I have now read enough of your essays to know that when you walk through a door, you are going to be the smartest guy in the room. Your essays are always the first ones I read. Thank you.
I could kiss you for writing this article, Professor! FINALLY, somebody is Gibbs slapping the whiny toddlers who threaten to take their ball and go home if they don't get their way. THANK YOU! All the voters who refused to cast a ballot for Kamala in 2024 because they were mad at BIDEN's handling of Gaza got an administration that's drawing up plans to bulldoze Gaza and turn it into a Javanka-style luxury beach-front property.
But the one thing that always frosts me about these types is how they overlook their civic responsibility as American citizens. YES, candidates need to earn your vote, but once the primary is over and the nominee is chosen, your job is to uphold your end of the civic contract and VOTE. People have DIED to secure that right for you. People have campaigned for generations to change the constitution to enshrine your right to vote. And, NO, NONE of them ever got to vote for a perfect candidate. Not ever. So this whiny crap of making the perfect the enemy of the good has gotten us two terms of the worst person ever to darken the door of our White House.
Thanks for putting into words what many of us have felt for a long time!
Whoop-de-do, Prof. You said this so well.! All those people that wanted change so stayed away from the H. Clinton campaign and then the Harris campaign got change all right: Trump, Project 25 and the Roberts Court!! Blows my mind when I think about it. I do remember one young lady in voting line: I won't vote anybody but Bernie. (I guess she wrote him in)
Yep, I like: Know the Window. Use it when open. (got it!); When it closes because the nominees are on the ballot, vote for the Democrat. Just darn well vote for the Democrat--- then organize, deliver and demand of the candidate. Do not slink off to some third party fantasy.
Thanks Prof. And probably you'll need to keep after us--hopefully not all of us. Wandering off into fantasy land happens. 😼👍🙏❤️🕊️
Everyone furious about Trump is not wrong to be furious.
The question worth sitting with after: does the way that we direct the outrage... shrink the movement that elected him... or did it hand it new recruits?
I'm a liberal, and I ran the actual numbers on this from inside the argument, not against it:
A thought on why Congress is sour on raising the minimum wage: I heard George H W Bush say that if you keep people poor and hungry, they don't have the strength to fight you. At a town hall in Clinton, IA when he was running for prez. (Tells you how old I am!) The mega super wealthy can afford to be taxed on 50% of their owned wealth and not suffer a whit.
The mass transfer of U.S. wealth to the upper income brackets that began under Reagan overlooks the fact that the U.S. was most prosperous in the post-WWII decades when the top income brackets was 90%. And the rich were still rich and did quite well for themselves!
TL;DR - Vote for the person with the D next to their name. Anything else, third party vote, staying home, etc. is a vote for Trump, Project 2025 and Agenda 47.
This right here ⬆️. A non-vote [either by failing to vote, or throwing your vote away on a non-viable third party or write-in] has the same effect as voting for the other side.
Everything here is correct on the mechanics... and it's also a pretty devastating description of what a two-party system forces good voters to do. In a system with real primary alternatives or ranked-choice voting, "earn my vote" wouldn't be a fallacy that needs a 2,000-word explainer to correct... it would just be true, continuously, because more than one viable choice would always be on the table. The coalition-leverage strategy described here is smart. It's also a workaround for a structural problem, not a substitute for fixing it.
Political parties are coalitions. What that means is that you never get everything that you want, and if you are on the edges of the party, you can't expect to win every argument. But it still makes sense to support the coalition which most closely matches your values.
In fact, in a democracy, you never get everything you want, which is supposed to be a feature, not a bug.
This naturally seems to lead people to the idea of abandoning the "two party system" in exchange for multiple parties.
A bunch of new minority parties won't solve anything. There already are such parties and they do nothing.
If you always have to agree 100% with a candidate on the issues to feel comfortable voting, you will still require that candidate to enter into a coalition to get anything at all done. So at the end of the day, new minority parties aren't a solution to the requirement that parties need to form coalitions. Those can either happen within the Democratic Party, or between a group of minority parties.
The problem is people seeming to require purity tests, and then when people don't get their way (which you can't by default) trying to erase the differences in the two parties, which just discourages voting. Somehow they think this "my way or the highway" approach will just make everyone give in to what they want.
It won't work.
In fact, if you like say 10%, or even 5% of elected Democrats, wouldn't you want the coalition those people are part of to win? If you elect people who check all of your boxes, but never form or join a working coalition with political power, they will be reduced to giving inspiring speeches without ever doing anything meaningful.
If we say we are "pro-democracy", we'd better grow up and understand what that actually means.
