[Mathgod]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

If you’ve built “the right” into this evil monolith voting block,

Nope, you and ThePrince are putting words in my mouth and misrepresenting my position. I never said people who vote Trump are evil. I said they've been deceived by a 9 year onslaught of disinformation and fear mongering coming from Trump and the right-wing media ecosystem. People keep listening to the liars and grifters instead of making an effort to find the actual truth on various topics. That doesn't make them evil, but it does make them irresponsible. Some disappointment of them is to be expected. Expressions of disappointment should not come as a surprise. But that's not the same thing as demonizing them and making them out to be evil.

yet regardless of the real or imagined danger, you employ the exact same rhetoric and thinking that enables people like Trump and DeSantisand allows them to thrive.

Wrong.

This is not a game you can switch on and off. You argue you shouldn’t have any principles because “the other side” doesn’t. That’s not how principles work, you’re just justifying not having any.

You are conflating two very different things. Withholding your vote is not the same thing as having principles.

Whether you want to admit it or not, there are going to be a lot of good, principled people who for one reason or another vote Trump. It’s just the way it is. They’re not all evil crazy rednecks that want a fascist to kill all their enemies. Whether it’s differing political views, a differing sense of the “danger,” or just a lack of education, there’s a whole swath of people that will vote Trump that would, in fact, vote for someone a lot less crazy and a lot better for America.

Once again you're making up this thing about me calling Trump voters evil. They're misinformed and making a disastrous decision, but (for most of them anyway) it's not being done with malicious intent. I don't think they're evil, in fact, I know that most of them aren't. They are, however, skirting their responsibility of properly informing themselves about what's at stake in this election, and what each candidate plans to do once they take office.

So yeah, you should believe parties need to earn a vote. This isn’t controversial, unique, or something that you can just “pause” for one election.

Sounds great in theory, but in the reality of a two-party system that the US has, if one side splinters, the other side gets sustained, unchecked power. And when it's a full-blown psychopath like Trump who gets the unrestrained power, it presents obvious problems for America and the world.

The fear mongering stuff just is not effective.

Again I reject the notion that it's "fear mongering" to warn people about real dangers. It is absolutely not ok to have a climate change denier in the WH when the world is already in a very precarious position as it is. It's not ok to have a trickle-down economics peddler in the WH when wealth inequality is worse than it's ever been, and so many people out there are struggling to make ends meet. And it's absolutely unconscionable to have an insurrection-inciter in the WH who refuses to accept the results of a legitimate election.

I’m not sure you realize it, but you are really good at projecting your own approach onto what you imagine as the very worst parts of the right wing.

No, not really. Unless you're willing to substantiate that and provide evidence, there's not much here to respond to.

As much as people like yourself don’t want to admit it, if Harris loses, it isn’t because of people who care about issues you don’t, or non-voters, or even Trump voters.

As much as people like yourself don’t want to admit it, if Harris loses, every single person who did anything other than vote Harris does in fact hold a portion of the blame. If you had a chance to use your vote to stop Trump and chose not to, then yes you make it easier for him to win than you otherwise would have.

It isn’t because she’s Black, or a woman. It’s because they ran a shruggie campaign and expected to win because they weren’t Trump. Instead of getting their head out of their ass and actually understanding the people they’re trying to govern, they maintained the status quo. Instead of capitalizing on the momentum they had, they said “no thanks” and immediately went back to the boring, uninspired Democratic Party we all know and love.

Are they running a perfect campaign? No. Have they made some mistakes along the way? Yes.

But to sit back and say "it's their fault if they lose because uninspiring campaign" misses the mark. I think they've run a reasonably inspiring campaign and have drawn a very clear, stark contrast between them and the Trump campaign. They've put forth good policy proposals such as $50k tax credit for new businesses, expanding the child tax credit, gun safety laws such as red flag laws, removing college degree requirements for many government jobs, and making the rich pay (closer to, anyway) their fair share in taxes while lowering taxes for the middle class.

You might not think the differences between Harris and Trump matter. But I think they matter. I think they matter to such a great degree that there's probably no combination of words I could type here that would get you to understand how much I think they matter.

And you know why they do it? Because they’ve got people like you (not you, because you can’t vote) that will literally vote for them no matter what. They don’t have to earn your vote, or even care what you think, because you have no principles or interests that would stop you from voting D. They can do whatever, because there’s people like you. And so if they lose, it’s on them, and it’s on the people that enable them to mail it in.

This is quite honestly a misconception. The real reason why they aren't going further to the left is because most of the voters available to them are in the center. People want centrist policies that you call uninspiring. That's a hard truth that you don't seem willing to admit. You accuse the Democratic party of not meeting voters where they are. But they actually are meeting voters where they are. There just happen to be far more centrists than there are leftists in America. Going hard left isn't how you win an American election. There's a reason why Bernie lost by a 2 to 1 margin to Biden in the 2020 primaries.