[orange dude, angry, fist raised] I will protest against both sides of the evil capitalist elites that are ruining society by voting for an anti-system extreme!
[pink gal, looking candid] Since your protest is based on human values and a desire for more social justice, this means you’re going to vote far left?
[pink gal, looking scared] Isn’t that right?…
[orange dude starts laughing so hard tears comes from his eyes and his hairpiece starts flying]
Protest voters helped elect Trump and I won’t be convinced otherwise, nor will I stop holding them accountable.
I don’t love most of my Democrat politicians either, but at least I voted against what we have right now.
I guess this comic makes no sense for countries locked in a 2 party system.
In many other global north countries (those with a normal electoral system), there’s a far leftist party struggling at 1% while the far right is chilling at 30%, and racists come up with silly excuses like “it was an anti-system protest vote” while the far right politicians are backed by the most “systemic” people there are, billionaires.
I wish the US had a system like that. It’s unfortunate that even a more inclusive voting system suffers from a surplus of voters fueled by hate and selfishness, but here in the US even protest votes for the far left play into the far right’s hands since all 3rd party votes together wouldn’t even come close to rivaling the 2 established parties.
Even if all the far-left parties only get 1% or 2%, if the moderate left arty doesn’t have a clean majority, they need the votes of those far left parties to form a government, and thus the far left parties can negotiate some stuff. It’s not useless to vote third party.
Except in the US the moderate left generally chooses to cater to the right when they need to bolster their numbers, rather than the far left. It makes sense given that our current Democratic party is far closer to the moderate right than the far left. We’d need to elect new incoming lefter-leaning democratic leaders across all levels of government over the course of decades to get the party as a whole to tilt leftward rather than rightward when a clean majority is needed. It’s still the most viable option, but it’ll be a lot of work to achieve.
Illegal vote suppression elected Trump, but even if it hadn’t, you should blame Democrats before blaming people who voted for third party candidates. Now, if you’re talking about people who “protest voted” by voting for Trump (in both the primaries and the election), then sure. Those people did, in fact, play an instrumental part in electing him.
Why blame Democrats? Well, beyond just kinda being Republican-lites:
Democrats are the bare minimum “harm reduction” party, and I don’t bare any ill will toward people who voted for them rather than a party that would actually try to effect change, but the opposite mindset - blaming third party voters for not voting for Democrats - is very shortsighted. And as third party voters have never had the power to enact RCV or STAR voting or otherwise improve the system, blaming them instead of the Democrats who have had that power is inane.
I’ve voted for a Democrat every single presidential election that I’ve been able to, but I honestly wish I hadn’t. I’d much rather there be more visibility for third parties, and for more people to feel empowered to vote for third party candidates.
I definitely blame the system for allowing all that illegal voter suppression.
And I definitely blame Democrats for being such a shit party and doing such a shitty job.
But I also blame people who didn’t vote, or protest voted. They still enabled what is happening, and commentary on how the Democrats didn’t woo you (not you you, the “you” that is making the argument) to their side is childish. The time to hit hard on making change to allow better options is in between elections, not when the choice is full-on fascism and significantly less fascism.
And those of us still harping on the point is because the no-vote people still don’t think they did anything wrong, and will continue the behavior in the future. And frankly, as small of a chance as there is, we’re more likely to convince those people to vote next time than we are to, currently, convince the government to fill the systemic gaps in or convince the Democrats to… stop being… what they are (though some are making some headway there, which is great! Let the Leftists take over the Dem Party they way the Teabaggers took over the Republican Party!).
Nah democrats lost an election that was handed to them on a sliver plater.
The most important job of a political party is to energize the electorate, something the democrats have failed to do for the better part of 20 years.
If every 3rd party voted D in this race it wouldn’t not have saved the this election. Democrats shot themselves in the foot by allowing Genocide Joe to attempt to run again (it’s also highly likely he knew about his prostate cancer at this point) and then using the less than useless strat of appealing to moderates and Republicans.
Their incompetence was highlighted by their less-than-useless strategy of trying to appeal to moderates and conservatives by appearing on stage with people that the Democrats electorate hate, like George Bush and Liz Cheney, which resulted in less moderate and conservative votes than from 2020.