this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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What does third parties have to do with lifelong Dem voters wanting the Dem candidate to side with the Dem voting base on basic parts of the party platform like:
No fracking
Better healthcare
Climate change is real and producing less fossil fuels is a good thing
What you're doing is insisting if you're not 100% loyal to the candidate with a D by their name you really have an R.
That's the same fucking shit Republicans went thru and it ended up with trump.
Why the fuck do you want to follow down the path of "never criticize the party, and always vote for them".
Please explain to the class why this time it will work out good for the party that takes that path.
It's not that it will work out good (though in a sense, it has for the R in that they got what they actually wanted), it's that if the Rs have ~50% ish support, no matter what they do, because of them going that route, the only way to beat them is to get everyone that isn't them in a coalition together.
Right and that makes sense...
Unfortunately that's not what Kamala is doing.
I'll say it till my face turns blue:
Taking a stand against fracking is all it would take to guarantee trump can't win, but Kamala is pro-fracking, refuses to give the party voters what they want, and refuses to even explain why being pro-feacking is seen as a good choice by her and her campaign.
That isn't the only issue she's to the right of the party on either.
It's like her, her campaign, and the DNC aren't focused on beating trump, they want to beat Trump while giving the voters the bare minimum it would take, because the more they give voters, the less they get in donations.
So then telling voters "all that matters is beating trump" it's obviously bullshit because they're not doing everything possible to beat trump.
It ain't complicated.
Like you said:
That's the opposite of what OP spends their time on, but considering a month ago they were intentionally spreading misinformation about when early voting started, I'm surprised the mods still let them post here.
Every single "meme" OP posts is about how Dem voters should fight with Dem voters rather than band together.
Taking a stand against fracking is all it would take, when the largest swing state this election has an economy that leans heavily on fracking?
It's not the instant win you think it is.
Not the person you replied to, but 58% of Pennsylvanians support a ban on fracking. It really shouldn't be surprising. Pennsylvania may be a great hub of fracking, but very few people actually benefit from the wealth it creates. Meanwhile, they're the people actually on the ground, living there in the areas most affected by fracking. They know its effects better than anyone. It's their ground water and their wells are being contaminated, all so a few companies owned by out of state wealthy interests can profit mightily. Plus, it's not like Pennsylvanians aren't also worried about climate change.
You're confusing people and corporations...
https://www.wvia.org/news/pennsylvania-news/2024-10-10/pa-voters-split-on-fracking-but-show-widespread-support-for-stronger-regulations
58% of likely voters in PA want it banned...
Did the environmentalists show up for Gore? No they did not.
Did the environmentalists show up for Clinton who said she'd have a map room to fight climate change? No they did not.
Were the environmentalists going to show up for Biden after he passed green energy and ev policies? Polls said no they were not going to show up.
Harris saying she'd ban fracking is an instant loss. She and everyone advising her knows this.
Yep. When Democrats enact environmental policies, they don't do it for the votes. Which makes Biden all the more commendable for his environmental action imo.
When people are employed by those corporations, they have a vested interest in their livelihood not disappearing overnight.
A survey of 700 people leaves considerable room for polling error. Without information on how they selected participants, I wouldn't say that's an overwhelming margin.
...
https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2021/01/29/report-pennsylvania-stands-to-gain-243000-jobs-a-year-from-clean-energy-investment/
64k, not just fracking, that's all fossil fuel jobs in PA.
There's 12.7 million people in the state
0.5% of people in the state work any job connected to fossil fuels....
You're confusing corporations and people homie.
You didn't have to tell us you never learned about stats in any educational setting, but I appreciate the transparency.
700 is more than enough
700 people is a good sample size if they are a truly random representative sample of your population. In real life, polling error tends to vary far more than 1/sqrt(n) because of systemic biases in how you select participants. Depending on how the survey was conducted, it could intrinsically favor certain demographics.
