Had Donald Trump been the U.S. president hosting this week’s APEC meetings, I have no doubt that the headline from the event would have been unchanged. It would have been: “He’s a dictator.”
The only difference is it would be Xi Jinping who was saying it to describe Trump.
Other than that, though, a Trump-hosted APEC meeting would likely have been unrecognizably different from the successful and productive forum hosted by President Joe Biden.
You don’t know my plan or my motivations.
Who are you voting for?
Sure as shit not a third party candidate.
So someone who does not support ranked choice voting. Great strategy lol.
You think throwing away your vote on a candidate who claims to support electoral reform but has no chance of winning will have any meaningful impact?
They won’t have a chance to win if you don’t vote for them.
They might if they joined a real party instead of a troupe cosplaying as politicians.
You want change, you join one of the real parties and fight to become a candidate in that party and gain enough influence to shift party policy.
If everyone that did the third party nonsense did that, there might be enough support in a real party to start changing things and maybe eventually make third parties viable instead of just a performative game.
That didn’t work, Bernie is an independent that tried running as a Dem, but undemocratic super delegates and a biased media stopped him.
AOC and the justice democrats also failed and do whatever Nancy Pelosi says
And people have been playing with third party nonsense since the beginning of the country pretty much. It doesn’t work because of our voting system, it’s never worked. In the history of the country, no third party candidate for president has ever come close to getting enough electoral votes to win. The highest ever was Theodore Roosevelt, and he got 88 out of a necessary 256 to win, barely a third of the needed number.
More notably, the most successful third parties overall, with Roosevelt’s Progressive (Bull Moose) party excluded, have largely been regressive, such as the American Independents with George Wallace, the Dixiecrats with Strom Thurmond, th Constitutional Union AND Lecompton Democratic in the 1860 election… Progressive third parties do not have a good track record, probably because it’s a lot easier to get people to vote for a lost cause if they’re doing it out of hate than it is if they actually want to improve things.
Bernie and AOC and others are being a fuckton more successful than third party candidates have been for the entire history of the nation.
They definitely need more support to overcome the entrenched forces against them, though. That’s why they need people like us to support progressive candidates in primaries, and we need more people like them willing to do the hard work of getting into the democratic party and changing it from within.
Now, in a small election in a district where another party has a realistic chance, great! Vote that way. But most places aren’t like that.
And don’t forget voting third party when they have no chance can cause great harm. I would have thought the election of 2000 would’ve been enough to sear that into all our minds forever.