I know for a lot of people it's A. Didn't feel like their vote mattered, B. None of the candidates matched their desires, I.e. non of the above earned their vote, whether by not lining up on issues, or being perceived to only give stated values lip service, C. Voter suppression, whether that be inability to go vote because work/schedule, voter roll purges, voter eligibility being repressed due to cost of documents, no transportation access to polling place, etc, D. Being too burnt out to even paying attention to politics/voting; or some combination of the above.

Probably because both party do not care about climate, they should still at least vote for the green

Platforms are not the problem, the problem is that most politicians do not really believe in implementing them

Biden forced rail-workers - who were striking for safer conditions - back to work. Less than a year later, a train derailment caused a massive chemical spill is Palestine, Ohio.

Voting matters. So does fighting for rights. It's not one or the other.

Both candidates were pro war. War is the top polluting activity humans do. People chose not to vote last time because we had absolutely miserable candidate choices, an undemocratic primary, and formal war crimes support from our own party. Anyone who wags a finger after that shenanigans and talks about climate in isolation from the rest of it is missing the forest through the trees.

Is levy for or against?

When you are grading yourself and give yourself a C- and then talk about how thats good enough to get people off their couch in an election, then go ahead and add 'misunderstanding how to compete in an election' to your list of problems.

Yeah, it's a good thing both candidates were the same on every single issue, too, so there was literally no difference in picking between the fascist and the non-fascist. Fantastic job recognizing your duty to stick to one single issue where you feel they were the same!

Oh yes, you can see by the voting records and what each party does with legislation to see they are exactly the same and both treat environmental issues exactly the same. I mean, if you ignore the voting records and what each party does, that is.

Incremental progress is better than actively working to make things worse, but y'know, stick to your guns and help make SURE things get worse. Good job!

11 million votes would have easily flipped the election...

Ignore this shit and go vote today.

Yes, I can see that Republicans are honest about not caring about climate and the Democrats pretend to care. You seem to want a one party system like China

who do you think was non-fascist?

It seems like you actually believe anyone who thought Harris was a bad candidate voted for Rump?
That's so simple

One thing you'll eventually have to come to terms with is that it's the government of the USA that is and has always been fascist and that the two parties aren't going to stop the fascism that they both manage and benefit from. Biden had the Epstein files and did nothing. You think the voters are gonna stop fascism when the candidates are all fascists and fascist defenders?

This is what your commitment to your narrative has done to you. It has made you believe that there is a category of people who don't vote because that is what they prefer, and you're so committed that you are willing to make nonsense arguments that posit the existence of people who eat food but specifically will not and never will eat food if it's in a restaurant.

Nothing about your narrative is reasonable. Give people something they want and they will pursue it

Didn't say it was good enough. Said it was better, why would moving in the direction I don't want help, I said both, you seem be saying neither.

Hard not to contrast it against today's shit show. Even Bush seems reasonable when you hold him against Trump. People are literally getting nostalgic for less bad. Still bad, just less bad.

Or they just didnt vote, yes.

2024 was a colossal failure for months before the election. They gave trump legitimacy by backing down "Sleepy Joe" biden, but didnt do it quick enough to hold a primary.

Democrats are fighting on being "the other guy" but thats not an identity. Theres a reason people love mamdani so much, and its because he has values.

It's a two party system and you have three choices.

Vote A

Vote B

Don't vote.

Not voting is still an action. It means either option is fine, otherwise you would have voted for a specific candidate

Because minor concessions are obvious pandering without real benefit. Give incentives to buy EVs, sure, go for it. But if you expand the military and fossil fuel extraction and then launch wars where you're dropping bombs all over the world it doesn't really matter how many tax breaks you give to EV buyers.

Americans act on convenience. Nothing more. Most Americans talk shit but won’t follow up with action. Also they won’t protest in any way if it comes at a sacrifice to this convenience.

They’ll shout from the rooftops at everyone about how Meta sucks ass. But will not deactivate their accounts.

They’ll whine and cry about the fascist administration but will not vote against it if they don’t like the person running against it.

They’ll protest in the streets knowing it’ll do nothing, to move the needle, but refuse to do something so simple as not pay their taxes which absolutly WILL move the needle)

Americans won’t sacrifice. They just like to be seen being opposed to the things others stand against. It’s all a show. They’ll say a lot of shit, but they aren’t worth the words they say.

As apposed to dropping even more bombs and not being any incentives, and like I said you don't stop there, that's the start, you still protest, you still advocate for direct action. One does not proclude the other

But what if they voted for Harris, while thinking she was a terrible candidate? Did that possibly not occur to you?

But what if they voted for Harris, while thinking she was a terrible candidate? Did that possibly not occur to you?

Historically, neither party has been a fewer bombs kind of party, and both parties have had their moments of conservation and environmental destruction, and their moments of expanding rights and destroying them.