That assumes that 58% are people who aren't already voting dem
An economy that "leans heavily" on fracking? What sort of economy leans on destroying their water table? What did you say about the economies that "lean heavily" on coal mining?
Like what, West Virginia? Can me when they're a swing state, but don't hold your breath.
If the conviction issue depends upon it being a swing state then it isnt a conviction issue.
Who's arguing about conviction here?
I want the US to pull out of fossil fuels. In the immediate future, there is no presidential candidate committing to that, but one of them is completely all-in on expanding fossil fuels so I will be voting for the opposite candidate.
Less than a month before election day is not the time for purity politics.
Which candidate are you referring to? And it certainly hasn't been just in the last month that fossil fuel policies have been a political issue.
I'm skeptical that there's a huge swath of voters refusing to vote just because of fracking. And if there are people claiming that, I don't believe they would be voting even if Kamala did come out against fracking anyway. Everyone knows Trump would be much, much worse for the environment than Kamala, and to refuse to vote over one single environmental issue is either very dumb or completely disingenuous.
because, unfortunately, donations are important. It's a shitty system, and this is what they have to do to win in the system.
actually it is.
No one said there was.
I said a majority of voters in PA want it banned, and Kamala would gain votes there if she agreed with the Dem voter base nationally and wanted to ban it
https://www.wvia.org/news/pennsylvania-news/2024-10-10/pa-voters-split-on-fracking-but-show-widespread-support-for-stronger-regulations
58% of PA voters want it banned
What is Kamala gaining by being pro-fracking?
Donations so she can try and convince the people who live by fracking and know how bad it is that they should vote for her anyways because Trump is probably fracking?
Even if that works....
You know that means they still have fracking in their backyards, right?
I can admit when I'm wrong, I really didn't think it needed this much explaining.
you clearly implied it by saying, "Taking a stand against fracking is all it would take to guarantee trump can’t win".
...which does not mean she'd gain voters from changing her position. How many of those people are voting for her anyway? How many would actually vote for her if she did change her position? you don't know this, and neither do I, but I'm guessing they have a pretty good idea.
Yes. I'm not arguing that it's a good thing. I'm saying this is the way it is, and this is what they need to do to win in the system we have. If you want to fix the system, you need to vote D to gradually re-take SCOTUS and overturn shit like Citizens United that is fucking our politics with money.
again some things are not as simple as you think.
That doesn't say anything about non voters....
If 58% of PA voters were voting for her anyways, why is it still a battleground state?
But why are you questioning every reason for why Kamala should match the party and ban fracking....
And you can't offer a si gle reason why she's pro-fracking besides:
So are you just admitting that the reason both candidates in 2024 are pro-fracking is because they're taking bribes in the form of donations?
Like, and I hate that I have to say this:
Just because trump takes fossil fuel bribes doesn't mean Kamala does.
Like, by that same logic you're using to defend fracking, a foreign government can buy off the Dem party to support and find their invasion of sovereign countries...
Because trump and the Republicans do it too.
Is that what you meant to say or do you not even realize what you're defending here?
Yes, in order to win in a shitty system, sometimes you have to do shitty things. Welcome to the real world.
because there is more than one issue at stake in this election, and fracking ranks far down on that list for most people. there is also likely a significant amount of trump voters who are against fracking but would never change their vote to kamala.
So you legit think it's better to piss off voters and then use corpo donations to try and claw back some?
Your priority isnt getting votes then, it's getting donations. Donations that will need to be spent in an attempt to get back some of the votes we lost to get the donations....
Nothing will ever get fixed if we do that.
It's just creating an extra step that pisses off the people we need votes from
it depends on how many votes, and how much money. You are just assuming the votes clearly outweighs the money, but you don't have enough political experience or information to know that (and neither do I to be clear). But I guarantee you the Harris campaign has done the cost-benefit analysis. They could be wrong because nothing in politics is 100%, we'll just have to see.
Are you not aware of the overlap with the 2016 and 2020 campaigns?
