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Loving USA Culture
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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I was disappointed that you guys didn't just hold your nose and vote for Hillary (I know she won the pop vote).
Honestly Obama did wonders to repair your reputation; he was a great statesman. Hillary was a massive step down, but electing Trump....wow what an own goal.
Between BREXIT and Trump, the world got worse pretty quickly.
I am really hoping you get your act together and elect Harris, Trump is worse now than he was in 16 and 20. If he gets elected, it will further embolden the far right, but not just in the USA, the rise of fascism in Germany is not something the world needs again.
Eh, Hillary sucked, so I voted third party. I ended up voting for Biden in the next election in the extremely unlikely off-chance that he'd lose my state (I'm in a red state, but he completely lost the primary here, so there was a chance), but he ended up winning by a wide margin anyway. Even if every third party vote went to Clinton in my state, Trump still would've won by a wide margin.
The thing about Trump is that even Republicans didn't think he could win, so nobody took him seriously, and all of that negative attention seemed to help him for some weird reason (seemed like an underdog).
Idk, Harris also sucks, and IMO she's worse than Biden. I don't like the term, but she absolutely seems like a "diversity hire" for Biden to improve his appeal to black and female voters, and now that she's the presidential candidate, she's demonstrating that she lacks substance. She's basically parroting Biden's policies, but watered down and with a worse sales pitch. The main things she has going for her are:
I'm going to vote third party again this year because Trump is going to win my state with 20% or more margin regardless (he has that R next to his name), but I do kind of hope that she wins. Not because I think she'll be a good president (I think she'll totally suck), but because I think she'll be a letdown instead of an active force for evil. I hope Trump losing will put him out of the spotlight for good, and that the GOP will reform itself into something reasonable.
The thing is, I think the majority of the US population dislikes the options in this election and the last two elections, but our electoral process is so messed up that we end up with really bad options. Harris did terrible in 2020 and was last on my list of preferences in the primaries, yet now she's the nominee.
Your voting system is a binary choice. It sucks, but it is what it is. Even in our elections, often it is choosing the least bad from a bunch of arseholes. From are outside perspective, I honestly can't see a single thing trump an objectively better choice on, for the non-millionaire/billionaire class.
It is either a vote for one or a vote for the other, voting third party or not voting is exactly the same as voting for the winner.
Our voting system is a bit crap; STV is better than MMP, which is what we have. But you guys have made FPTP worse with the inclusion of the electorial college. Maybe it made sense a long time in the past...
That's just not true. Due to how the Electoral College works, unless you live in one of the swing states (usually about 8 states), your vote literally will not impact the outcome of the election, so the best way you can use it is to vote for a third party to inform your elected officials of your voting preferences. If a third party is getting a lot of support, they'll change their policies a bit to cater to those voters. If you do live in a swing state, then yeah, pick the lesser of two evils.
I absolutely think the Electoral College has its place, but we need to be able to split votes. My state (Utah) is about 60% Republican, 35% Democrat, but it goes 100% to Republicans every time. We have 6 electoral college votes, so theoretically 3-4 should go to Republicans, 2-3 should go to Democrats, and one could go to a popular third party or flip between the two major party candidates. But no, all 6 go to the Republican candidate, even if they are unpopular (e.g. Trump got all 6 with only 45% of the vote in Utah in 2016). Some states allow splitting votes, but most don't, so it ends up sucking way more than it should.
The benefit of an Electoral College is that it skews power from the high-population states toward the lower-population states, which I think has value (i.e. so we don't screw over farmers too much). However, the all-or-nothing approach just leads to lower voter turnout (why vote if your vote won't matter anyway?).
I think we should move toward proportional representation, both in the Electoral College and our state representatives. It's absolutely silly that we can just gerrymander our way to a massive majority whenever a state has a simple majority (e.g. all four reps in Utah are Republican, despite having >1/4 of the population voting Democrat). I think we can do that w/o a Constitutional amendment, but neither party seems to want that because they like having clear majorities in most states.