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Mamdani Holds Huge Lead in NYC Mayor's Race, But Top Democrats Still Won't Back Him
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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I know some centrist Democrats, and I've literally never heard them say this for any reason. I've only ever heard it said on Lemmy by people who are applying it sarcastically.
I heard it on the radio over 15 years ago. Haven't heard it since but then I've been pretty hostile towards and talk of Democrats since the Obama era and all the copium they've tried to force down my throat.
https://nitter.net/hakeemjeffries/status/1236682402052935680#m
You'll have to pardon me if I don't care what Hakeem Jeffries tweeted one time 5 years ago.
Man, I'd be thrilled if everyone was so tepid about these top Democrats instead of insisting on their continued occupation of public office being the only thing standing between us and fascism...
Yeah, you gotta find someone who gives a fuck about Hakeem Jeffries lol. That is not me, see if you can find them and talk some sense into them. For example from time to time I post an article complaining bitterly about some awful thing he has done to fuck up democracy in this country, as a random example.
It was a never a particularly common slogan in everyday discussions, but it was something that was fairly common during the 2020 primaries, notably Pete Buttigieg saying it during his concession speech in the New Hampshire primary, saying he heard it from organizers and canvassers.
Even if the exact wording isn’t exactly common by this point, outside of people mocking it, the sentiment behind it has been a consistent backdrop. That whoever the Democratic candidate, there is an obligation for supporters of left wing and progressive candidates to support, in turn, a centrists candidate who wins the primary.
So the question here is, if the left wing and progressives are obligated to support a centrist candidate when they win the primary, how come it’s okay for a centrist to loose the primary and not only not throw their support behind the winner, but to go out and run as an independent?
You know what else has been a consistent backdrop? The pretense that "Trump is going to literally kill motherfuckers on a pretty massive scale, so we need to vote for a dead fish, if that is the alternative in the general election" is some kind of smarmy DNC plot or a trick or "obligation." No, it was the reality, and y'all (the voters) fucked it up, and here we are.
Better than that would be some kind of election reform so that progressive voters wouldn't have to support some centrist dickhead who won the primary or else get The Joker as mayor, or whatever, but I have noticed that the consistent drumbeat of "Don't vote for Democrats! It's a trick!" on Lemmy is far louder than any voice of reform along those lines. Wonder why.
Pretty sure I'm in 100% agreement with you on this side of it, since I posted this article and all. I talked elsewhere in the comments about some of the reasons why I think it is so.
please dear god can we blame the metaphorical fish for committing suicide, please, this was a decision they consciously made. I'm so tired of infighting
Voters will never vote for a dead fish in large enough numbers to actually win elections. That is how voting works in the real world.
I would advise against conspiratorializing, particularly when this such a relatively small and obscure platform, not the kind of thing that an institutional actor would target with an influence or astroturfing campaign.
As to why people don’t tend to advocate so much about electoral form? (Personally I would love to see multi member districts with single transferable votes). Simply because the same establishment centrists politicians who are currently rallying against mamdani, would torpedo it and claim it was impossible or that it would require constitutional amendment, despite that being categorically untrue.
Most people would love to see some kind of electoral reform and already tacitly support it, but realize that the real obstacle to it is not a lack of public interest, but the current party leadership. Which will stay in power so long as the tactic of “you have to vote for us because the other side is worse”x
Getting corporate backed moderate centrists out of party leadership is a prerequisite for electoral reform. And the only way to get the middlemen of the party to oust them is to make it clear that they will lose elections if they keep towing the moderate centrist line, thus a narrative must exist that people are willing to not vote for them if their only real platform is “we’re not as bad”.
So voting for Cornel West for president was something we heard all the fucking time this past election because, unlike RCV which was on the ballot in half a dozen states, it was totally possible.
Got it.
Absolutely agree.
There's quite a bit of history of this, from George McGovern to Al Gore to Kamala Harris. Has it worked yet? How much longer do you think we should give it?
Edit: Actually, maybe that last part is incomplete. I do think that unfucking the centrism of the Democrats in general is an urgent priority, and stuff like "uncommitted" does have a strong potential to knock some sense into them. The thing about that though is that it is visible and organized. Mostly what I am criticizing here is this whole strategy of just not voting, and hoping that that alone and nothing else will eventually motivate these corrupted people to suddenly abandon their campaign donors and embrace the actual left, all of a sudden, and it'll happen in time so that no horrifying damage happens in the meantime while Trump is in office. The whole political machine of American politics has been wildly out of step with the actual American people since at least 1992 or so, and I see no reason that people being less involved in politics will make that any better.
