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this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Yeah, not voting for any of the bad options is a lot worse than voting for the worst option.
I wouldn't say worse, but equally idiotic. Not voting doesn't absolve you from causing the result.
Not voting in 2020 would actually have been the optimal outcome for the country. Objectively, we would have been far, far better off if a large number of Democrats had stayed home in 2020, allowing Trump to get a second term then instead of now. Democrats focused on short-term expediency by forcing Biden through. They won the election in 2020, but at what a terrible price. Instead of a flailing second Trump term with Trump as a lame duck, Democrats gave Trump four more years to regroup, strategize, and come up with Project 2025. Democrats chose the cheap and easy solution in 2020, and every one of us is paying for it now.
Your strategy has some merit, but it fails in that it only considers short-term, rather than long-term thinking. Your victories end up temporary and ultimately Pyrrhic.
Voting for today's lesser of two evils only works if you're a goldfish with no memory of history.
You know, there's no law of nature dictating that Trump had to get a second term. If people had voted democrat in 2024 and 2028, Trump would just not have had a second term.
There was such a law. Not a law of nature, but that's a silly high bar that you're imposing. It was widely predicted that Biden would fail to enact the changes needed to prevent a MAGA return. I remember thinking that would happen the day Biden won the election.
Your post outlines the type of thinking that so damns us. You view every election as a completely independent event, as if they have zero influence on one another. Biden was a milquetoast centrist. He governed that way his entire adult life. It was eminently predictable, and many predicated, that he would fail to stop MAGA. Maybe you didn't want to listen to those predictions, but that's failing on your part.
Your view is that voters are always to blame, and that if the party chooses a bad candidate, well the voters are still to blame. You expect voters to show up and vote D election after election after election, even if the party repeatedly fails to live up to its promises and betrays its voters time and time again.
Sorry. Objectively, the best outcome would have been if Trump won in 2020. A Trump victory in 2020 would have been much, much preferable to one in 2024.
But you view each election as an isolated event. Every election is the most important one in history, and we're never allowed to think strategically long term.
This short term thinking is why Republicans control the government. Republicans can think long term. Liberals like yourself can't.