claim 1: “voting doesn’t change anything”
Never forget the recent case of Kris Mayes, who refuses to uphold the Arizona supreme court’s sweeping ban of abortion.
Kris Mayes only won her 2022 election by 280 votes. Voting changes things.
claim 2: “but genocide joe”
Yep. Hold that fucker’s feet to the fire. He has blood on his hands
But trump has promised to be indisputably worse.
I won’t tell you how to vote. I just encourage you to vote. You’re not radical for ditching the only miniscule right the state has granted you to do some small aid for your neighbors.
If you’re not voting you’re indistinguishable from someone who doesn’t care about the outcome. The representatives are going to chase after the people who vote, not the people who don’t care enough to vote.
Only if you aren’t messaging. A write in campaign for “nobody” would be a clear indicator that there are people willing and able to go to the polls, fill out the form, just not for the candidates given. Then, in future, you have hard numbers to point to; “look at this block of voters that wrote in nobody, maybe we should target them”.
But that’s a real possibility, especially in an election in which both candidates are intolerable
So: if people on the left refuse to vote because both candidates are terrible, and people on the right are going to come out in droves for God King Trump, where do you think the Democrats are going to go chasing votes? Are they going to try to chase the non voters who wouldn’t vote for Trump anyway? Or are they going to try to steal votes from Republicans by shifting further to the right?
Convincing someone who isn’t going to vote to vote for you is 1 vote, convincing someone who would have voted for your opponent to vote for you is 2 votes. Not voting just means both parties ignore you.
You don’t even need that much. With the proper electoral split, Trump could win with an little as 42% of the popular vote.
But that’s a structural problem. And it’s a proven perpetuated by those centrist voters happy to see elections break whichever way they lean.
Not by the math of the electoral college.
None of that changes the fact that convincing someone voting for your opponent to vote for you instead is more valuable than convincing someone who isn’t voting to vote for you.
Do you really think there are republicans left to be convinced? Especially with the rising costs of everyday goods? (Remember, it doesn’t matter if the president isn’t directly responsible, it’s happening under Biden’s watch, so the administration gets the blame - either out of ignorance, or out of a frustration that the problems have not been sufficiently addressed)
If shifting right convinces 50 “centrist” voters to vote for them instead, and shifting left convinces 99 people who wouldn’t have voted to vote for them, they’re going to shift right.
Politicians are all too happy to have people not vote, so they have fewer people to try to convince.
The DNC has been shifting right for the last fifty years, don’t you think the strategy is hitting up against diminishing returns?