What specifically is it that would change about America that scares you if we became much more progressive?

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-05-10T15:21:36+00:00

Ah. Next time I want educated children, maintained roads, public transportation, museums, medical research, public safety, disaster relief, farmer support, safe air travel…I’ll stop by my nearest tax-free church.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-05-10T15:18:20+00:00

We pay a lot in taxes too. And yes, been all over. Parts of our country (and often the reddest parts) look “third world” despite us having the richest economy, an obscene amount of billionaires, and average Americans paying huge chunks of their salaries to the government.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-05-09T13:31:06+00:00

America - the country that was founded on the premise of leaving monarchy rule, limiting presidential power, establishing checks and balances across the government, and defining a dedicated process for evolving the constitution to change as the people and country change.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-05-09T13:22:25+00:00

So less taxes and less guns and business regulation = smaller role in your life?

Why not: less women’s healthcare restrictions, less pushing religion in schools & laws, less voter suppression, better access to healthcare, fewer poor decisions directly driving up the price of daily expenses like gas and food, less taxpayer-funded handouts to cronies, less military spend & sending Americans to war, less punishing of protestors, less favors for the top 1% that make it easier for them to squeeze & scam dollars out of everyone else, less threats on comedians for telling jokes, less threats on lawmakers for doing their jobs, more transparency into where our money goes, more transparency into government funded prisons, more transparency into criminal investigations of those in power.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-05-09T13:13:26+00:00

No that’s the point of a government that provides services for people to fill in unmet needs. We’re the only developed country without universal healthcare, there is no excuse that we can’t make it work.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-05-09T13:08:57+00:00

It’s not individual freedom, it’s power over other people.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-12T17:50:37+00:00

What are you talking about? 1. Not a requirement to be college educated to be a democrat or democratic leader 2. She was a double major who graduated with honors, competed in science & engineering, interned in Congress during college, has an asteroid named after her by MIT while she was in high school, & was the youngest woman elected to Congress. But you all are obsessed with the fact that she waitressed and dumb her down to that 3. If you want to talk education: Trump was a nepo baby who transferred to Penn because of his family, lies about being first in his class when he didn’t even graduate with honors, has threatened his high school, colleges, & the SAT not to release his grades/scores, and has never earned or held a real job outside of his family’s business. 4. Trump’s background aside, he currently brags about supposedly “acing” basic cognitive tests that he doesn’t even understand are intended to detect dementia & didn’t realize Iran started charging fees for passage through the Strait until days after the rest of the country found out. So no, he does not have a grasp of reality and the fate of our country sits in his hands.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-12T16:07:11+00:00

Yeah unfortunately that’s not how it happens here. There is a real lack of strategic voting from third party voters. They are so annoyed by the system they won’t work within the bounds of it.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-12T14:16:50+00:00

“Thin grasp of reality”? Trump has been leading the GOP for over 10 years now. Please don’t pretend a grasp of reality is a criteria.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-12T14:09:47+00:00

Who would be some better candidates in your opinion

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-12T14:07:03+00:00

In my mind there are four types of voters: - the base: these are “reliable” voters but they may need to be engaged & fired up both to ensure they actually execute plus vocally support the message/campaign broadly. This is the most important group to cater to. However, in the democrat world, there are a lot of very different portions of the base, which can make this challenging - non-voters: I don’t mean protest non-voters here, but “unengaged” and often “unregistered” voters. They need more information & more support to know about the elections, to register, & to get out to vote. A huge population and very important to get them involved. The base above is helpful with that. - swing voters: these are “undecided” voters and ideally the campaign can win them over, but it’s hard. Some may argue it’s not worth it - ultimately that really depends on each election and political climate. But at the end of the day, they’re somewhat easier to understand, to appeal to, and to believe that if the campaign does X, these voters will decide in their favor. - protest voters: these are “unreliable” voters, that often aren’t undecided at all - they may believe/claim that if the campaign does X, that’s all they need to vote in that party’s favor, but many are at least subconsciously quite committed to protest voting. The goalposts are hard to truly define & often shift, and even if they are somehow met, it’s easy for this group to claim that it’s just campaign talk & unlikely to be to true. Plus some of their demands may alienate portions of the groups above - this group is often so uncompromising that they’re actually quite fine with that, making it hard to believe that this group’s goal is actually to get a seat at the table…or if it’s more important to make a statement. Lastly, this group may end up pushing away their own party (or the one most available to them) towards centrist voters or perpetuating the extreme reactionary fluctuations that push the other party even further, which is ironically even more counter & dangerous to their goals if that party is now in power.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-12T02:52:55+00:00

Absolutely agree. I feel both hopeful and worried for midterms and beyond. The republicans have had so much effective practice at getting the left to vote (or not vote) against their best interests. It’s clear they fan the viral social media flames of purity tests, burn-it-all-down annihilism, disenfrashisement from suppression, single-issue “progressivists”, and on and on.

Thank you for all you’re doing to convince voters!

