There’s a lot of “Vote for xyz or zyx might win!” going on already in social media, with more than 5 months before an election.

It’s a sign that people are used to a system so broken that they demand crutches.

Personally, I detest that sort of fearmongering. With so much time left before an election, the candidates can and should be working harder to get the votes. Potential voters shouldn’t be smeared by their supporters for not settling so early.

Every election is a negotiation between candidates and voters.

I didn’t want to write about the crappy choices we have for President of the United States in 2024, but recent conversations on Mastodon just irk me a bit.

To get votes, candidates have to convince voters that they’ll work on issues that are important to the voters. These should not be cults. These should be people with open eyes and realistic expectations, which is as hard to find these days as a technology announcement that doesn’t have ‘AI’ in it.

The Negotiation.

Everyone gets so stuck on votes, but the implicit issue is not the votes but what the votes are for. Votes are for ideals and issues, and we vote for candidates because of ideals and issues – and fear. Fear strips the power away from us. It makes us victims of our choices.

To settle for a candidate 5 months and some weeks before an election when one could be demanding more of them seems like bad negotiation to me. It also seems like bad democracy. Candidates should be encouraged to be better candidates. As it happens, the United States is pretty polarized right now because of Trump, and the supporters of Trump will say it’s because of everyone who disagrees with them. There’s no middle ground when we look back at January 6th and the attack on the Capitol, we see just how divided we are – and how easily manipulated some are. It is something to worry about.

That does not mean we shouldn’t negotiate. I wouldn’t go on record for voting for anyone this early into an election because it’s bad negotiation. We certainly don’t have all that we want. We also can’t get all that we want, but we can certainly negotiate better than, “OK, you have my vote, I’ll hope for the best Mr. Politician making campaign promises.” When you have one candidate farting up a storm in court, the other candidate has every opportunity to do better with 5 months+.

The worst thing for democracy are elections so polarized that both sides vote out of fear. Everyone loses. There are no Trump supporters interested in changing the minds of Biden supporters, and vice versa. The fact that neither group of voters feels that their candidate is good enough is reflected in the fear mongering. It also shows a lack of confidence in their candidate. A candidate should be able to stand on their own two feet and attract votes. Any time you have to market a product so viciously, you have a shitty product.

I’ll say this: there’s no way I’ll vote for Trump. That does not automatically mean that Biden gets my vote. Biden has to earn a vote, just like any other candidate, and while he may be the better candidate in my eyes, that does not yet make him a good candidate.

People who are already saying that they’ll vote for their candidate are doing themselves a disservice in my eyes, which is always the problem when decisions seem so clear: The candidate doesn’t feel uncomfortable, the candidate doesn’t have to work as hard, and who suffers? The people, of course. When the President spoke at Morehouse and people were showing unity with Palestinians (not Hamas, as some like to color it), they were doing their jobs as members of a democracy, signaling to a candidate an issue that they care about enough to protest. The candidate may realize that they should do more, if they’re paying attention. That’s the point. That’s negotiating.

What’s interesting is how campaign funding balances on issues like this. We’re seeing it play out with protests over what Israel is doing in Gazah. The unflinching support of the United States in killing civilians is not popular by any poll. How much is that campaign funding changing that?

The Third Parties.

Third party candidates are often judged based on how the two main political parties do.

“So and so stole votes…” No, to steal something it had to have belonged to someone in the first place. The presumption alone that they belonged to the candidate in the first place is the height of disrespect. Had the candidate that lost spoke to the issues those people voted for, they probably wouldn’t have lost.

Putting that on people who didn’t vote for the candidate effectively dismisses the issues that they feel are important, and it’s condescending. No one asks, “Hey, why didn’t you vote for my candidate?”

The truth is that we do need stronger third parties because the parties we have aren’t too concerned about the voters. They dictate and manipulate issues because they always get to pull out the trump card , “But that other person might win and it will be the end of the world!”. I’ve heard that since… the days of Jimmy Carter, though I imagine I heard it much younger during the Nixon years.

Third parties, in my eyes, demonstrate issues that the other parties aren’t concerned about. Young people should get involved with them or start their own, not because they have a chance of winning a presidential candidacy but because you nurture a seed to grow a tree, and the trees we have are old and rotten. Do I suggest spending a vote on them? It is not for me to suggest that, but you can grow a party without voting for them, by supporting them in other ways and making issues you care about get better visibility. Third parties may not win elections, but they certainly can make issues more visible.

That’s an important function. And should those 3rd parties get votes, then it says that those issues meant something to the people who voted, more so than what the other candidates stood for or against.

Losing votes to a 3rd candidate isn’t the fault of those that voted that way. It’s the fault of the candidate that lost those votes to a 3rd party candidate. Some people try to flip that around and say that voting for a 3rd party candidate is a wasted vote, and to an extent that might be true – but if it were a wasted vote, or a lost vote, it would have no value to the person that takes umbrage with it, and implicitly it dismisses the concerns of a fellow voter without even a fair hearing.

Why? Because the system seems broken? It does seem that way. Yet if we concede that the system is broken and don’t do anything to fix the system, those 3rd parties may be the only path to fixing it since the two major parties don’t seem interested in doing so.

Of course, we can just keep doing what we’ve been doing and expecting a different result. For me, any change will likely be beyond the scope of my lifetime; I’m on the downward slope. Yet there are those younger, coming up, who can make things just a bit better, incrementally, and deserve the opportunity to vote their conscience regardless of how others feel about it.

Their future depends on it.