2020 we won by literally tens of thousands of votes, it worked but just barely and mostly because trump was already in office.
The people running this campaign and the dnc don't know what the fuck they're doing. They've locked in as donations as a metric and only chase that one single metric, even to the point of ignoring votes.
It's ok to criticize them, we're not Republicans
i’m not saying you’re not allowed to criticize them. i just doubt that you know better than they do. just because the elections are close doesn’t mean your strategy is better. they are fighting an uphill battle with the electoral college and too much money in politics, on both sides.
If you look at who "they" are, it's mostly the people who couldn't beat trump in 2016 and barely beat him in 2020 after Sanders drug them kicking and screaming to the left in the primary
We didn't get that this year, no one is dragging Kamala left...
They're not "the best at what they do" except in raising donations, seriously, look I to the people running shit, they're in positions of power because they brought in the most money, they're always going to side with the money because their metric is how much they can bring in.
It is not a good way to run a political party, and most voters don't even know it's happening.
we're going in circles, I have already addressed all these points.
WHY do you dumbasses always think everyone agrees with your personal beliefs??
A LOT of people like fracking, and even more are indifferent. Harris is not looking at this huge fucking majority of Dems who hate fracking and going "nah, I don't wanna win this election". She is accurately representing the positions of a majority of Democrats.YOU are the minority.
(And me too, because I'm also anti fracking, but I'm a realist)
The problem is that the broader Democratic electorate is a much bigger tent, with overall much more moderate politics, than online leftists are typically willing to admit. We're still only eight years past an election where Hillary Clinton took the Rust Belt for granted, and we all paid the price for that when traditionally solid union votes swung to Trump because he was boosting fossil fuel extraction while Clinton implicitly threatened the livelihoods of families dependent on coal and fracking jobs.
Healthcare you have a point on, but also keep in mind that the last time Dems had the votes for sort of sweeping reform was 2008, and what we got out of that was the ACA, which for all its faults was still a big step up over the status quo. Obama was going for a big bipartisan win, in spite of McConnell's announcing that he was killing bipartisanship in the GOP caucus, and that was a mistake, but perhaps an understandable one given that up to that point that's how Congress had always worked.
There have been windows of time since in which Dems have held the Presidency and both houses of Congress, but never with enough margin to defeat a Senate filibuster, and with DINOs like Manchin and Sinema standing in the way of filibuster reform. I do not doubt that progressives in Congress would move an M4A or public option bill through the legislature if, in 2025, the House flips back and the Senate stays Democratic in spite of the unfavorable cycle, but withholding your vote doesn't get you any closer to that happening.
Polls show progressive policy isn't just popular with Dems, but all voters...
That's life mate, I'm sorry it doesn't agree with your opinions, but it's the truth.
That's why Obama's 08 campaign did so fucking well, despite not really being that progressive in any other developed country.
The neoliberal experiment has only benefited the wealthy, stop defending them, they got lawyers and lobbyists for them, pick people over corps and we can get something done.
That is until they're told it's a Dem policy.
And of course the progressives actually show up to vote.
Neoliberals are Republicans, so we're already not defending them.
Except Biden repeatedly gave in to pressure from his voter base on a lot of actions, we also got a lot of changes to DNC policy care of Sanders voter base. It's not ''do or die'' it's vote for an administration that will actually respond to pressure and voter's policy goals, or vote for a dictator backed by industralists who all want an ethnostate of uneducated second class citizens.
And Biden got elected despite his age...
2020 was an example of the candidate moving their campaign left and winning the election.
What's your alternative, Trump? Because a 3rd party candidate will never win the general election without a massive overhaul of our election system which will never happen as long as the Rs have a majority in any branch of the government.
I don't disagree with the reality of what you're saying, and I personally agree, but at the same time I think you have to grant people the right to vote their opinion if that's what they choose. It's not my choice, but people should be able to represent their views how they want.