For all you Americans who like to complain about the democrats candidates, maybe join the party and vote on primaries. Maybe do something other than just wait around until they feed you the candidate they picked without your input. Maybe start changing up the party from within and at the entry level, by voting on primaries and volunteering for the progressive candidates that want to overthrow the party career politicians. Look at what New York did! If they had waited around and not cared about primaries, they would have gotten Cumo and complained.
I hear a lot of complaining about the democrats on Lemmy, sometimes you guys blame them more than Republican. But if you don’t vote or register as a democrat then you don’t matter to them. Make yourselves heard before the actual elections
You don’t even have to join the Democratic Party to vote in their primaries.
That being said, they will absolutely move mountains to block anyone remotely socialist from gaining power. The only reason Mamdani won the primary is because NYC has ranked choice voting.
The Dems are not going to save us because their leadership is profiting from this too much. Organized resistance is the only hope we have.
Is it really most states? I’m in an extremely conservative state. I refuse to join a political party. I’m allowed to vote in the Democrats’ primary, but not the Republicans’.
If you are in this situation, please vote in the primary after learning about the local candidates.
There is one big thing- You must ask for the Democratic Party Ballot. I was used to getting it by default and was disenfranchised in 2008 by being given the no affiliation ballot. I realized it when I got to the machine and was not allowed to change. I left yelling about it, like that did any good.
Establishment Dems never move mountains for anything. They’ll push over molehills. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
And yeah, they only put molehills in front of Bernie. Unfortunately that’s all it took.
One of the big realities is that winning elections right now takes money. I hate every Dem that swears off campaign contributions. It’s partly our fault that if they don’t play the game they’re not gonna win.
Votes still matter more than money. It’s partly our collective fault that money buys votes as effectively as it does.
Actually, Mamdani would’ve won on first past the post as well (he has 43.5% of voters choosing him as first choice). He needs a 50% threshold to advance, which is where ranked choice will come in, but he would’ve won a first past the post anyways.
So even in a first past the post scheme, people should vote in dem primaries. I think we’re all on board with changing the dem party, and it starts in the primaries.
Go vote, or get oppressed. That’s basically the options and people need to understand that. Voting doesn’t guarantee you won’t be oppressed, but not voting guarantees you will.
Would those people have voted for him in a first past the post race? Or would they have been too afraid that someone worse than Cuomo would win, so they stick with him?
Well since he was selected as their first choice, presumably they would still choose their first choice when only given one choice. Ranked choice plays a role for everyone else down ballot and for automatic runoffs. People don’t put someone as their first choice that they don’t actually want as their first choice. So yes, they would have.
Yes they do, all the time. I wanted to vote for Bernie in the 2016 election, but I actually voted for Hillary because I thought that splitting the vote would let Trump win. If we had ranked choice, I could have put Bernie on top while knowing that I wasn’t opening the door tor Trump.
While I understand your statement here in the Hillary v Trump scenario, I don’t think it necessarily applies here, as if anything , I would think that Lander supporters would’ve instead put Mamdani as their first choice if they only had a single choice, given the announcement. The down ballot races would have been less successful.
Well, the entire point of ranked choice is that you can do this. You can put unknown candidates up top without having to be afraid to „waste“ your vote, as you would have, with FPTP.
I am pretty confident that this would not have happened were it not for ranked choice. People would have voted the „safe“ candidate instead.
Right, but the benefit of ranked choice in this election would have been “I’m gonna vote Lander or Michael Blake in 1 but put Mamdani second since I’d be happy with him”. Realistically who is the safe candidate that isn’t Cuomo? The only viable candidate is Mamdani. Cuomo is still going to be in the ballot as an independent, so you really would’ve only voted Cuomo here because you’re staunchly establishment dem, in which case you wouldn’t be putting Mamdani but you also would’ve put Cuomo in first.
But I think this is all ridiculous. If the argument is “don’t vote in primaries unless they’re ranked choice”, that’s a defeating argument and we should absolutely abandon that as wise advice. The argument should be “vote in every primary, especially ranked choice, and vote for the furthest left candidate you can if you don’t want more of the same corporatist democrat melange”. I hope we can agree on that.