I do understand the idea of a plurality of strategies. I just think that people need to understand which strategies actually have effects. Allowing people to believe in fairy tales is a recipe for disempowerment. Much like praying for a cancer cure, voting is one of those things that makes you feel better about yourself without actually achieving anything

i think you misunderstand

i’m not saying people shouldn’t vote (truthfully, i don’t care). i’m saying parties who want votes should have policies worth voting for.

y’all keep talking about how the "let’s not vote for the lesser evil because it’s still evil" voter strategy has lead to terrible results. why not talk about how the "let’s be the lesser evil instead of doing anything good that people would want to support" party strategy has lead to the same terrible results?

There are material differences between the parties, pretending their policy is the exact same isn't enlightenment it's delusion. People should hold specifically institutional democrats accountable for stifling progress I'm with you there but the only thing not voting ever got us was less time to work with and worse conditions to do it in.

ah yes. the best place to hear how it is to live in America is from...a Canadian.

it's always a lemmy.ca user who's vomiting this shit.

You're making shit up. Women got the vote without voting for it. Black people got the vote without voting for it. Black people got civil rights while less than 10% of them were voting. The politicians that passed civil rights were in both parties and it wouldn't have passed without bi-partisan support. Equally, it was both parties that designed, implemented, and sold the war on drugs to incarcerate more black people immediately following the passage of civil rights.

You are 100% correct that the Good Cop behaves materially different from the Bad Cop. The Good Cop doesn't break the law as often, nor as loudly. They don't act beligerently, they don't attack you. What the Good Cop does is hangs out with the Bad Cop and appreciated how the Bad Cop makes it easier for the Good Cop to get compliance from the prisoner.

Yes, GI Joe and COBRA have different policies, but they're created by the same author.

The Ds and the Rs share the responsibility of managing the USA, and the USA is a EuroCentric white supremacist monocultural genocidal psychotic violent belligerent entirely based on the Papal Doctrine of Discovery (don't take my word for it, read RBG) and 100% committed to maintaining control over the stolen wealth of millions of trafficked humans, 100% committed to maintaining the system of racial categorization for the purposes of dividing the working class, ad 100% committed that the working class should never organize and overthrow the capitalists.

So yes, they do act differently. Because that's the roles they play in project of managing empire. But whether you vote for one or the other won't make the country less fascist, less psychotic, less violent, less carceral, less mass murdersome. Voting has never stopped or even slowed down the machine.

We only have one non-fascist party at the moment, so yeah. But you say that like anyone who prefers one party over another wants a one-party state like they don't prefer one party over the other.

Find me non-fascist Republicans who are standing up for human rights and I'll give them a shot, sure.

The time to make that change is before the general election.

Anytime you're presented with two choices, take the less bad option. But if that's the only time you bother to act, or even worse, if you don't even act THEN to pick the lesser bad option, then you are one less vote against the worse, and therefore by your actions support it. But you already supported it if you weren't fighting for better options.

"Well, I didn't pick which restaurant to visit very well, and this restaurant only has moldy fruit or sandwiches made literally from shit. I don't like either option, so I'm just gonna eat whatever they bring me". Sure, it's not a great analogy in the sense that picking a different restaurant is not so easy in the context of politics, but I think it makes the point - always choose the lesser bad option. I'd rather eat the moldy fruit (we're assuming that we must eat something in this metaphor) than the literal shit. And then work harder to try and prevent us from going to this restaurant next time. But if you are presented with the two bad options and one is worse, not picking an option is fucking stupid.

I see everyone going to blaming parties or whatever but its like no one considers that they are just complacent. If people wanted they could fundamentally change the way they live their lives to make things better for everyone else and remarkably more difficult for themselves. Why they dont is self evident.

I think things like voter suppression, access to information also weigh a lot heavier than some might think.

I'm also kind of wondering how they came up with this number of 11 million, if people are not politically motivated and activated but are still politically conscious enough to have priorities, there are systemic issues keeping them from voting. And especially at these large numbers, simply saying 'well they should vote' and being angry about them supposedly not voting won't change a damn thing.

We don't need to yell at people. We need to fucking strategize.

If I had to guess, the vast majority of those people are in places that absorb their vote into an electorate that won’t take climate seriously. The US is huge, and it’s hard to steer the political landscape in a given direction. We have a party duopoly that doesn’t help.

Yup, it's election season, time for every .ml user to make sure DT stays in office

This is historically false. While protests and activism created the pressure, the actual mechanisms that granted rights were legislative votes.

• The 19th Amendment required a two-thirds vote in Congress and ratification by 36 states.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were bills passed by Congress and signed by a President.
• During the Civil Rights era low black voter turnout was a direct result of voter suppression (poll taxes, literacy tests, violence). The entire point of the movement was to secure the right to vote so they could participate.
• The New Deal was passed through electoral politics
• The Affordable Care Act expanded healthcare to millions.

Respectfully you are making shit up and being disrespectful to those who fought for this.

Conversely, it was voting that actively reversed the machine recently. The overturning of Roe v. Wade happened because a specific political coalition won elections and appointed Supreme Court justices. If voting doesn't matter, why did the religious right spend 50 years obsessing over it to achieve their goals?

My comment talked about voting for a third party , you completely ignored it and claiming that I support voting for republicans. You basically say yes vote for only one party like China have. You have two terrorists parties who destroyed multiple democracies and countries.

Everyone conveniently leaves out he got them more sick days, etc. weeks later.

