692
I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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I just don't understand people railing at the non voters and the people who voted for Trump. It seems as backward as a rocket scientist raging at drag and wind breaking their rocket. "How dare the wind do this! Don't they know this will progress humanity!?!"
It's your job to build a rocket that can withstand the air at those speeds. The air is always a problem you have to deal with, and no, you can't shame the air into doing what you want.
Genuinely the democratic campaign seemed more like they were pushing a trolley problem than a future. So why is everyone so shocked it failed?
excellent analogy.
airflow and friction can be manipulated and corrected. Trump knows this and has been doing it for 8 years.
sure, wind drag is an infuriating factor, i get pissed off at it sometimes, but it will never take the majority of the blame from me compared to the people forcing us all into the damn rocket.
The DNC spent a billion dollars to lose an election to a racist rapist. Again.* All their fancy political science degrees and polls and data analytics amounted to jack shit. We don't blame the passengers when a 737-Max flies into the ground, we blame the so-called experts who fucked up so badly they should fall on their swords.
They also pulled some insane unforced errors like campaigning with a Cheney and letting off on the "weird" stuff that was actually getting traction. They're playing a political game that stopped working in 1976, that people want bipartisanship and decorum.
The entire party is composed of Leslie Knopes, except without the charm or empathy. They'd point to graphs of median wage growth and tell people their grocery bills didn't matter. They're a bunch of rich nerds, just like the Republicans are rich jocks.
Wow look another awful analogy... If planes were piloted democratically by the passengers, then yeah they'd at the very least, share part of the blame.
Anything to avoid blaming the leaders who flee the campaign into the ground, right?
Check this out: more than one person can be to blame for something. Crazy, right?
Yes, and there’s lots of people at the DNC we can blame.
But if an ignorant animal does something destructive you don’t blame the animal, you blame the person who was supposed to keep them from doing it.
Another garbage analogy... If the animal had the intelligence level, sentience, and complex society on par with humans, then yes I would blame them.
You could literally use that analogy for any person doing anything destructive, making nobody ever responsible for their destructive actions.
But over in another comment you agree with me that voters are ignorant. So which is it, are they intelligent and sentient or are they ignorant, dumb, panicky animals?
And if voters are intelligent and sentient, why does it cost a billion dollars to get them to vote?
And if they're intelligent, maybe we're both wrong and they made the intelligent choice by not voting and letting Trump win.
The air and the drag are entities without a brain.
So are trump voters and non-voters.
this but uncynically
in a state with massive poll wait times, no day off for voting, and leadership that gives voters reason to hate their guts every day, not voting is literally the default, no brain option.
it shouldn’t be, but it is. dems had the choice to either accept that situation and work with it, or just say fuck you everyone and hope for the best.
People in general, really
Bad analogy dude. The wind isn't sentient. You cannot speak to the wind and convince it to change direction.
Why are you equating the people who criticize non-voters and Trump voters with the Democrats? I will criticize non-voters and Trump voters all day long, but I am not a Democrat; I am not even American.
Your framework suggests that only Democrats have agency (and you also rhetorically equate the party and its voters, which isn't reasonable), whereas non-voters and Trump voters don't.
In reality, everyone has agency, and everyone is affected by large-scale social forces. I see lots of people on all sides doing everything to limit their side's responsibility. Everyone is responsible for the role they played in this election.
I am not criticizing Democrat voters. I am criticizing the Democratic party themselves. I'm criticizing the campaign, I'm criticizing the president and the VP. I'm criticizing everyone in power who didn't try to convince him to step down and not run again. They are the rocket scientists and all the voters are the wind.
If the Democratic party aren't going to learn from this and just go "well voters are dumb we did everything right". They will lose again to the next fascist (or maybe the same? Who knows what Trump will do)
If that's the case, then the Democratic party just ain't the way to win against facism.
I think the problem is that people are constantly framing it as putting all of the blame on non-voters/Trump voters, and completely absolving the Democratic Party, and that's just ridiculous. Many of us are also very unhappy with the Democratic party, and there's plenty of blame to go around.