With enough pressure from their constituents, the Democrat party will absolutely change into whatever we want it to. Look at the Republican party. They found out their constituents really liked racism and authoritarianism and that party basically became unrecognizable compared to a quarter century ago to give it to them. I’m old enough to remember the Republican party being assholes, but not on this level. When I was younger they would absolutely not have behaved the way they currently behave. But their constituents gave them the thumbs up, so here we are.
Democrat legislators very, very much want to keep their gravy train jobs. They’ll morph into whoever they need to be to keep them.
But that pressure has to start significantly before an election and it has to be big enough that they can’t ignore it.
One method would be an Article V convention to get rid of money in politics, abolish the electoral college, get rid of FPTP in favor of ranked choice voting, and mandate a fair and impartial redistributing system which must be applied nationally before the midterms.
Essentially, our last shot at a “peaceful revolution”.
That’s the point of voting in primaries. To change that. That’s how the republicans got turned into a maga cult. We need to follow that example to uncult our side.
Correct. From the inside is the only way to change them. Actual 3rd party just splits the ticket and gives seats to the opposite party who are always worse than the most centrist D.
It’s the same way the MAGA Rs shifted that party from within. The old guard neo-cons fought them as long as they could, and now they know if they bad-mouth them, they get primaried by insane people like MTG and Boebert.
Why is the moral obligation on the progressives to join with the centrists? The progressives should start their own party. Then we can tell the centrists that they can get on board. And if they don’t, it’s their fault Republicans win. This street goes both ways.
That’s what the abolitionists thought about the Whigs. They tried for decades in vain to get the Whigs to adopt anti-slavery positions, but the Whigs were far too loyal to business interests and the status quo. In the end it took abolitionists abandoning the Whigs entirely and founding the Republican party.
We’ve witnessed this before. Sometimes parties become so resistant to change that the only way forward is to walk away. Yes, this takes a willingness to reject myopic thinking - to focus on the long term rather than the short term. But this short term thinking, only looking at one election at a time, is what has got us to this crisis.
There are way too many whiny children on this platform thinking they need a brand new party to vote for instead of doing what’s actually possible and morphing the Democrat party, since much of their policy already matches what these whiny children want.
A new, viable party isn’t happening in this country anytime soon. Probably not in our lifetimes. The answer is forcing the Democrat party to change, which is 100% a thing that can happen.
The policies match on posters but not in practice. All of the policies you want only get brought to vote when it is impossible for it to pass against a Nazi majority and then disappear when opportunity arises.
ANY candidate who has been in Washington for 12 years or more should be VIGOROUSLY primaried…for example Adam Schiff, who has become yet another Pelosi- styled career milquetoast shitlib.
All of the policies you want only get brought to vote when it is impossible for it to pass
It might be now, because nothing is possible anymore, but before current round of shitsow, amazing amount of smaller bills and propositions were passed, they weren’t flashy ones (and that’s why there were passed, under the radar), but it helped immense amount of people. Everything big, like medicare for all, requires so much more work, it was never possible to do in that short periods of time US government wasn’t overwhelmed by reactionaries.
But that’s all that people can actually achieve, for now.
A new party will never be formed by the people complaining cause they tend to just complain and not do actual work. Like you said, forming a party would be much harder than just changing the Democratic Party from within
I agree with all of this but take into account that lots of people here don’t even live in the US (like me). And we get fucked by democrats being shit at winning elections too
The democratic party is literally designed to squelch any kind of true progressivism. They are funnel any movements into “voting blue no matter who” and make people like AOC say bullshit things like “Biden is working tirelessly for a ceasefire” which we know if bullshit after Biden aides admitted they did not.
We need to make ourselves heard, aboslutley. And waiting for the elections is a recipie for failure indeed. But you say all these things about registering for democratic primaries or canvasing or “changing the party” without realizing people who have been paying attention have been trying that for decades. The democratic party is designed to maintain the status quo, and be as big of a roadbump as possible to actual workers demands so that they can keep campaigning on being better than the GOP. We are not reforming the democratic party when its whole goal for decades is to trap people trying to demand actual reform.
