Discussion
If you are too disgusted with your democrat option to vote for them (I assume no one is following me who would vote for republicans?) Anyway I think it's helpful to still vote and write-in something or check out the local referendums and just vote on those.
Your null vote weakens republican and democratic mandates. Just telling people you feel that way is ... less impactful.
It also increases overall turnout numbers which mostly freaks out all of the right people.
@futurebird There's no real easy or even proper answer to this. Of course the primaries are our best hope of actually achieving anything, but yeah, that still comes with serious limitations and caveats. But trying to "punish" Democrats who don't measure up doesn't really work because they don't really think it through enough to think "gee, I must have angered all those on the left." They just think "I need to go more 'centrist' next term" because Republicans vote no matter what.
Politicians only care about reliable regular voters.
@futurebird I don't think they even care about them. It seems to me though that all Democrats who fail to measure up think is just that if they aren't getting the votes then they need to try to appeal more to the other side (aka become more "centrist" or, actually Republican.)
But I don't think most even look at it that much. They don't know people are punishing them. A throw-away vote doesn't actually sent a message. It's a lack of message people *hope* will be just understood
I think voting for democrats is the most effective option in nearly all cases, but I don't like cheerleading for them much.
The constant vote vote vote from people who never show up or help with anything else can be annoying.
People will tell you a null vote is wasted. I don't think so. It's alarming.
IDK maybe don't do it in a swing state, but that's up to you.
Just show you can and will show up.
re: For Americans
I do think it's impactful to vote in local matters.
I'm finding it really hard to find good analysis of local issues and really hard to find any information about local candidates.
@futurebird I wish the US had mandatory voting like the Aussies do. Not that high turnout alone will fix everything, but it would provide a little more weight to the voters and would likely shift candidates away from some of the more awful policies.
My local Dem candidate lists her priorities as re-establishing the status quo (hold ICE accountable, stop the tariff madness, rollback Medicare cuts), with only two new ideas: an inflation-indexed federal minimum wage, and forbidding stock trading by members of Congress. Sure - that's fine, but it's a long way from Medicare for All or a national wealth tax on billionaires.
She has no policy statements on Iran, Israel, Palestine, or Ukraine, which I'm interpreting as "STFU about foreign policy, you proles" since she was a career foreign service officer. I'm sure she has opinions, but she evidently doesn't feel the need to share them with the public.
She will lose to incumbent Mike Baumgartner - who blows goats, writes pro-AI and pro-data center legislation for Trump, and takes a bunch of AIPAC and venture cap investor money.
A half dozen elections on my ballot were GOP hacks running unopposed.
I hate contemporary US politics.
You see this is why I won't say "vote blue no matter who" but I will say "vote no matter what and never for a republican"
If many people who feel disaffected and ignored were casting votes and if no one was getting those vote ... the politicians would need to at least pretend to pay attention to those people instead of "soccer moms" and well off older people and hardly anyone else.
@futurebird My go-to in that situation would be to show up and cast a blank ballot, or otherwise leave that particular race blank entirely. That's even clearer than voting for a nonsense candidate or not showing up: someone who went through the time and effort to show up and still "didn't vote". I kinda wish we had a "none of the above" option to make it even more explicit, but that wouldn't allow them to come up with 'excuses' for why there are more ballots cast than votes counted for the candidates...
It's important to find at least one thing you *can* vote for since I worry that totally blank ballots may not be counted at all. I don't think that's supposed to happen, but if there are, for example, referendum votes, then the rest have to be added to the totals.
I am a little paranoid though.
@futurebird I forgot they might have "protections" against that, and just checked. Apparently some machines will reject entirely blank ones, but you can just mark a write-in spot for a single race to count the whole thing.
(And apparently some machines have a bug where they enforce that completely-blank check on page 2 even though they shouldn't...)
@futurebird vote like whole entire oppressed groups’ lives and livelihoods and dignity depend on defeating fascists now before it gets worse.
@futurebird Honestly I don't agree. They don't count null votes as being votes that are against them but also against their opponent. I think people give the system far too much credit for somehow voicing something. If you choose to throw away your vote, they don't even know that you did it. You're not punishing Democrats who aren't good enough, you're just helping let those who have zero standards (which generally means Republicans) win by default.