Make your point but let's at least involve all the facts.

11 million are concerned about it.

11 million are not concerned enough to be inconvenienced by any remedies.

Many of them use "both parties are the same" to rationalize not pausing their dooomscrolling long enough to vote.

edit: I love the "must have hit a nerve" douchevoting

You realize that legislative votes that are bipartisan in nature and driven during a period when the beneficiaries are not voting is evidence for my position right? If Black voters were only voting at a rate of 10% - 15% (the highest turnout at the time was 25% in a few states), and Black voters were a minority of the total vote anyway, then Black voters voting for the right party had absolutely nothing to do with Civil Rights legislation passing.

And again, the actual evidence is that it was the riots and the organizing towards communism that drove the legislature to act, not voting habits. Both a Democrat and a Republican president, back to back, was forced to act not by a minority of a minority voting properly, obviously because literally the parties and had just won back to back opposite elections. And it wasn't the legislature's voting constituencies, because it was bipartisan to pass the legislation. And immediately after Nixon signed his administration's civil rights changes, his administration then immediately went about destroying black communities by launching the war on drugs deliberately targeting black people and the white hippies who supported them. And BOTH parties legislators, the ones who had just voted together to address the civil rights situation, BOTH joined hands and supported the war on drugs and its racialized character, presiding over the most massive and rapid increase in racialized incarceration since abolition.

Both parties did both things, on both sides of the partisan reorientation! The Ds came up with the superpredator lies and propaganda AFTER they had recalibrated and "stopped" being the face of the openly racist South.

Because it wasn't about voting properly. It wasn't about getting the right parties in power. It was about threatening the status quo by organizing and being willing to shut things down, and being willing to become anti-capitalist, and to unify the working class against the rulers. THAT is what got meaningful change passed and THAT is why immediately after that meaningful change happened BOTH PARTIES IMMEDIATELY SET ABOUT TO UNDERMINE WITH VIOLENCE, LAW, POLICE, AND PRISONS.

The New Deal is the same thing. It was a response to labor organizing and building a movement to unseat the capitalist ruling class. The New Deal was explicitly designed to save capitalism. FDR said as much. It had nothing to do with voting and everything to do with the potential for the working class to unify and unseat the ruling class. Not only did the New Deal pass but the FDR administration also instituted racialized red lining and setup concentration camps for people who looked Asian and stole their property. People voted for that level of fascism? Or that's just what the maintenance of empire demanded?

The entire US system is designed to prevent mass voting from having any effect. From the bicameral structure of the legislature to the staggered terms, to the electoral college, to the supreme court, voters were never supposed to have any real power. That's what the Federalist Papers were all about. That's ultimately what Liberal power is based on. Liberalism cannot survive mass movements. It can only disempower them in favor of maintaining capitalism. The minute a mass movement takes power, anti-imperialism and communism become the primary movement.

That's why Ds and Rs both wanted to kill MLK after he came back from Vietnam. That's why both Ds and Rs want to make sure workers stay hungry. That's why both Ds and Rs deport millions. That's why both Ds and Rs build and deploy the world's most depraved psychotic military for genocidal projects and the destruction of mass movements anywhere in the world.

"Oh, I just couldn't vote for the Democrats. I'll hold out for True Progressives."

War kills people and nobody pollutes less than a dead man 🤷

But do you actually have a source for that? Because agriculture is the largest driver of ecological collapse and I'd be shocked if a handful of aircraft carrier emissions outweighs tons and tons of foods and goods being shipped.

If anyone considers climate to be their highest priority, the choices weren't even close to comparable. One was milquetoast green half measures that would kick the can a little further and one was nosedive everything off the cliff and irreversibly accelerate the climate catastrophe. If you stayed at home and were fine with the second choice you were flat out lying about your priorities.

Well one party didn't try to overthrow the election, stop our votes from being counted, call for violence against their dissenters, pardon the people who tried to take control of the government by force, remove anyone who tried to prosecute them, remove anyone who didn't fall behind them. But I mean the dems didn't make life changing bills, only generally positive ones while having a majority of checks notes 1 seat. Republicans are an ocean of fascism and dems are a bucket, but I guess it's better to lose all our rights, help Russia invade Ukraine, and destroy the planet instead of voting for those fascist dems :3

We only have one non-fascist party at the moment

No. We don't. Both parties are fascist. The Nazis studied the American system to learn how to build the Third Reich. The ruling class funded the Nazis in Germany and in the US. The US had a huge Nazi movement domestically. Who got purged? The anti-fascist communists. The US has spent over a century purging communist anti-fascists from all forms of meaningful power - media, art, politics, business. There are no non-fascists left in power. It's just two PR firms selling the same fascism. The Rs are openly racist and the Ds do literally nothing to stop them and in fact create the very systems required for over fascist actions. That's two fascist parties with a Good Cop / Bad Cop routine.

Why would you try to appeal to non-voters? They don't vote. The right messaging won't suddenly make non-voters voters.

because climate concerns are not a concern with either party? both sides may not be the same, but they hold the same views on 90% of all things. and more and more that last 10% seems to be things they want but are still ashamed about it.