#also pls dont reblog this yall i dont want it to get traction and to get angry people in my DMs sjdkfsbdf

[hardytoms]

Hi! I do have a question about politics and Biden/Harris. I want to preface this by saying that I am not American and all I know about the elections is from the internet & Philip DeFranco. I recently started following a youtuber who, when Bernie dropped off the race (i lov him sm), she told everyone to STILL VOTE GREEN in the elections in november, that she couldn't respect people who voted for Biden because they thought he was the lesser of two evils (1/?)

she said that if you were from a swing state and you voted for Biden, that you didn't really care about people, that you just wanted to get Trump out of office, and that it'd be better if you voted green. I felt like this was a little... harsh? extreme? because of course you (i was about to say we as if my voice counted LMAO) want to get Trump out of office. is that not the point? I really am trying to understand, I swear. I know Biden/Harris are not great, but definitely better than Trump (2/?)

and i feel like ultimately, any votes that don't go to Biden right now, are going to Trump. I don't know. I'm sorry, I'm mexican and I don't know much, but... it does worry me that, for example the last elections, the people who voted for Harambe or third party ultimately helped get Trump elected. EVERYONE would have to agree to vote third party to not get Biden or Trump elected. right? she has a pretty big following and it scares me a little that she could be influencing them. (3/3)

Ahhh yes this is such a good question!!! Thank you for asking!!! And honestly your thoughts here are really the root of the struggle with this election (at least in my opinion). I totally don’t speak for everyone so I want to make sure that’s said. I also wanna say I 1000% understand why American voters are feeling disenfranchised and not wanting to vote at all so I want to make sure I approach this with empathy because so many people’s lives are going to be affected negatively no matter who wins. My answer might be all over the place because it totally is a complex and really nuanced issue so if anything is confusing at all please lmk!! 

In terms of a Biden vote meaning you don’t care about people, I think for most rational Americans, and those of us who are leftist/socialist (at least those of of us who, at the minimum would have voted for Bernie and even to a lesser extent, Warren), the point is to get Trump out of office but many people who don’t want to vote for either aren’t voting because they truly don’t feel that Biden is the better option. For a lot of people who aren’t wanting to vote at all, it’s because they feel they’re voting for just sliding scales of morality and both Trump’s and Biden’s morals (and therefore the policies they’ll choose to support) are corrupt. Trump is the obvious and outspoken fascist, but Biden is just wrapped in a veneer of progressivism because he doesn’t explicitly say he wants to disenfranchise voters, he’ll just do it by picking a VP that has a long and icky history of turning Black people into felons and therefore excising them of their right to vote ever again. (For what it’s worth, people with a felony record in CA where Kamala Harris was DA and senator can vote with some qualifiers, unlike many other states). For a lot of people, especially BIPOC, their lives are threatened under both candidates so why vote for either if neither will make them feel safe or care about their basic human rights?

It’s hard too because we do know what a Trump 2nd term will bring and it’s fascism and the removal of everyone’s rights/healthcare/access/etc. as much as he possibly can manage. With Biden those particular risks are just not at the same level. The way he is damaging is in different ways and people are unfortunately being forced to choose whether he as a president will be more harmful or less harmful than Trump, so it’s really about what each individual person is willing to sacrifice and “put up with” because clearly all of us are going to sacrifice in very painful ways (to put it lightly) no matter which candidate is picked. I do think part of it too is playing into Republican hands to make Biden look as bad as Trump, which I feel is what they did in 2016, as well, and it worked. If we’re talking about the basic, will Biden put children in cages, will he build a border wall, will he refuse to leave office if he gets elected and loses re-election, will he xyz - no, I personally do not feel he will. And if that, for me, is the bar I’m voting at, then he’s getting my vote, if that makes sense. (For me personally, it just doesn’t track that the right can get a spray-tanned used sock into power and all unite behind him in unison, but the moderate to liberal left can’t unite behind one fucking person to keep a fascist from exercising his dictator inclinations.)

One of the other big things people feel is that centrism is the death of progressivism. Malcolm X and MLK both talked a lot about this with respect to being Black and in general, a person of colour, and I’m REALLY going paraphrase it here but basically, lots of people feel that voting for Biden will make Democrats/centrists/liberals complacent. The republicans and conservative party are getting more and more extreme and far-right with every new candidate so the fear is that to be a “moderate” democrat and to be successful, you have to bend to the will of Republicans to even casually get both sides to agree, which inches each “moderate” Democrat further from being left-leaning and more toward being right-leaning because the demands of the GOP are such fucking thinly veiled fascist demands at this point, if that makes sense.

With respect to the idea of not voting for Biden meaning a vote goes to Trump, it’s sort of true and not true at the same time (in my opinion). If someone doesn’t vote for Biden, it’s not *literally* a vote for Trump because you *literally* voted for a third party candidate, but in the nuance of how electoral politics work, the American two-party and electoral system does feel like it turns it into “if you don’t vote for one of the major candidates, your vote won’t count at all.” It’s easy to say “well if everyone voted for the Green Party then they’d win”, but as we saw in 2016, the person who wins the most votes doesn’t necessarily win the presidency, so even if most of us did vote for a third party candidate, we’d all have to do so in EVERY state enough to outvote not only Biden but Trump as well. And it ABSOLUTELY would mean the states with a lot of electoral votes (in particular Florida because historically whoever wins FL’s electoral votes generally wins the presidency) would have to go toward the Green Party candidate.

I do feel that telling people if they don’t vote for a third party candidate that they don’t really care about people is harsh because a vote for Biden isn’t just a vote for the president, it’s a vote for a supreme court judge (who rules for their ENTIRE life or until they actively choose to step down - this person WILL be as disgusting as Kavanaugh under a Trump 2nd term at best and at worst, a 2nd Trump presidency will get to choose two more SCOTUS judges), it’s a vote for hundreds and hundreds of political offices approved by the President and confirmed by the Senate, it’s a vote to kick DeVos and Barr the fuck out, it’s a vote for climate change and for abortion access and LGBTQ+ healthcare, it’s a vote for someone who won’t tweet his presidency (the bar is so low), it’s a vote for representatives of the US who won’t act like fools in front of foreign powers, etc. etc. Lots of people are being forced to vote for him even when they don’t want to (like me) the same way lots of people are feeling forced to note vote at all because both of them feel dangerous to themselves in different ways. 

For me, it feels like a MASSIVE gamble to say I’m not gonna vote for either because I think that we as a country need a revolution. I said this on Twitter but feeling like the revolution needs to happen before you’ll vote hinges a lot on that revolution actually happening and if we’re gonna be honest, I don’t think it will happen. Will I be a part of it? Yes. Will I attempt to dismantle the system we have? Without a doubt. But I’m also going to vote for the candidate that will keep my rights to be able to do that even if I think he’s kind of a sentient sock puppet.

Here is another post that talks about it that I agree with.

This was SO LONG and I’m super sorry!!!! I hope this at least sort of answered what you were getting at?? It’s a complicated question that people understandably have a lot of mixed feelings about so I hope my answer made sense!!