This isn’t the responsibility of the voters, it’s the responsibility of the politicians. If they can’t provide a candidate people are willing to vote for, they’ll lose elections. 100,000,000 people don’t vote. The winner gets ~70,000,000 votes. The real winner is apathy, and there are reasons.
When polled, the reason many if not most nonvoters give is “both parties are the same” or “it’s not going to matter anyway”—because for millions of Americans that’s largely true, things suck for them no matter who’s in charge. There’s a way to motivate them and it’s up to Democrats to do that.
Relying on “people will vote even though they hate the candidate” is a pretty fucked-up and stupid strategy. It’s like saying “the refs will award me points even if I don’t score, because I’m the better person. And if they don’t, then it’s THEIR fault the asshole team won.” Bizarre.
It’s not even a matter of my own personal preference here, though I personally won’t vote for a candidate who opposes trans rights and supports genocide and oppresses homeless people. The reality is that it’s unpopular to voters at large to cosplay as Republicans. It’s electorally unviable.
In 2024 the biggest factor for Harris was voters in the biggest cities—the progressive bastions—in swing states. The takeaway there is that Democrats are alienating their own base and not picking up any more centrist and right-wing voters as a result. It’s not up to voters to solve that.
Meanwhile, I’m not willing to sacrifice any more people or values. I’ve done that in election after election and all I’ve gotten is derision and scorn. The fact that top Democrats won’t even endorse Mamdani, one of the most popular politicians, speaks volumes about hopes for transforming the party.
The only thing that could possibly work is if we all band together and say “we will not support this. We will not vote for this.” If we go “let’s try for a better candidate but we’ll vote for whoever they run,” why would that change anything? We’ll just get another terrible candidate.
It’s like walking into a car dealership and saying “look, I’d like you to come down to $25,000, but I’ll pay sticker price if pushed because I really need a car.” What do you think the outcome will be? With enough people saying “I’ll vote for ANY Democrat” it’s going to lead to a bad candidate.
People downplay Mamdani as “well sure, that plays in NYC, but there’s no way a progressive candidate could win nationwide” but there’s more to that story and it’s that for the first time in any election I can recall, young voters were the largest voting demographic. Usually they’re the smallest.
Progressive policies poll super highly nationwide. The more Democrats drift toward the center, the more unpopularly they poll—now with an approval rating worse than Trump. And since the centrists are running the show, they insist it’s because Democrats aren’t far enough to the right.
And as proof of this, they point to what right-wingers think about trans people and homeless people and etc and they say “we need to be more like Republicans because they’re winning!” Meanwhile 100,000,000 people don’t vote, and the winner of every election wins by like 5,000,000 votes.
People need to see evidence of other Mamdani-type candidates *win* in other places. I’d love to see James Talarico in TX win a statewide race. I miss Katie Porter. Mallory McMorrow is saying the right things. But there are *still* legions of Dems who claim “wE hAvE nO bENcH” and until you win them…
So the analogy is “I need a car to live but because the salesman didn’t come down to the price I wanted I’m still without a car and my livelihood is at risk”. I also consider evidence of Dem politicians with positions counter to my values that have come around…
Shooting myself in the foot here bringing up Obama and Biden again, but they on e supported anti-LGBTQ policies. But they came around. Biden’s platform in 2020 was shaped heavily by the progressive left AFTER he won the nomination. There’s evidence of bending rational actors into rational positions