A whole swath of GOP voters appears firmly committed to not voting for Trump in November.
Donald Trump has a problem no matter what happens in New Hampshire on Tuesday night: There’s a whole swath of the Republican electorate and a good chunk of independents who appear firmly committed to not voting for him in November if he becomes the nominee.
It’s an issue that became starkly apparent in polling ahead of the Iowa caucuses, when an NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of voters in that state found that fully 43 percent of Nikki Haley supporters said they would back President Joe Biden over Trump. And it’s a dynamic that has been on vivid display as the campaign shifted this week to New Hampshire.
“I can’t vote for Trump. He’s a crook. He’s too corrupt,” said Scott Simeone, 64, an independent voter from Amherst, who backed Trump in 2016 and 2020. “I voted for him, and I didn’t realize he’s as corrupt as he is.”
Oh good, it’s this argument again. I’ve really never heard a statement that is more damaging to a conversation with an intent to sway votership than this one.
A vote for candidate C is not a vote for candidate B, but for the sake of the argument let’s assume it is. It’s possible to model an election using game theory, and it can be done in a few different ways. First I’m going to try is a 1 dimensional approach from the perspective of candidate A. A vote for candidate A is worth 1 point. A vote for candidate B is worth -1 point. A vote for any other candidate is worth 0 points. This is actually a fairly accurate model of how a winner takes all election system works. I’ll also play it from candidate B’s perspective to illustrate something.
There are 300 votes for candidate A There are 340 votes for candidate B There are 20 votes for candidate C from constituents who claim to be from party A There are 60 votes for candidate C from constituents who claim to be from party b
Candidate A: -40 Candidate B: 40
Interestingly, people who voted for candidate C do not show up in the final results at all and they hurt/helped each candidate equally. The only people whose votes actually had any real bearing on the election in this model were the people who turned out to vote for candidates A and B. I’ll let people draw their own conclusions from this thought experiment.
The real argument to make here however is that Biden is not the lesser of two evils and has in fact done a lot of good for the country in his term, or at least attempted to. The more important thing then voting for Biden is that people show up with an intent to put as many good senators and representatives in office as possible each election until we can get enough people in office to allow them presidential agenda to actually be able to do anything. Also to vote in your local elections for similar reasons.
The only goal for anyone who values what little democracy we have left is that Donald Trump does not get reelected. Period.
The only vote that helps that goal is for Biden.
There’s nothing to debate here, unless you’re an accelerationist. And in that case I’d just like to remind folks that revolution is brutal, not fun and exciting.
A secondary goal is to convince people who are on the fence about voting for trump to vote for literally anyone else.
Agreed. We can go back to a more nuanced discussion of voters choice and freedom of speech when we’re not actively barreling towards autocracy. If you don’t draw the line somewhere, you’re simply saying you don’t see a need for one.
Sorry for the double post, but I forgot to mention that the above statement is a much better argument AND is mathematically provable using the same method I used above (any vote not for candidate A becomes a -1 or a -2.)
It’s a much better statement to use when trying to sway voter opinion.
Also definitely the more important point I’m making above is that Biden is NOT the lesser of two evils. The moves he’s made have not been the biggest or the best but a lot of that’s in part because he needs a solid base of good Congress people working alongside him to accomplish any real progress on any of the initiatives he’s been pushing. The President does not make laws, though having the correct President in office does lower the bar at getting good laws passed. If a good law never crosses his desk because we have a bunch of regressives in office like we currently do, not a lot it’s going to happen.
In the US, only one of the two major parties will get elected as president. That means that either Trump or Biden will be elected barring one of them being incapacitated in some way before the election.
So you’re saying that between Biden and Trump, Biden is as evil, or more evil than Trump?
Holy crap no. I’m saying Biden has been actively good (to my surprise, but I digress) and to not want to vote for him “being the lesser of two evils” shows a disconnect from reality on par with the current state of the Republican everything.
A huge chunk of that ‘good’ never coming to light is a combination of media just never talking about it, and conservatives and regressives in Congress actively blocking his efforts (the most well known instance of this being the student loan debt forgiveness)
This thread is about people who refuse to vote for biden because he is the lesser of two scrolls, my original point was that giving people retoric like “a vote not for Biden is a vote for Trump” is a bad faith argument, and using more grounded statements like “voting for Biden is the best way to ensure we don’t get another term of Trump.”
Meanwhile it’s also with pointing out to the third party people who refuse to vote for Biden as the lesser of two evils that Biden is in fact not even an evil, and that he actively tried to do a lot of good. If we can stack congress with same congress people who have better things to given than people’s genitals age bedrooms and some decent bills make their way across his desk, he’s probably not going to veto them.
Some of the people using this argument are probably Bernie bros who are butthurt over Bernie stepping down in 2020 and the DNCs antics back in 2016. It’s probably worth mentioning that right now Bernie can do a lot more good in the Senate than he can in the oval office, since we have a president who wouldn’t block his policies. If Trump or Haley get into office that’s not going to be the case and refusing to vote for Biden over that hurts their favorite politicians agenda a lot.