My theory in all of this is: Do the best we can vetting primary candidates, vote for the one that most aligns with the broad public priorities, hopefully one without fatal flaws, then in the general election it's vote blue like our lives depend on it because it probably does....
Professor, I have been spreading this exact message like jam on toast for years now. The people who hold on to purity, like Linus and his security blanket, make me crazy. Voting is a comparison of resumes, not a vote for prom queen/king. Nobody hires their plumber because they would like to have a beer with them; they hire a plumber to fix their damn leak. Putting the opportunists aside (Krystal, et al), the "earn my vote crowd" never seems to want to do their work either. Elections are job interviews, and too many Americans abdicate their responsibility to hire the best man/woman for the job. So many people confuse wealth with knowledge. The thought that "he/she must be smart if they could make all this money" makes me want to tear my hair out. One thing has nothing to do with the other. History is full of rich men who were idiots, many of whom were ruling empires. Character matters, temperament matters, plans matter. If we keep treating elections as if they are not life-altering events, they absolutely are, this experiment in self-governance is doomed. This is not a football game on Friday night where, if your team loses, you try again next time. Once the die is cast, the wrong choice means carnage to life and liberty. The President has the power to literally decide who gets to live or die, whether it be from poverty, war, or neglect. We must understand that we are all in this together because the anti-liberalism crowd will surely pick us off one group at a time. Everyone who believes that it will only affect someone else will find themselves trapped in a nightmare they can't wake from. Godspeed sir. I hope you are more successful than I at making people understand what we face.
Regardless of your policy or philosophical orientation, this is excellent advice that should be followed by all responsible voters. The real contest for policy preferences is in the nominating stage of presidential politics. Once the two nominees are selected, the choice should be clear.
Yes! In a general election, the choice is between two candidates. Get behind the one you think aligns most closely with your views - or oppose the one you think will be the most disastrous. Support “the lesser of two evils”, if you want to call it that. But one of those two candidates is going to take office. Unless you would genuinely accept the result of a coin flip to choose between them (which has happened to me exactly once), support somebody!
I have now read enough of your essays to know that when you walk through a door, you are going to be the smartest guy in the room. Your essays are always the first ones I read. Thank you.
I could kiss you for writing this article, Professor! FINALLY, somebody is Gibbs slapping the whiny toddlers who threaten to take their ball and go home if they don't get their way. THANK YOU! All the voters who refused to cast a ballot for Kamala in 2024 because they were mad at BIDEN's handling of Gaza got an administration that's drawing up plans to bulldoze Gaza and turn it into a Javanka-style luxury beach-front property.
But the one thing that always frosts me about these types is how they overlook their civic responsibility as American citizens. YES, candidates need to earn your vote, but once the primary is over and the nominee is chosen, your job is to uphold your end of the civic contract and VOTE. People have DIED to secure that right for you. People have campaigned for generations to change the constitution to enshrine your right to vote. And, NO, NONE of them ever got to vote for a perfect candidate. Not ever. So this whiny crap of making the perfect the enemy of the good has gotten us two terms of the worst person ever to darken the door of our White House.
Thanks for putting into words what many of us have felt for a long time!
Whoop-de-do, Prof. You said this so well.! All those people that wanted change so stayed away from the H. Clinton campaign and then the Harris campaign got change all right: Trump, Project 25 and the Roberts Court!! Blows my mind when I think about it. I do remember one young lady in voting line: I won't vote anybody but Bernie. (I guess she wrote him in)
Yep, I like: Know the Window. Use it when open. (got it!); When it closes because the nominees are on the ballot, vote for the Democrat. Just darn well vote for the Democrat--- then organize, deliver and demand of the candidate. Do not slink off to some third party fantasy.
Thanks Prof. And probably you'll need to keep after us--hopefully not all of us. Wandering off into fantasy land happens. 😼👍🙏❤️🕊️
Everyone furious about Trump is not wrong to be furious.
The question worth sitting with after: does the way that we direct the outrage... shrink the movement that elected him... or did it hand it new recruits?
I'm a liberal, and I ran the actual numbers on this from inside the argument, not against it:
https://uncomfortable.rxansmithmedia.com/p/the-misplaced-outrage-on-the-left
Tell me what you make of this.
A thought on why Congress is sour on raising the minimum wage: I heard George H W Bush say that if you keep people poor and hungry, they don't have the strength to fight you. At a town hall in Clinton, IA when he was running for prez. (Tells you how old I am!) The mega super wealthy can afford to be taxed on 50% of their owned wealth and not suffer a whit.