I think it takes a lot more than voting alone, or not voting alone. But mostly what people on Lemmy seem to advocate, as far as I can tell, is just staying home and doing nothing, to "teach the Democrats a lesson" or because they haven't gotten good enough on their own yet, or something, thinking that eventually a better politics will fall from the sky and we'll be able to vote for it. I don't think things work that way.
can you point to an actual concrete example of someone advocating that strategy? because this has strong "making up a guy to be mad at" vibes.
(hard mode: someone advocating that strategy who has any amount of political clout or influence. like, Twitter/Bluesky followers, YouTube subscribers, whatever. just something more than "a random comment I read once, somewhere")
Here's a dbzer0 admin being super condescending about how important it is not to vote, and saying that voting will "legitimize" a whole bunch of stuff they don't want, and anyway there's no particular difference between Kamala Harris and Trump, so why bother? After all, he's doing what really matters for societal change in the US: Making and running FOSS. You can expand out the whole conversation and read it, the dude is out of his goddamned mind on this topic and for some reason absolutely convinced that everyone needs to receive his wisdom. It honestly reminds me of talking to a teenager, or a MAGA person about vaccines, or something.
Here's a huge thread with a bunch of people weighing in, on the topic of whether or not "electoralism" should be permitted on a political post in an anarchism forum. Pretty much all the Lemmy mods and admins involved opined that it should not.
So yes, it's common on Lemmy to see people advocate for not voting and that being the extent of your involvement with the official political process. And, they sometimes go further into apparently claiming that that should be the extent of your entire political involvement, or that people should be banned for saying otherwise. We've been talking in this thread about "protest voters," so presumably the concept is also known within the real world, but I was mainly talking about people giving their opinions on Lemmy, and on Lemmy it is very common.
OK...sort of a glaring problem - the source you're citing doesn't actually back up the claim you made.
you said, emphasis added:
and then, the top comment in the thread you linked:
every time I've seen a "don't vote" argument put forward seriously - no one actually says what you're claiming of "don't vote, and don't do anything else".
voting happens one day out of the year, and not even every year. even if you count primaries and one-off special elections you're still only looking at a handful of days (here in WA they have a very stupid fondness for having both a February special election and an April special election, usually for ballot initiatives they want low turnout for)
so the actual non-strawman argument goes, that the impact of voting once every 2-4 years is minuscule, compared to the impact it's possible to have on the other 364 days of the year, by getting engaged in things outside electoral politics, with mutual aid being the most well-known example.
but anyway, that user gets pressed for examples of what they actually do, and they say they do FOSS stuff. and you're assuming that's all they do. which, maybe it is. but Lemmy posts are not depositions - that user isn't sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. besides FOSS shit, maybe they crochet socks for homeless people. maybe they sabotage oil pipelines. maybe they crochet socks for oil pipeline saboteurs.
I have some friends who are anarchists, or on the anarchist spectrum. every single one of them has very good opsec. there is a strong cultural norm of "don't brag about shit online".
I've done shit in the past that I will never post details about online. or, maybe I haven't, maybe I'm just saying that hypothetically to prove a point. (if a lawyer or fed is reading this, I absolutely have not, I am 100% a couch potato and my political beliefs never spill out into the real world, I have never taken any overt acts in furtherance of anything that may or may not have been a criminal act in that jurisdiction at that time)
those opsec-minded friends would probably chide me even for posting the joking paragraph above. people have gone to jail because they got goaded into forum arguments that started with "you're just a keyboard warrior, you don't do anything in the real world" and then they bragged about circumstantial details that seemed anonymized enough that it'd be safe to post them online.
so if you see someone online saying "I don't vote", and they don't mention anything else they do that's politically involved...don't assume that means they don't do anything. maybe they just have good opsec.
but for the sake of argument, let's say that user you linked to truly doesn't vote, and doesn't do anything political other than running some Lemmy servers. so what?
like, yeah, it'd be good if they voted, and it'd be good if they joined their local Food Not Bombs chapter or whatever. but you going on Lemmy and trying to scold them into voting is never gonna persuade them.
in general, the thing I wish more centrist Democrats learned was scolding doesn't work...you can try to scold someone into voting, but you can never scold someone into being excited about voting. excitement means they tell their friends, they put up yard signs and bumper stickers, they volunteer for the campaign, they stand in line to vote even if it takes 8 hours because of voter suppression, etc.
