this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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I think part of our different view might be based on how our electoral system is.
So to explain: Trump's never won a popular election before. Even when he became president, most Americans voted for his opposition Hillary Clinton. We have a very gerrymandered and corrupt voting system to oversimplify. Because of that The main decider for presidential elections is voting turnout. If a lot of people come out to vote, the Democrats usually win. If they don't the Republicans win. Voter turnout is higher when people want to vote for the Democratic nominee. No one really wants to vote for Biden. Most of us will vote against Trump myself included. That being said, if we run a very unlikable candidate against him like we did in 2016, he might win and that's terrifying. This election is serious so we should take it seriously and run somebody likeable and not half way to being a turnip.
God forbid if Biden stays in there, I hope he wins. I'll even vote for him but I am not feeling good about his odds.
I think you missed their point. They, and many others, don't know why anyone would vote for Trump to begin with. Of course, I said the same thing when he first started being presented as a candidate for 2016. Like, of all people, him? But, here we are today, wondering if he actually had a chance for another term.
A different voting method may have avoided him getting this far, but he really shouldn't have even gotten out of the joke candidate category to begin with.
My bad Thanks for letting me know.
I totally get that sentiment. I don't really understand it either. I have family members that votes for Trump. It's like their brain is rotted. They constantly use words that they don't have a definition for like woke or CRT. They think everyone is lying except for Trump. It's terrifying honestly.
I think that's about 30% to 40% of Americans sadly.
In my experience, the people who vote Republican/conservative/Trump do so out of a certain amount of philosophical and emotional laziness and denial. Confronting the roots of our societal problems is difficult and uncomfortable, and takes a degree of empathy and emotional intelligence that many people simply do not have. To be clear; it is rarely their fault and frequently a result of the external influences and education during their formative years.
The conservative viewpoint that has functionally become hereditary and contagious is that you are special and good, and the only people that are also special and good must have the same values, prejudices, advantages, and deficiencies that you do. This is why if you are nice and polite to conservatives they start spouting more and more bigoted bullshit. It's because, in their mind, the only good people are the ones that agree with them, and they perceive you as "good" for extending basic decency to them.
This cognitive shortcut is how I have succeeded in planting a lot of seeds of progressive values in the minds of my classmates at the conservative, religious school I accidentally ended up in. Each one of them is a single starfish, so to speak, but each individual moves the needle a little bit. Small progress is better than no progress.
I also attended a small private religious conservative school growing up. Happy to see someone like me out in the world with progressive politics. Good on you stranger. ☺️ I hope you're living life to the fullest.
That explanation makes sense to me. Good theory 👈😎
I compare my time in a similar situation to being exposed to some nasty disease. It was misery at the time but has provided some inoculation against authoritarianism and demagoguery since. Also let me know sadists are a thing.
I always interpret this as projecting their opinions. If you give the person nothing to suggest a specific political leaning and have a positive enough interaction it's too easy for them to assume you hold the same values as you.
I've honestly caught myself in the same, so I just try to stay apolitical in interactions at work until others reveal their opinions to me
TLDR: the Electoral College is DEI for Republicans.
Addendum point: The people we need to convince to win are not the people who see the obvious distinction between Joe and Trump, and if you haven't convinced them yet, you probably aren't going to -- especially not after that debate performance (which is why they took the gamble to do that debate in the first place).
And before that, it was DEI for the pro-slavery States. Back before black people and even women could vote, whites didn't have numbers enough to win many elections, so they created the Electoral College and made it so that black people counted as 3/5ths of a "person" and slave owners could vote in the names of their slaves.
Ah yes the 3/5 "compromise".
Yeah, this is where I'm at. I'm not an American, but I will feel the impact of your country's decisions very quickly. I think the best option is to beg the non-voters to get out and vote however you can while building a new party, or rebuilding an existing one, from the local level on up until you have a realistic chance of putting a leader worth having in place.
For what it's worth, I think the Biden administration hasn't done terribly. They could have done much better with the latest episode of the Israel-Gaza conflict, but we literally had Congress people advocating for a nuclear response. A lot of improvements in other areas were quietly made in the background that wasn't really talked about. I can't say if that's because Biden picked the right people to get things done, he had the right vision, or he just had good handlers. I'm not sure I care because, whatever the answer is, the opponent certainly doesn't have any of those.