this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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They might be wrong that no one was saying that, but there definitely wasn't a significant voting block who thought a third party candidate had a shot at winning.
Blaming third party voters is a loser mentality. 77 million voted trump, 75 million Harris, and 101 million didn't vote at all. How about blaming those people? Or blaming the party and candidate? If someone didn't win the majority of the blame lies with the person running.
Yeah, I mean, I agree. I don't think third-party voters made the difference. I don't even think protest voters and protest nonvoters made the difference. I think the civic education of the US electorate is worse than previously thought, and it was previously thought to be pretty damn bad.
This is an election. The people - the electorate - make the choice. If faced with the most incompetent democratic candidate imaginable, and a literal Nazi, the electorate - the voters - should still be held responsible if they chose the literal Nazi, or decided it wasn't worth bothering with which one won. Or, conversely, if the democratic candidate is the best damn campaigner anyone has ever seen, but loses to the literal Nazi, that does not mean that the blame lies with the democratic candidate.
Elections are not a race between two aristocrats trying to prove they're better than the other - or at least, they should not be. Elections are a decision about what direction the country should take going forward, and the campaigning of candidates only important insofar they emphasize one aspect or another. And the country decided that it liked, or didn't care about, the fascist platform put forward by Trump.
That's on us. That's on the country. No matter what incompetence, vanity, or venality Harris or the Dems have shown, no matter what condemnation they rightly deserve, the final choice, the ultimate sin, is on the nation's soul. We were given the choice between fascism and avoiding fascism, and we chose fascism.
That is your personal belief, not an objective truth. There is no manual for voting. YOU view voting one way, and others are perfectly free to vote on whatever principles or with whatever method they choose.
When people call liberals arrogant, this is the type of thing they're referring to. I'm sure you would call yourself open-minded, but you are completely incapable of seeing the world through another person's eyes.
Not everyone votes like you. YOU see voting as a way of picking the ideal candidate for the next few years. YOU see voting as a kind of job interview. But your way is not the only way.
Others see voting as more of a performance review, a way of holding people accountable. They see judging past actions as more important than considering future actions. In many ways, this is a much better way of judging elected leaders. After all, politicians lie all the time. It's often better to judge them by past actions than by whatever lies they happen to be telling today.
People saw that Biden enabled a genocide. That's something he did. Full stop. There are tens of thousands of innocent dead civilians that he enabled. For millions of voters, holding Biden accountable for this was more important that what hypothetical future crimes Trump might commit.
You can disagree. And I don't think you're entirely wrong. You're applying your cultural beliefs about voting perfectly fine. In fact, I did the same thing and voted for Kamala. But I have enough humility to not simply dismiss the reasons for those who didn't. It's simply a matter of how you interpret voting. And unless you want to fulfill every arrogant liberal stereotype, you should have enough humility to accept that your way is not the only way.
Yeah, people are free to be fascists or believe that an aristocracy must rule over us peasants, that doesn't mean they aren't fucking wrong. Jesus H. Christ. This is "Genocide is okay if they really believe in it" level apologetics.