I'm not familiar with that corner of Lemmy....but it looks like you went into a sublemmy that is explicitly for anarchists to talk with other anarchists, tried to pick a argument with them, got banned, and then made a post on a different sublemmy that is exclusively for "I want to complain about getting banned from a sublemmy"
and IDK man...honestly it seems like you're salty about getting banned and are holding a collective grudge against every anarchist on Lemmy?
so as i've said, I don't think the "that being the extent of your involvement" part holds up...but also, remember that Lemmy is a tiny slice of the internet, and the two examples you linked to are from anarchism forums on Lemmy, which are going to be a tiny slice of a tiny slice. that first thread you linked has 24 upvotes and 12 downvotes, showing that it's just an incredibly small niche, but also that it's somewhat controversial even among Lemmy anarchists.
usually, when we talk about protest votes, the concern is there being so many protest votes that it swings the election. and like...anarchists on Lemmy are simply never going to be numerous enough to matter.
Yes, and then someone quizzed him for more details, and it turns out that that meant "setting up a mutual aid sublemmy, running an anarchist Lemmy instance, helping my fellow humans create AI art through a shared network." Nothing that was going to do a fucking thing to prevent the horror that's happening in Gaza, CECOT, nothing for working people, he just runs a fucking web site and claims credit for that as his political contribution.
(Edit: I really cannot overstate how disgusted I am with this point of view. You know what some of the politicians were doing while he was running his FOSS? They went down to El Salvador and met with Garcia, talked with lawyers, put themselves at some personal risk to fight for someone who needed it, and now everyone's out of CECOT because they took some fucking direct action. It's not an either or. You can like democracy and direct action both. Fuck man. FOSS is great. Running Lemmy instances is great. But don't fucking confuse that with what is going to get us out of this horror and into a better state.)
I run some web sites too, some are even oriented towards helping people get access to information because I do agree with him that that stuff is important. I would never dream of claiming credit for those things as super-superior things that are producing some kind of societal good, and talk down to someone who is claiming some other way of influencing the world and telling them not to do the things they're doing, because my way is better. That's why I say he sounds like a teenager. The whole thing is fucking insane.
Oh, pardon me, Corporal. I didn't realize he was doing all kinds of vital political activism and just couldn't talk about it, for reasons of mission security.
It would have been perfectly fine for him to say, "I don't really want to talk about my IRL activities, but yes, I do work hard at making a difference in ways that I think are a lot more important than periodically voting." If he'd said that, I wouldn't have needed to bring up this one as an example. It was specifically the fact that he was real aggressive about not voting being virtuous, while holding up his own more-or-less-nothing level of activism as what he needed to get credit for instead, that made me bring it up.
And a whole bunch of people including several anarchists went "what the fuck, yeah that's messed up, it is very un-anarchist to start to police what people can and can't say because a lot of people are issuing wrongthink and we need to correct that." I was far from the only person that got banned.
Also, the person who banned me was doing heavy electoral promotion of one side of the political election. I talk about it in one of those comments (maybe search for "profile" to find it). They were actually doing what you are claiming here that I was doing.
Anyway, the main point was, you asked me for examples. Here are my examples. If you don't like them, then okay.
uhhh...so like one line of my previous reply was about how it seemed like you were salty about a random Lemmy moderator banning you almost a year ago.
but holy shit
if Uma Thurman's "the Bride" character from Kill Bill were real, she'd tell you that holding on to grudges like this isn't healthy
yeah uhh thanks, the next time I ask someone for an example like this I'll make sure to clarify up-front that I'm looking for examples that don't center around "I have a blood feud with them because of an internet forum moderation dispute but also I dislike their politics"
"Not these examples! These don't count! I want some other examples!"
It's not so much a quote, as it is a voting strategy that is promoted among DNC insiders, to encourage progressives to vote for the "lesser evil", every time.
And yeah, if you're talking to progressives, they will almost always refer to it sarcastically, since it means always voting for a candidate that doesn't actually represent their views, simply because the alternative is objectively worse.