The mass transfer of U.S. wealth to the upper income brackets that began under Reagan overlooks the fact that the U.S. was most prosperous in the post-WWII decades when the top income brackets was 90%. And the rich were still rich and did quite well for themselves!
TL;DR - Vote for the person with the D next to their name. Anything else, third party vote, staying home, etc. is a vote for Trump, Project 2025 and Agenda 47.
This right here ⬆️. A non-vote [either by failing to vote, or throwing your vote away on a non-viable third party or write-in] has the same effect as voting for the other side.
"You are no longer shopping for your ideal candidate" is the line I'm stealing. Correct, and it needed saying.
Everything here is correct on the mechanics... and it's also a pretty devastating description of what a two-party system forces good voters to do. In a system with real primary alternatives or ranked-choice voting, "earn my vote" wouldn't be a fallacy that needs a 2,000-word explainer to correct... it would just be true, continuously, because more than one viable choice would always be on the table. The coalition-leverage strategy described here is smart. It's also a workaround for a structural problem, not a substitute for fixing it.
Political parties are coalitions. What that means is that you never get everything that you want, and if you are on the edges of the party, you can't expect to win every argument. But it still makes sense to support the coalition which most closely matches your values.
In fact, in a democracy, you never get everything you want, which is supposed to be a feature, not a bug.
This naturally seems to lead people to the idea of abandoning the "two party system" in exchange for multiple parties.
A bunch of new minority parties won't solve anything. There already are such parties and they do nothing.
If you always have to agree 100% with a candidate on the issues to feel comfortable voting, you will still require that candidate to enter into a coalition to get anything at all done. So at the end of the day, new minority parties aren't a solution to the requirement that parties need to form coalitions. Those can either happen within the Democratic Party, or between a group of minority parties.
The problem is people seeming to require purity tests, and then when people don't get their way (which you can't by default) trying to erase the differences in the two parties, which just discourages voting. Somehow they think this "my way or the highway" approach will just make everyone give in to what they want.
It won't work.
In fact, if you like say 10%, or even 5% of elected Democrats, wouldn't you want the coalition those people are part of to win? If you elect people who check all of your boxes, but never form or join a working coalition with political power, they will be reduced to giving inspiring speeches without ever doing anything meaningful.
If we say we are "pro-democracy", we'd better grow up and understand what that actually means.
My theory in all of this is: Do the best we can vetting primary candidates, vote for the one that most aligns with the broad public priorities, hopefully one without fatal flaws, then in the general election it's vote blue like our lives depend on it because it probably does....
Exactly. I call that "blocking and tackling". Not glamorous but it's what gets the job done.
I wish people who need to hear this message would listen to it.
But from what I can see they have learned nothing and won't listen to anyone.
Professor, I have been spreading this exact message like jam on toast for years now. The people who hold on to purity, like Linus and his security blanket, make me crazy. Voting is a comparison of resumes, not a vote for prom queen/king. Nobody hires their plumber because they would like to have a beer with them; they hire a plumber to fix their damn leak. Putting the opportunists aside (Krystal, et al), the "earn my vote crowd" never seems to want to do their work either. Elections are job interviews, and too many Americans abdicate their responsibility to hire the best man/woman for the job. So many people confuse wealth with knowledge. The thought that "he/she must be smart if they could make all this money" makes me want to tear my hair out. One thing has nothing to do with the other. History is full of rich men who were idiots, many of whom were ruling empires. Character matters, temperament matters, plans matter. If we keep treating elections as if they are not life-altering events, they absolutely are, this experiment in self-governance is doomed. This is not a football game on Friday night where, if your team loses, you try again next time. Once the die is cast, the wrong choice means carnage to life and liberty. The President has the power to literally decide who gets to live or die, whether it be from poverty, war, or neglect. We must understand that we are all in this together because the anti-liberalism crowd will surely pick us off one group at a time. Everyone who believes that it will only affect someone else will find themselves trapped in a nightmare they can't wake from. Godspeed sir. I hope you are more successful than I at making people understand what we face.
Regardless of your policy or philosophical orientation, this is excellent advice that should be followed by all responsible voters. The real contest for policy preferences is in the nominating stage of presidential politics. Once the two nominees are selected, the choice should be clear.
Yes! In a general election, the choice is between two candidates. Get behind the one you think aligns most closely with your views - or oppose the one you think will be the most disastrous. Support “the lesser of two evils”, if you want to call it that. But one of those two candidates is going to take office. Unless you would genuinely accept the result of a coin flip to choose between them (which has happened to me exactly once), support somebody!
Purity voters aren't very smart and they've done real damage. I'm not sure where this idea of "perfect" came from but people need to grow up.