United States | News & Politics

The fact that you are not american, and apparently do not understand our political system, means that you probably shouldn't be talking about our elections. There's only around 10 states at any given time that actually decide the outcome of a presidential election, by design, and the rest of the states are pretty well locked in, most especially the majority population centers like new york, california, texas, many southern states, cascadia. It's only realistically medium density states, flooded with suburbs, that are really up for grabs in the EC, which doesn't necessarily directly correlate with who becomes president. Every state, bubbling from local city districts, to state level districts, are also gerrymandered to shit, which further decreases the power of your vote directly.

So, if you live in one of those majority population cities or states, your vote basically might as well just be going straight into the paper shredder. You might as well vote for a third party, which, given 5% of the popular vote, could qualify them for federal funding, you might as well vote for a third party to signal to the big two parties in which direction they should lean, you might as well vote for a third party so said third party can understand what their actual activist base is.

Doubly so when we have further evidence that the marketing of either party doesn't matter so much when they agree on every other issue regarding their actual political orientation. On economics, they're both neoliberals. On immigration, they're both hitting the same line because the only institutional response to the exploitation of latin america and the climate crisis has been to shore up the border militarily. On foreign policy, they are both completely aligned. On social issues, they might seem a little bit different, but I think you'll find that nobody in the democratic party really takes what is mostly used as an aesthetic ideological divergence seriously, or else they would actually be pulling any number of the levers available to substantially change things. Gay marriage might be legal at the federal level, sure, but see what kamala's record is as the DA of san francisco, and it's pretty fucking horrifying, and is obviously something that we know impacts marginalized communities to a greater degree.

Also don't hit me with the "oh she was secretly good as the DA". She was incredibly mid as the DA compared to every other "progressive" DA that san francisco has had, which is an incredibly low bar to still somehow not clear. One side will hit you with "kamala had 2,000 people locked up for marijuana charges", which is true because when you are arrested you go to jail for sometimes months or even years until trial, most especially when prisons are crowded with marijuana charges or graffiti charges, and then the opposition claps back with "well she only sent 45 people to state prison, which is less than the last guy for state prisons", despite the fact we have no information for county jails because they refuse to give us those statistics. That's on top of her deciding to prosecute parents for truancy, which I'm sure can be spun as actually being a good thing rather than a ghoulish curb-stomping of the working class which just needs to buck up and bootstrap themselves under the gentle threat of getting sent to jail, which I'm sure will help kids. I have a lot more then just that, too, and I can hit you with the citations if you actually want to read them. That's just her, also, a lot of this shit will float around about basically every other "progressive" democratic politician except for maybe bernie, AOC and other members of the squad, and maybe some midwestern politicians that happen to get a simple democratic majority.