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* 1/3 of adults voted for Trump
* 1/4 of the entire population voted for Trump (though, that's a bit of weird example since kids can't vote)
There's a big difference between a country that has 50% support of a person and 25% support of a person.
There's a whole lot of people who strongly disdain both parties, on that basis and others. They are not remotely proportionally represented by either government or media, but they do exist and they don't support this administration.
Btw, there are all kinds of electoral solutions to the two party bind which you seem to have entirely accepted. Neither party will ever willingly bring those in.
I’m so tired of this nonsense. If y’all bothered showing up for state and local races, you could even change elections in your state. But that would like, take effort, so I get why you’d rather shitpost about how worthless it all is.
Sorry, that reads, to me, like post hoc justification for nonsense. The only people who talk about voting not mattering are people who don’t vote - not people who skip one or two boxes on the form. Maybe you’re different.
It would also force candidates to address a base rather than trying to just be 'not the other one'.
I try to rephrase it for them: you're not picking a team, you're picking your OPPONENT. And who do you think you're going to have a better chance of even picking the battlegrounds against?
I think it's related to the frustratingly common idea that a person's political involvement begins and ends with voting. We really have to do a lot better at educating people about how political involvement can be an anytime thing, not just every four years. Successful lobbyists (and those who employ them) have long ago figured this out, we need to make sure the common person does, too!
To be clear, voting systems should have explicit options for protest votes; an explicit "I reject all candidates" option. Unfortunately, ours does not, by design; a blank ballot instead means "I endorse all candidates". Pretending otherwise will not change this.
Jeebus, I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but dems the times we live in I guess.
I often am blank on things where I cannot find any information and so cannot have an imformed vote.
If we're ever going to claw ourselves out of this (or any) mess, we need ranked choice or something like it. The giant douche / turd sandwich dichotomy needs to end, for everyone on any side of the political spectrum.
Did you expect something else?
No matter what system of voting we use, unless we go back to only white landowning men can vote or something (doubt we want to do that), you can’t avoid the fact that 160 million+ people vote together for President.
The most viable solution looks less like changing to ranked choice and more like returning more governing power to lower levels of government (state and local) where there is less competition
If you're given the choice between two bad options, you aren't really given the choice. There's massive cross-aisle support for a lot of things (proper healthcare, more support for working families, lower inflation, holding the banks to some kind of standard, reducing corruption, etc.) that we could actually move the needle on if our votes mattered, but because the two parties have us between a rock (whoever we identify as our party) and a hard place (whoever the other guys are) it doesn't really matter who we vote for.
Now, I'm willing to concede that what you're talking about might be a thing, but there's really no way to know until we actually fix what we have and see if that becomes a problem. We've never really tried what we're supposed to have in the modern era.
Frankly, I'd like to see some format of direct democracy rather than representative. Always seemed a little like an obvious grift to me.
So many american leftists just seem to ignore that and it makes things very difficult.
You're right, that the closer you get to that core of federal power the more resistance you come up against, but once there's a powerful enough popular groundswell (that is I suppose, and if and not a when) you can move to mass protests, general strikes, guillotines, etc. This is why it's important to talk about, esp. around those who don't really know about it yet.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
No. Either vote for one of the third party candidates (doesn't much matter which one), or vote write-in for a fictional character or "none of the above" or something.
The states do track undercount votes, But they don't mean anything in terms of the law that decides representation.