For people on the actual left, it represents a form of socio-political extortion.
Ctrl-F "dead fish" if you want my response to this line of argument
And unfortunately, your response literally embodies the nature of this imposed "obligation" to vote for the dead fish. It's basically a form of political peer-pressure, intended to shame people into supporting a candidate that does not represent them, simply because "the reality" is, the other guy is worse. You're actively engaging in it, right now. I get that there is also some nuance to your viewpoint...but the underlying message is that whoever didn't vote for the dead fish, will be considered responsible for whatever comes next.
Except it only ever goes one way when it comes to centrists. They will gladly use this leverage against progressives when it's their candidate running against a Republican...but will refuse to follow the same strategy when it's a leftist. They will either run a spoiler campaign against them like Cuomo is doing, or straight up throw their support behind the Republican, in order to see the progressive lose.
And then they complain when leftists refuse to participate next time. It's a disingenuous argument.
If you want someone to blame for why Democrats are hemorrhaging support right now...blame the Democrats who are currently refusing to respect the will of their own voters in New York. They are determined to show progressives that they are not welcome in the Democratic party...so why would progressives continue to vote for them?
To borrow your analogy...it isn't the parents fault that they're refusing to give their kids vaccines, once they learn that the vaccines being offered are all laced with syphilis. Maybe the people in charge should be offering something that works, instead of a different disease.
The lesser of two evils, is still evil. People want a cure. Not a milder disease.
Vaccines are literally a milder disease that helps to avoid a worse disease in the future.
Not voting hasn't encouraged Dems to improve their approach in decades, not sure why you think it would help now.
It's not about "encouraging Dems to improve". They won't. It's about giving up on a broken system. Why would you keep doing something over and over again, knowing that it isn't working? Or, knowing that it's working against you? It's insane to expect constant support from people that you consistently reject.
Some people will never give up trying. Other people aren't going to bother after enough failed attempts. That number is only going to keep getting worse as time goes on, and nothing changes.
And the vaccine analogy is probably better if you think about it like this...some people will get the real vaccine, while most people will get a placebo that does nothing to help them, and others still will get a poison shot that makes them sick. You can never tell what you're going to get, until after you take it.
The Democratic party is rotten. It is mostly ineffective and occasionally toxic. The fact that there are a few good people in there, trying to make things better for the rest of us, doesn't matter. Those people will never have enough votes to overrule the ones that either aren't willing to help, or are actively working against us. And even when someone seems to be on your side, as soon as they get elected, they turn out to be no better than the average Republican. (Looking at folks like John Fetterman)
it had its heyday, at least in my experience, during the 2020 Democratic primary, when the idea was that you'd vote for whichever Democrat was nominated, regardless of who you had supported in the primary.
I've heard it used since then, but usually in the context of state/local elections other than the President. in 2024 "no matter who" didn't make sense because there was no primary and it was obvious who the Democratic nominee would be (except when it wasn't, but that didn't involve an open primary with a clown car of candidates like 2020 had)
It happened a lot when Biden was the nominee, and again for Harris too. It's probably not the kind of thing you'd hear from regular people though—most political sayings aren't, because real people in real life touching grass together tend to be more normal than that. It's more common on social media and the like, and can probably be traced back to political campaigns, honestly. Still important to push back against, because even if people don't say it, that doesn't mean they won't believe it.
What do you mean by "it happened", if it wasn't the kind of thing you would hear from people? What you said about not really hearing it was kind of my point.
I mean I am sure there was some tone-deaf shit coming out of the DNC which included it at one point and introduced it to the lexicon, boomer consultants really love the shit out of little smarmy rhymes like that. I'm just saying that if I look at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kamala+harris+vote+blue+no+matter+who&ia=web for example, I see the top results being:
And so on. It sounds from that totally scientific survey that most of the visible usage is not by people who are saying it, but by other people who disagree with the idea, who are introducing the smarmy phrasing as a way of characterizing people who are planning to vote for a Democrat.
Like I said, social media. "It happened" in the kind of environment where people tend to get kinda deranged about politics.
For sure, most references to the phrase these days will get you leftists complaining about it, justifiably and otherwise. I checked and got the same results. But it was still a thing. I can't tell you how much because I don't have the time or energy to investigate that, but it wasn't just leftists being sarcastic. It was real.