Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told a crowd of thousands at a rally in Los Angeles on Saturday that the U.S. was facing a moment of “extraordinary danger” as he criticized the political, economic and social policies of Donald Trump.
Sanders, who also dropped by the music festival Coachella over the weekend, has been criss-crossing the U.S. to speak out against the new Republican administration.
“We are living in a moment of extraordinary danger,” he said, “and how we respond to this moment will not only impact our lives but will impact the lives of our kids and future generations.”
Some historical context for you.
Just in case you don’t read or comprehend the article here is a TL;DR
Third party is dead in the US without changes to the voting process.
And just to be more clear: You, and anyone else who voted third party essentially voted for Trump. And if you didn’t vote you voted for Trump as well.
the mental gymnastics inside one clause are incredible
If you don’t understand how either not voting or voting third party equated to voting for Trump then I guess enjoy riding your moral high horse of superiority.
trump only gets to count votes for him. any other vote is a vote against him, and a non vote is a non vote
See the thing is that a candidate only needs a plurality of cast votes. So every vote that doesn’t get cast makes that plurality easier to achieve. If there are 100 people that can vote and all of them do you need 51 for a majority. If 10 of them don’t vote at all and there’s only 90 left you now only need 46 for that same majority. If another 10 of them vote for some third party that person now only needs 41 votes to have the largest plurality. Every person that doesn’t vote lowers the threshold for victory.
It’s tempting to think that this benefits both remaining candidates equally since both can benefit from that lowered margin. But in reality it gets skewed based on who stayed home/voted third party and who didn’t. This is the spoiler effect.
so you know non votes don’t get counted for Trump
Missed the entire point huh? If people not voting lowers the required counts to achieve a plurality, then mathematically speaking it is functionally equivalent to voting for the candidate furthest away from that non-voter’s preference.
The only way a non-voter does not work in the favor of in this case Trump would be if there was some absolute share of eligible voters he had to reach. But since only a plurality is needed every non-vote and every third-party vote lowers the amount of votes he needs to achieve that plurality.
This is literally a studied and documented mathematical phenomenon related to first past the post systems.
no, it’s not.
You can argue with the math all you like. It won’t change.
Wow it’s a good things democrats took those 4 years to make everyone’s lives better. They really motivated all those people who didn’t vote for them to support them.
I also like how they are championing changes to the electoral process that would help more candidates get on the ballot. Oh wait they aren’t doing any of that!
You can blame anyone you want, but when democrats know they have just enough votes to lose without having to concede anything at all they are going to keep playing the lesser of two evils best hits and convince you to blame everyone else.
They will keep voting for war, tax cuts for the rich, and increases to their own benefits and salaries. As long as they do it with an anti-Trump pro-LGBTQ sticker their constituents will blame those who found no resonance within a hollow corporate party.
So what do you recommend?
The base we can start with is never voting for a politician who accepts foreign (even hidden foreign) money.
Vote your conscience - aka things you believe in and want to see happen - not by who is scaring you the most.
Aside from that - try to build up third parties and bring their ideas to the front. This is an answer finding mission many of us are on together.
There’s enough blame to go around my love