I mean, its process of elimination.

The pebbi is heroin

Okay, so you are approaching this in good faith, which I appreciate and acknowledge and will invest the time it takes to have this conversation around. But as this is the case, its important to note that this conversation isn’t happening in a vacuum, that I’ve had this conversation or variants of it almost continuously since 2023, and that context informs this current conversation; that they are inseparable.

What I am saying, is that in isolation, come the general election in 2024, voting for Harris was the only action that would have prevented Trump from winning the 2024 general election.

There’s no real point in beating around the bush and this sentence highlights my core criticism; I identify it as a fundamental component to why Harris (and honestly, Hillary before her) lost. You’re effectively making one leg of the argument around strategic voting, or at least a summarized version of it. And that is pretty squarely where my criticism lands. The conclusion of those advocating for strategic voting, or rather, the idea that voters had no other choice, or that the most “rational” choice for voters should be Harris, was well represented and communicated during the campaign. And the problem which, by its on acknowledgement it creates, is that it ignore the fact that voting in a two party system, however much the proponents might resist, is not a binary.

Voters always have another place to go, and this is fundamentally the damage that this advocacy does and the problem it creates, is that it ignore the fact that voters can choose to not participate in-lieu of accepting your framing of what you consider the smarter choice to be. The downstream impact of this is voter disenfranchisement, and that also, campaigns recognize and are paying attention to whats being communicated. They also see and understand your communication that you see this act as being the only “rational” choice and they adjust their actions accordingly.

When political projects recognize your vote as a given, or see themselves as the only “rational” choice in the matter, they understand to themselves that they do not need to earn your vote any longer. And we saw this play out in real life in both 2016 and 2024. Both campaigns recognized the limited suite of choices, and rather than engaging less than likely voters to become engaged, they instead chose to focus on attempting to bring “across-the-aisle” voter to their side. The problems with this are multitudinous and obvious and I don’t think need additional explanation here as others have done better and in greater detail elsewhere.

The problem is that the “strategic voter” cuts against their own cloth; “strategic voting” as an electoral strategy has been demonstrated, over and again, to lose elections. As a voter you should never be communicating to a campaign that “they’ve got your vote” or that “if voters were smarter, they’d have voted Harris”, because in doing so, you do two kinds of damage to that campaign. First, the campaign understand they no longer need to compete for your vote, and what you need to recognize, is that when a campaign is competing for you and your voice that you are using, there are 2-3 additional people they’ll convenience if they recognize that they need to focus on you and meet your need to get your vote. The second kind of damage is that you disenfranchise people when communicating this, that they only have some kinds of choice, when they do know that they actually do have more choices available to them. They can just not vote. And this is the choice Americans made as Harris understood and was communicated to that she didn’t need to “go get” Democrats votes. She thought she could focus on getting Republicans to vote for her, and it utterly failed. And many of us, my self easily one of the most consistent and outspoken voices on this matter, worked to communicate that this strategy would fail months before it ultimately did. And we were met with the consistent repetoir of “Well the only way to stop Trump is for voters to vote for Harris”.

And what this belies is a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanisms on which politics operates. You can’t just “move voters” to a candidate. But you can move candidates to where voters are. And I say that softly. Obviously, over time, you can convince voters of things, but in the course of a campaign, this is somewhat ridiculous. Campaigns are short and attention spans are shorter. Its far more effective and strategic focus on moving a candidate, rather than an electorate, in the course of a campaign. And you can’t move a candidate if you’ve already acknowledged you’ll vote for them regardless. And strategic voting is effectively an opposing frame work to what I’ve outlined.

A similar conundrum exists in recycling or with climate change. We were propagandized to that your individual action is what needs to change to change the course of things in this that or the other matter. But actually, it doesn’t work. You can’t just ask voters to do better and then expect them to. Like with pollution, you need to focus on where the power is; in industry, at the political agent/ player level. You can change those people and move them to better positions and get better outcomes. But just expecting voters to “do better” according to whatever your recipe for that is, is to cultivate disaster.

Honestly, if you really need it explained to you at this point, I have to assume you are asking this in bad faith.

Go ask @SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world to explain to you how you’ve become the villains of your own narrative.

And in the most superficial terms, the exact kind of framing you are using right now is what was used to hand Trump the election. If not for people doing exactly what you are doing now, we probably could have gotten Harris over the finish line to a W, but for the reasoning you are using right now. And since its been so well studied and is incredible obvious now, we must simply assume that those asking/ following that line were never interested in a Harris W, and that it was always in bad faith.

This is going to be a major boost for her.

What’s implied here, is, that there is direct evidence of trump having sex with minors. And enough people obviously know that it’s release is inevitable, they’re doing this tired labor of trying to redefine what a pedophile is or isn’t.

Keep missing the point and keep throwing elections for us then.

But what you feel doesn’t matter, because we took the data on this, and the exact approach you outline led directly to fascists getting elected.

I feel like we just need to make the most absurdist fucking bets at this point.

like that actually Barron is Putins kid and that Trump has a micropenis and one ball

The whole campaign was a scam to make consultants rich by buying TV ad spots for which they get a percent…

This is a perpetually idiotic take.

All the statistical evidence that we have, is that once Kamala was the candidate, her polling rose meteorically. Until she started to define herself as a candidate, when all we had were her words as former candidate to base her policy positions on, she was heading towards blue-wave-of-epic proportions territory. She named Walz as running mate and people thought they had someone to vote for herself

Then, during the convention, the definition began as a continuance of a corporate, Biden-esque, more-of-the-same, Democrat. They silenced Palestinian voices and shunned the progressive vote, while embracing Republicans and hawkish dem’s.

And her polling rapidly stagnated, then began to slide. As she slid further and further right, so did her polling.

Harris’ loss was not an inevitability, and to present it as such is to both misunderstand the political moment then, as it happened, and to misrepresent the ongoing political moment.

If Harris’ had ran on her 2020 campaign platform with Walz as vice, she wins. Hands down. The political pressure desperately seeking an outlet on issues like M4A, and so many other leftwing polciies isn’t new. Bernie got it started in 2016 and it never stopped growing. All she needed to do was step left and ride the wave. But she chose to make losing decisions. Her loss was not an inevitability and to present it as such is a form of lying.

a political moderate who supports democrats not right wingers.

Oh! Like how Chuck Schumer makes is able to make the claim of being a political moderate! While dogwalking Democrats to break with the party to protect the filibuster.

Of course. This is soooooo supportive of Democratic policy positions.

Or, and this might be completely revolutionary towards your thinking…

Maybe how you approach politics is harmful and supports rightwing movements.

others decided not to vote

And why is that?

What alternative did you provide them?

You do understand that your approach to rhetoric is fundamental to why Democrats lost and Trump won?