If we can't be bothered to vote in the primaries, wjy would anyone believe us that a progressive candidate would somehow lure millions more to vote?
As I know the comments will be, uhhh, fun, I've turned off reply notifications.
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Progressive here. I vote in every primary and try to rally support for the most progressive in my coalition. Come November, I vote against fascists which means voting for Democrats because they're obviously better in every way.
If you don't vote or vote third party, congratulations, it means you were duped by right-wing propaganda or don't understand how our election system works and the inevitable binary outcome that comes with FPTP and whole you didn't give fascists +2, you gave them +1.
In 2000, Nader won 1.64% of the popular vote in Florida.
If less than 1% of the Nader voters had voted for Gore instead, Gore would have won Florida, become president, and who knows what timeline we'd be living in today.
If your favorite candidate is polling in single digits ahead of election day, maybe... just maybe... you should consider which of the actually viable candidates you want to win and vote accordingly.
Careful, people who have never met you will now tell you that you're not actually a progressive, but a dirty liberal
I've gotten more down votes saying exactly this.
In 2020 Biden won with 81.3 million votes. In 2024 Trump won with 77.3 million votes. All we had to do to avoid the mess we are in is turn out with the same "enthusiasm" we had for Biden in 2020.
You're not wrong, but they sure didn't make it easy.
It's the job of a politician to generate that enthusiasm.
I would argue that it is the civic duty of a citizen to vote. Enthusiasm is irrelevant.
I agree with this, but that doesn't convince people to actually turn out and vote.
A politician needs to be able to generate enthusiasm to get people to vote
I fucking loathe this mindset. I mean I hate it with such a passion. Cuz all you're saying is you don't care if you lose. You don't care if the worst happens to all of us you'd rather not change your ways. Cause guess what? You're wrong.
You can say that until the cows come home but people turn out to vote when they're spoken to and engaged. Thinking anything else means you're okay with losing. And I resent the fuck out of my life being put in jeopardy because some of you are okay with losing.
We simply know that people are more likely to vote when they are enthusiastic. You can either keep telling people "do better" and keep losing, or you can accept human nature and use it to your advantage by running a candidate that people actually want.
People should have been planty enthusiastic to get anyone but Trump as President, but that shows how strong the misinformation machine is.
Personally I've always favored a system like Australia where voting is compulsory and punished with a small fine. That filters out the principled from the merely lazy.
Yes, but they do that only when they want you to vote. Imagine making it compulsory to vote, and then also suppressing your ability to vote... Then the fine is just a new tax and you still don't get to vote.
No, it simply shows that the Dem strategy of "putting up a turd that doesn't stink quite as bad as the other one" isn't enough to actually win when it matters.
We are back to the original point that people are so determined to blame Democrats that they sabotage their own efforts to get something better.
Ah, I see, we are back to absolving Democrats of any agency or responsibility.
Why is it Democrats responsibility to get progressives to vote in primaries? If you don't vote, politicians don't care about your opinions.
Let's not act like the Democratic primary process has been going well for the last elections - look how they treated Bernie, and there wasn't even a primary for Harris - after she was quite unpopular in the previous primaries!
That's not to mention that the Biden campaign before 2020 gave many signals that he'd be a one-term president. They said "we have to rally to defeat Trump", and then just didn't care to build up an alternative to Biden since they knew people would have to rally behind whoever they put up, since anyone would be better than Trump!
And if you don't speak to voters, voters don't care about politicians. Guess which one matters more?
It's the job of my dentist to encourage responsible dental hygiene. But if I don't brush, it's my teeth that rot.
This.
Not voting or voting for a third party hands a win to people you don't want winning. The system is not fair, at all -- but that doesn't mean we should operate in a way we know will lead to a bad outcome. We have plenty of evidence that third parties in the US don't really make a dent, but they do sway elections (and generally not how you want). The rest is idealism.
It's also a good example of why single-issue voting means you'll almost always get more collateral damage, even if you get representation you want on that specific issue.
Trouble is, sometimes voting for either of the two major parties hands a vote to people whom you don't want winning, and you know it will lead to a bad outcome: The march toward some flavor of authoritarianism has been obvious for decades. One major party welcomes it, and the other major party doesn't not welcome it. While the system isn't fair, neither is life, and sometimes the system itself is so flawed that it falls apart even if you play by its unfair rules.
So what was the plan? Democrats win every election forever and ever, amen? The party was cooperating with the Republicans, actively or passively, to put the pieces of an authoritarian system into place. Was that supposed to be fine because Democrats would always be in control of the machinery of repression? Despite the long history of U.S. voters ping-ponging between parties?