We need to make demands, absolutely. But we need to throw off the shackles of thinking the prison guards are going to help us escape. We need a new party, not a new Democrat.
Exactly. When you try to actually change the party, you are forced to join at the bottom. And the only people who rise to any power in the party are those that are willing to toe the party line. People saying to work within the party have no idea how politics actually works.
As our nation descends into authoritarianism/fascism you absolutely do not have the luxury of time necessary to wait for a 3rd party to actually start doing something so they can start winning local/state elections so they can start having ANY presence AT ALL in Congress, so they can one day potentially run a presidential candidate that stands a chance.
Like, are you aware that no 3rd party has done really anything at all? NONE in Congress. NONE. They have no presence and it takes DECADES to build up a nation-wide coalition and win a presidency. Even if somehow, in a fantasy scenario, a 3rd party candidate won the presidency, they’d have ZERO support in Congress to accomplish anything.
The answer is 100% putting massive pressure on the Democrat party to change to what we want it to be. We literally witnessed the insane Republican base do exactly that to the Republican party over the last 10-20 years.
For all you Americans who like to complain about the democrats candidates, maybe join the party and vote on primaries. Maybe do something other than just wait around until they feed you the candidate they picked without your input. Maybe start changing up the party from within and at the entry level, by voting on primaries and volunteering for the progressive candidates that want to overthrow the party career politicians. Look at what New York did! If they had waited around and not cared about primaries, they would have gotten Cumo and complained. I hear a lot of complaining about the democrats on Lemmy, sometimes you guys blame them more than Republican. But if you don’t vote or register as a democrat then you don’t matter to them. Make yourselves heard before the actual elections
You don’t even have to join the Democratic Party to vote in their primaries.
That being said, they will absolutely move mountains to block anyone remotely socialist from gaining power. The only reason Mamdani won the primary is because NYC has ranked choice voting.
The Dems are not going to save us because their leadership is profiting from this too much. Organized resistance is the only hope we have.
This depends on the state and in most states you have to be a member of the party to vote in primaries
Is it really most states? I’m in an extremely conservative state. I refuse to join a political party. I’m allowed to vote in the Democrats’ primary, but not the Republicans’.
If you are in this situation, please vote in the primary after learning about the local candidates.
There is one big thing- You must ask for the Democratic Party Ballot. I was used to getting it by default and was disenfranchised in 2008 by being given the no affiliation ballot. I realized it when I got to the machine and was not allowed to change. I left yelling about it, like that did any good.
Establishment Dems never move mountains for anything. They’ll push over molehills. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
And yeah, they only put molehills in front of Bernie. Unfortunately that’s all it took.
One of the big realities is that winning elections right now takes money. I hate every Dem that swears off campaign contributions. It’s partly our fault that if they don’t play the game they’re not gonna win.
Votes still matter more than money. It’s partly our collective fault that money buys votes as effectively as it does.
Actually, Mamdani would’ve won on first past the post as well (he has 43.5% of voters choosing him as first choice). He needs a 50% threshold to advance, which is where ranked choice will come in, but he would’ve won a first past the post anyways.
So even in a first past the post scheme, people should vote in dem primaries. I think we’re all on board with changing the dem party, and it starts in the primaries.
Go vote, or get oppressed. That’s basically the options and people need to understand that. Voting doesn’t guarantee you won’t be oppressed, but not voting guarantees you will.
Would those people have voted for him in a first past the post race? Or would they have been too afraid that someone worse than Cuomo would win, so they stick with him?
Well since he was selected as their first choice, presumably they would still choose their first choice when only given one choice. Ranked choice plays a role for everyone else down ballot and for automatic runoffs. People don’t put someone as their first choice that they don’t actually want as their first choice. So yes, they would have.
Yes they do, all the time. I wanted to vote for Bernie in the 2016 election, but I actually voted for Hillary because I thought that splitting the vote would let Trump win. If we had ranked choice, I could have put Bernie on top while knowing that I wasn’t opening the door tor Trump.
While I understand your statement here in the Hillary v Trump scenario, I don’t think it necessarily applies here, as if anything , I would think that Lander supporters would’ve instead put Mamdani as their first choice if they only had a single choice, given the announcement. The down ballot races would have been less successful.