But I have run into the same issue. It's been impossible to have a good faith discussion about the topic, because literally (and I mean literally) every attempt begins with a straw man, and goes nowhere.
The issue with that line of thinking is that your conclusion is that the only way out is superior execution by the Dem party. But that's not the case. The wind CAN choose and can decide to blow us away from the cliff.
aaaaand, what's the most efficient way to reach all those voters and change their mind? To persuade the wind to blow us in the right direction?
we'd need some sorta... grand organization of people who have an incentive for Trump to lose who will reach out to the voters, educate them, motivate them. Maybe they have their own candidate? That'd be a fine incentive. Then they can get the word out, organize, throw in some goals for the people to rally behind. Like a- like a political party!
What exactly is your argument here?
That the wind cannot be moved via external forces? It does whatever it feels like it wants to, completely and utterly out of our control and we were screwed no matter what? The wind was always gonna blow us to Trump? This is just fate? Really all the money the democrats spent was never gonna change anything so they're just blameless? Howling at the sun in a vain attempt to keep it in the sky?
Or is it that the Democratic party was perfect. It was perfectly min-maxed in such a way that we had the maximum possible electoral votes. They were just given an impossible task. No candidate existed that could beat Trump, no platform existed that could defeat Trump. They could've lost harder, but there was no way to win? There's just too much of the voter base that is just so EVIL.
You compare voting to the laws of physics. They're not even remotely similar. Politics is choice.
A more apt comparison would be a little kid crying that he wants a chocolate ice cream, his mum says he should order that, then to be funny/petulant/assertive he orders strawberry - and gets mad at his mum when the server gives him strawberry. "It was your job to make me choose what I wanted!", he wails.
Edit: my phone can't spell 'comparison'
Your comparison is worse.
The options weren't chocolate and vanilla. They were getting kicked down a steep hill or kicked off a cliff, and you seem flabbergasted that some people chose to flip the bird instead of groveling and thanking the democrats for only kicking them down a steep hill.
Especially when in the next 4 years their options are gonna be slightly steeper hill or another cliff.
See, what you're doing is pretending that there was a third option of walking away and flipping the bird, when in reality that was never a choice.
Bingo
Instead of choosing to die off the cliff, they should have chosen the steep hill and then climbed back up to kick ass for having been kicked down a hill.
Apparently they'd rather choose the obviously far inferior of two options (even in their own analogy) and then complain about how bad it is, because at least they didn't have to grovel?
Pointless to engage further I think.
Yeah, I don't think their analogy suggests what they think it suggests.
They tell us the two options right there, and then immediately say they chose a nonexistent third option of walking away... Very apt comparison, just not in the way that they think.
Reminded me of when the Republicans overrode Obama's veto of that one 9/11 bill, and then complained that it was his fault and he didn't warn them hard enough.
I think you're getting your roles all mixed up with your analogy. The anger you reference is at fellow voters. It isn't the average voter's job to build a better rocket. And the wind is not alterable but voter decisions are. The anger is at the decision makers who chose the rocket that was less capable of dealing with the harsh wind or chose to not pick a rocket at all, knowing that would result in the lesser rocket being picked.
no, I'm not.
I'm not angry at the voters. I've watched the whole primary looking at the democratic strategy thinking. 'That's not gonna work", "thats not gonna resonate with voters", "where the hell is Biden?", "Is Biden still cognizant?"
At some point, a campaign or candidate can be so bad, that I can't blame anyone but them for losing. Joe Exotic, the tiger king, ran for an elected position and lost. I blame him. His campaign was trash. He did better than expected purely from his fame, but I do not credit the voters for keeping him out of office. He did a lot of damage to himself all on his own.
If you care whether she won, then yes blame her for losing. That's not what I care about. I care that Trump won. Since there was a much better option available to voters, I blame the voters for that.
Anyone who thinks Harris was a worse option than Trump is not worth having a conversation with.
If the choice was so obvious why did the DNC spend a billion dollars trying to convince people?
Because American voters are ignorant and uninformed?