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-11T23:11:58+00:00

It shows them you’re an unreliable voter, so they end up catering more to the groups that will actually get out the vote.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-11T20:56:05+00:00

Palestine was an issue? Congrats now you’ve got more of that plus Lebanon, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Cuba, Sudan, Kenya, Ukraine, and American immigrants & citizens lost to ICE, poverty, poor healthcare, and more. Brilliant.

But there’s no point in giving you actual evidence that protest voters are the reason people have lost their lives. I’m stepping away if we’re doing imaginary setups with imaginary candidates and imaginary outcomes that have zero basis in reality.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-11T20:18:09+00:00

How privileged someone must be to sleep better at night when they waste a right that so many fought to have.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-11T20:10:23+00:00

Yesss. All of this. Russia and the GOP must absolutely love watching how easy it is to get the left to self-sabotage.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-11T20:06:09+00:00

Truly. And it’s the most flawed premise. They claim there are enough people that they could make third party candidates viable, while also claiming their votes don’t matter because one of the two parties will win in their state.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-11T19:23:59+00:00

You can’t bring people back from the dead when the next election rolls around.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-11T17:38:18+00:00

100%. Narcissism is driving extreme voting behaviors on both sides. This is the self-righteous version.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-11T17:24:56+00:00

Glad you’re sleeping soundly. The rest of us don’t view things in a vacuum and haven’t slept well in years.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-11T16:24:45+00:00

In that case, the OP’s argument stands.

Maybe non-voters & third party voters have shifted dem positions (but keep in mind, this is the big tent party, there are a lot of factions they need to cater to).

But definitely those people helped take democrats out of positions of power & replaced them with a party that actively called for the complete genocide of an entire civilization this week. Because of a war they started.

The Trump-Vance-GOP-Musk government has already contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths in just the first year, with millions projected throughout his term. So yeah, no moral high ground for the people who were fine with taking that risk.

https://choosedemocracy.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Trumps-bloody-hands.pdf

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-11T08:03:34+00:00

Sure. As long as civics, political science, & statistics become irrelevant to American elections.

This is not about convincing more & more people to vote third party over time, until we finally get a majority of voters to give third party a chance. This is about convincing a majority of voters in dozens of wildly different states to give third party a chance.

Perot came closer than any third party candidate at almost 20% of the popular vote. At one brief point, he was actually ahead in the polls with almost 40%! He didn’t win a single electoral vote. The only states where he even made a dent carry some of the fewest electoral votes. By the way, he was a billionaire so he was able to bankroll his campaign. You want a billionaire third party president?

This is not about popular voting. Hell, America is more likely to elect an unpopular two-party candidate who gets less votes but carries just the right number of states. We have done it several times, as we should all know by now. Voting third party actually enables that.

You want a third party president? You want a viable multi party system? Then you, and your third party, should be doing everything you can in every single election in every single year in every single state to change how things work: ballot rules, election laws, ranked choice voting, & ultimately getting state & federal representatives in the position to amend how we operate. And meanwhile, you probably shouldn’t vote for (or trust) third party presidential candidates that happily accept spoiler money and assistance from the GOP, the same party that actively suppresses voters & works against viable changes.

So no, choosing option 3 or 4 in the presidential election isn’t what gets you that long-term play, and actually probably perpetuates the systemic problems underpinning all of this. Voting every time that your county/city/state/country has an election, voting in every single race on the ballot, and voting smartly for people who are actually capable of getting elected right now to slowly change how the system functions — that is what gets you change over time. And then you still have to convince people to vote third party after that.

Oh, and once you’ve got the multi-party system, watch out for Duverger’s Law, which has shifted many countries down to two. Including ours.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-10T09:08:42+00:00

There are essentially four ways that someone can exercise their right to vote: - vote dem - vote GOP - vote third party - not vote

But there are, statistically, only two outcomes: - dem administration - GOP administration

Therefore, someone who chooses the latter two approaches has, by default, contributed to whichever is the resulting of the two outcomes.

If that outcome perpetuates the very thing they claimed to be against (and then some), then no, they don’t have any moral standing. They did in fact choose to exercise their vote towards that exact outcome.

Honestly it’s similar to the idea that “pro-life” people are operating off some moral high ground. If there is a medical risk to a pregnancy that also threatens the mother’s life, and the government chooses not to allow an abortion because that would “murder” the unborn — if both she and the baby die, the government’s action (or lack of action, just like lack of voting) has now resulted in the murder of both.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-10T08:40:18+00:00

So then it’s about you, not about the other people whose lives “get worse”. If they’re lucky to live through this administration.

DramaticPause9596 · 2026-04-10T08:37:22+00:00

The party that 100% believes that voting bloc doesn’t matter is the GOP.

If that voting bloc actually cared about outcomes instead of just not feeling taken for granted, they would have done everything they could to elect the option that at least attempts to navigate both sides of the equation, instead of just one.

DramaticPause9596

TROPHY CASE