politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
2016's turnout was 55% of eligible voters. That's not historically high. Clinton underperformed Obama in total votes received.
2020's turnout was historically high- it's tough to say whether that was all anti-Trump energy (in which a ham sandwich with a (D) next to its name could have won, or if it was all pro-Biden energy that no other Democrat could have received (but TBH, I kinda suspect it's more the former than the latter)
Probably not, given that centrists seem to prefer kneecapping progressives to supporting them.
As for things we "can't really know", we do know 100% that Clinton didn't win in 2016, and that resulted in flipping SCOTUS rightward for a generation, the overturn of Roe, it meant that we'd have the pandemic under leadership that just wanted people to pretend it wasn't there and sacrifice themselves for the economy, it was a terrible shit-show and the biggest thing we all got was ballooning debt so the billionaires could get their tax cuts and American foreign policy experienced setbacks from which it may never recover.
So was Biden. So was Obama. So was FDR. So was Kennedy. So was LBJ. They've called every Democrat to the left of Hoover a communist since Woodrow Wilson's administration. This "oh no, we have to nominate people that republicans will accept or they'll call us names" nonsense is quite possibly the worst sort of preemptive-surrender politics imaginable and I imagine it has something to do with why young people don't vote
Counterfactuals. You can't ignore counterfactuals.
The counterfactual to Biden is even less successful progressivism than we got. You yourself agreed with this and it is the most salient point.
You can and should demand more. You can and should advocate for change far beyond this. But my original points stand. By the time we reached the general election, Biden had proven he was the candidate to vote for to cause the most positive change possible. There was not a better way to spend your vote.
That's all well and nice, but it wasn't republicans holding up far more aggressive and progressive legislation. It was Sinema, Manchin, and the other "centrists" who at least are smart enough to see the GOP for the totally evil lunatics they are, even if their politics really isn't much better.
Young people getting out and voting is WHY Biden won. He didn't win in spite of them.
Yes, young people showing up tipped it that way. It worked out better for Biden than it did for Clinton and I'm really glad about that.
But did they show up because Biden earned their vote, or because a ham sandwich vs. Trump would have got their vote?
Certainly in the general he was vastly preferable to Trump, but was he really a better choice in the primary than, say, Sanders or Warren or Buttigieg? I see a lot of confident assertions and untestable claims about that, but I suspect we'd all do well to consider the Democratic primaries as first and foremost a money contest, as secondly a process by which the money people signal to the voters which candidates they will support or tolerate- and in which whoever designates "the candidates that can win" has leverage to get voters to give up on what they might really want in order to get someone who "can win". In other words, are the primaries really a way of getting to know the will of the people, or are they a means of pressuring a critical mass of people to vote a way the donors will accept and then presenting that as the genuine will of the people?
There's a certain begging-of-the-question involved when we use confident claims about who "can win" to influence the way people vote. After all,
I'm not really sure what to say.
To me, the best evidence of a candidate's ability to get the most votes is their ability to get the most votes. And their ability to get the most votes from voters seems to be pretty damn predictive of their ability to get the most votes from members of congress.
I mean, I personally voted for Buttigieg and would've personally preferred Sanders or Warren. But I am also genuinely surprised at how much positive legislation Biden has gotten passed, especially the IRA, and am pretty dubious anyone else could've built that much consensus to do the same. Not to mention that I'm pretty disappointed in Buttigieg's lack of massive change in the DOT so far, as much as I know it is an ultra-conservative and hard to change department..
The rest of your complaint here is just that you don't like the way US politics works. Yeah, join the club. National popular vote and more ranked choice voting is probably the best first step to reform, but even they have serious drawbacks.