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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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Politics
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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!"