Well, the entire point of ranked choice is that you can do this. You can put unknown candidates up top without having to be afraid to „waste“ your vote, as you would have, with FPTP.
I am pretty confident that this would not have happened were it not for ranked choice. People would have voted the „safe“ candidate instead.
Right, but the benefit of ranked choice in this election would have been “I’m gonna vote Lander or Michael Blake in 1 but put Mamdani second since I’d be happy with him”. Realistically who is the safe candidate that isn’t Cuomo? The only viable candidate is Mamdani. Cuomo is still going to be in the ballot as an independent, so you really would’ve only voted Cuomo here because you’re staunchly establishment dem, in which case you wouldn’t be putting Mamdani but you also would’ve put Cuomo in first.
But I think this is all ridiculous. If the argument is “don’t vote in primaries unless they’re ranked choice”, that’s a defeating argument and we should absolutely abandon that as wise advice. The argument should be “vote in every primary, especially ranked choice, and vote for the furthest left candidate you can if you don’t want more of the same corporatist democrat melange”. I hope we can agree on that.
With enough pressure from their constituents, the Democrat party will absolutely change into whatever we want it to. Look at the Republican party. They found out their constituents really liked racism and authoritarianism and that party basically became unrecognizable compared to a quarter century ago to give it to them. I’m old enough to remember the Republican party being assholes, but not on this level. When I was younger they would absolutely not have behaved the way they currently behave. But their constituents gave them the thumbs up, so here we are.
Democrat legislators very, very much want to keep their gravy train jobs. They’ll morph into whoever they need to be to keep them.
But that pressure has to start significantly before an election and it has to be big enough that they can’t ignore it.
If you live in a closed state primary like Florida, you do have to join to vote in the primaries of your party.
Is there because people used their political power to make them leaders, to achieve that goals. It’s a democratic process, albeit convoluted one.
And then they proceed to do nothing revolutionary, don’t forget.
You guys can’t even be bothered to get off the couch and vote against fascism. You guys ain’t starting no resistance or Revolution
100% - the Dems are a fundraising organization, not a political party.
Sure it will benefit us to be more politically active, but we need to put that energy into a new party. The Dems will not save us.
Please leave a detailed message explaining exactly how you propose to come up with a viable 3rd Party when the 2026 midterms are in sight?
Please provide a detailed message explaining how you plan to escape the repeated cycle of voting in fascists and then voting in fascist collaborators.
One method would be an Article V convention to get rid of money in politics, abolish the electoral college, get rid of FPTP in favor of ranked choice voting, and mandate a fair and impartial redistributing system which must be applied nationally before the midterms.
Essentially, our last shot at a “peaceful revolution”.
Hold on.
First line “One method”
Last line “our last shot.”
Pretty quick self contradiction.
Besides, the 2026 are about 17 months away. There’s no way you could convene an Article V convention in that time.
Sounds like you just don’t want to admit you haven’t got anything practical to suggest.
That’s the point of voting in primaries. To change that. That’s how the republicans got turned into a maga cult. We need to follow that example to uncult our side.
I would LOVE to do that but I am constrained by rent obligations and a blind wife.
It doesn’t stop you from voting in primaries, it’s free actually, and there is no eye tests for family members.
Oh I misunderstood; I was referring to actually running for office
Yeah, that requires dedication and free time and resources very few people have.
Progressive Democrats are the 3rd party. That’s why establishment Dems are trying to suppress them.
Correct. From the inside is the only way to change them. Actual 3rd party just splits the ticket and gives seats to the opposite party who are always worse than the most centrist D.
It’s the same way the MAGA Rs shifted that party from within. The old guard neo-cons fought them as long as they could, and now they know if they bad-mouth them, they get primaried by insane people like MTG and Boebert.
Why is the moral obligation on the progressives to join with the centrists? The progressives should start their own party. Then we can tell the centrists that they can get on board. And if they don’t, it’s their fault Republicans win. This street goes both ways.
Yup.
We literally witnessed the insane base change the Republican party.
It’s 100% possible for liberals to force the Democrat party to change.
That’s what the abolitionists thought about the Whigs. They tried for decades in vain to get the Whigs to adopt anti-slavery positions, but the Whigs were far too loyal to business interests and the status quo. In the end it took abolitionists abandoning the Whigs entirely and founding the Republican party.
We’ve witnessed this before. Sometimes parties become so resistant to change that the only way forward is to walk away. Yes, this takes a willingness to reject myopic thinking - to focus on the long term rather than the short term. But this short term thinking, only looking at one election at a time, is what has got us to this crisis.
Right?
There are way too many whiny children on this platform thinking they need a brand new party to vote for instead of doing what’s actually possible and morphing the Democrat party, since much of their policy already matches what these whiny children want.
A new, viable party isn’t happening in this country anytime soon. Probably not in our lifetimes. The answer is forcing the Democrat party to change, which is 100% a thing that can happen.
The policies match on posters but not in practice. All of the policies you want only get brought to vote when it is impossible for it to pass against a Nazi majority and then disappear when opportunity arises.
ANY candidate who has been in Washington for 12 years or more should be VIGOROUSLY primaried…for example Adam Schiff, who has become yet another Pelosi- styled career milquetoast shitlib.
It might be now, because nothing is possible anymore, but before current round of shitsow, amazing amount of smaller bills and propositions were passed, they weren’t flashy ones (and that’s why there were passed, under the radar), but it helped immense amount of people. Everything big, like medicare for all, requires so much more work, it was never possible to do in that short periods of time US government wasn’t overwhelmed by reactionaries.
But that’s all that people can actually achieve, for now.
“It’s sitting on McConnell’s desk!” “Now is not the time.” “But the Parliamentarian…”
And ALWAYS one Democrat vote short. Also, three are dead.
You didn’t actually read what I wrote, didn’t you?
A new party will never be formed by the people complaining cause they tend to just complain and not do actual work. Like you said, forming a party would be much harder than just changing the Democratic Party from within
I agree with all of this but take into account that lots of people here don’t even live in the US (like me). And we get fucked by democrats being shit at winning elections too
Just don’t be like my Canadian friends who do nothing but talk American politics but they can’t name their MP or city councillor
I’m a member of a political party of the country I was born and can vote in, so I’m not like that
Arguing a point about something-or-other, when the other person has a limited idea about the context, is really frustrating.
The democratic party is literally designed to squelch any kind of true progressivism. They are funnel any movements into “voting blue no matter who” and make people like AOC say bullshit things like “Biden is working tirelessly for a ceasefire” which we know if bullshit after Biden aides admitted they did not.
We need to make ourselves heard, aboslutley. And waiting for the elections is a recipie for failure indeed. But you say all these things about registering for democratic primaries or canvasing or “changing the party” without realizing people who have been paying attention have been trying that for decades. The democratic party is designed to maintain the status quo, and be as big of a roadbump as possible to actual workers demands so that they can keep campaigning on being better than the GOP. We are not reforming the democratic party when its whole goal for decades is to trap people trying to demand actual reform.
We need to make demands, absolutely. But we need to throw off the shackles of thinking the prison guards are going to help us escape. We need a new party, not a new Democrat.
Exactly. When you try to actually change the party, you are forced to join at the bottom. And the only people who rise to any power in the party are those that are willing to toe the party line. People saying to work within the party have no idea how politics actually works.
Not happening.
As our nation descends into authoritarianism/fascism you absolutely do not have the luxury of time necessary to wait for a 3rd party to actually start doing something so they can start winning local/state elections so they can start having ANY presence AT ALL in Congress, so they can one day potentially run a presidential candidate that stands a chance.
Like, are you aware that no 3rd party has done really anything at all? NONE in Congress. NONE. They have no presence and it takes DECADES to build up a nation-wide coalition and win a presidency. Even if somehow, in a fantasy scenario, a 3rd party candidate won the presidency, they’d have ZERO support in Congress to accomplish anything.
The answer is 100% putting massive pressure on the Democrat party to change to what we want it to be. We literally witnessed the insane Republican base do exactly that to the Republican party over the last 10-20 years.
Ok fine, do nothing but complain. See how that’s working for you