Biden defeated Trump by nearly 8m votes in 2020, a substantial if not overwhelming margin of victory. Matters were very different in the electoral college. A combined total of 44,000 votes handed Biden victory in the swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia.
Had Trump succeeded in “finding” 45,000 more votes in these three states, the 2020 election would have resulted in an electoral college tie, an unseemly result that, by the terms of the constitution, hands the task of electing the president to the House of Representatives. In a travesty of democratic rule, when the House elects the president, each state delegation, and not each representative, gets a single vote, and while Democrats still controlled the House after the 2020 election, Republicans actually enjoyed a majority of state delegations. Trump would have won.
While it is hard to imagine Trump defeating Biden in the popular vote in 2024, the electoral college remains another matter. Polls already predict another tight electoral race. Maga zealots and election deniers continue to target and attack independent election officials in the key swing states. Add to the mix the possibility of a third-party candidate, who, like Ralph Nader in 2000, would have no prospect of winning but could peel away votes in these crucial states, and the perils magnify.
Generations of Americans have recognized the defects in the way we elect our president. The first serious effort to eliminate the system came in 1816 and hundreds have followed, all failing given the extreme difficulty of amending our constitution. It is a grotesque fact that a candidate who has made clear his hostility to democratic governance could only be returned to office through an antiquated, dysfunctional and anti-democratic electoral system.
Dictators get elected all the time, Hitler being the one most historians refer to. It’s the policies they implement after election that define them as dictators. Trump began the process while in office, but was horribly incompetent at it, as demonstrated by his flailing coup attempt. Moreover, he didn’t have Hitler’s popular support, effectively getting into office on a technicality.
Biden was elected by both the popular and electoral vote. His policies thus far, while centrist, have been built on bi-partisan cooperation where possible, and he’s been as hands off as possible regarding the political elements of the court cases against Trump. He’s also been supportive of civil rights, and has rolled back a number of Trump’s crueler policies.
The same cannot be said of Trump, nor will it be. You can actually boil it down to one definitive action: Dictators lock children in cages.
Trump qualifies under this definition, having been responsible for the detainment of over 500,000. Biden doesn’t qualify under this definition, nor any other. At worst, he’s a middling centrist who is most concerned with keeping the country running, as a President should be.
As to the legitimacy of America’s electoral process, I absolutely agree that it needs to be reinforced, but I don’t believe that there was any substantial fraud in the 2020 election.
I would ideally like to see all voting machines require paper trails, and have universal mail-in voting, as it’s been a resounding success in OR and CA. I would also like to see a restructuring of the electoral college that more accurately reflects the popular vote while still allowing rural areas to have a significant voice - after all, urban needs can easily override rural ones to the detriment of all citizens. In a perfect world, that balance would also be properly reflected in Senate seats, to more properly represent the country as a whole.
Was Obama a dictator? https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/kids-in-cages-debate-trump-obama/2020/10/23/8ff96f3c-1532-11eb-82af-864652063d61_story.html
I get that you can wring your hands and call the cages Obama built “holding cells” or whatever, but let’s get your definitions straight.
Now as far as the voting process, I don’t believe there has been any fraud that has affected a presidential election in any way that matters, except POSSIBLY Florida in 2000, but even then I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in it. But the important part about America’s sham democracy is that the choices are rigged from the start. You don’t get to vote for an environmentalist, you don’t get to vote for a leftist, you don’t’ get to vote for a candidate that will dismantle the CIA, that will recall 100% of America’s armed forces, that will stop supporting Israel, that will stop sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. The only thing you get to vote for is which flavor of Capitalist you prefer. You also don’t’ get to vote for reforming our first past the post system. So given this reality, why should I give fuck that the Red Capitalist technically matches some Ivory Tower definition of Dictator, but conveniently the Blue Capitalist is just shy of that definition?
By the way the Biden administration is still holding children in cages.
Debating these minute differences sounds like Manufacturing Consent to me.
Obama is far from a saint, and every US President has the same blood of Empire on their hands.
But this is rich from a guy who bailed after it was pointed out that Trump literally has no platform, only offers racism, sexism, xenophobia, hate and authoritarianism, and that maybe we shouldn’t be trying to court the opinions of people who support those things.
I’m sure that buffoon really engaged them with his fucking unhinged rants and making fun of disabled people. His voters have been very honest about who they are, and it’s not our fault you’re not listening and instead arguing we should be engaging with authoritarians.
Sounds like Manufacturing Consent to me, from someone happy to debate the minute differences when it suits them.
I responded and I’ve made my point.
It was a bad point. You should have saved your time and not posted.
Yeah I guess this guy forgot that Mr. Trump notoriously had a lot of white collar white people voting for him, and that his “base” absolutely isn’t just the rural working class.
I guess the working class in cities don’t exist or something. /s
Clearly not from the context of the article you provided, as they describe how the cages were part of an expansion to a larger facility that corrected a worse detention situation at the border, where there was no air conditioning. Do I think this was a humane design choice? No, but it was an improvement. At the time they were built, family separation wasn’t performed except in extreme circumstances. Nor do I think that Obama was personally involved in the design decisions.
Trump undid that policy, and filled the cages that Obama built. Family separation was the point. And again and again he bragged about it. He was personally involved in the decision, and lauded it.
The Biden administration is still detaining children, but they’ve drastically reduced the number (see the graph on the article provided), and no longer enforces family separation to my knowledge. More work needs to be done here, I agree, but ignoring the scope to say both he and Trump are the same is lazy thinking.
From a purely leftist standpoint (far left in the US), you’re right - the electoral process and two party system as they currently exist will never allow a true progressive to set policy, and we’re stuck in a cycle of choosing between bad and worse. It’s my hope ranked choice voting starts getting some real traction as a counter, but I’m not holding my breath.
So why should you care?
Because in a choice between bad and worse, if you don’t vote, you end up with worse.
Holy shit, we have people defending literal concentration camps in the thread
Good job, Lemmy. You have officially gone full retard.
I vote and I have voted in every federal election and most of my local elections since I was first eligible to vote in 2000. But I never vote for the “Bad” choice, nor the “worse” choice. I always vote in the primary of the majority party which was usually Dem, but in Texas I voted in the GoP primary. When it comes to the General Election, locally you have no excuse to vote for bad or worse, you typically have multiple candidates, some that are even good. On a federal level, there is no reason to vote for bad or worse either because even in swing states, voting for “Bad” means you support the bad, telling yourself the alternative is “worse” is just a coping mechanism and ensures no one will ever get any other choices.
So you’re an accelerationist. Got it.
This is what someone with no agency and no ability to ever organize something like a nationwide vote strike/write-in campaign tells themselves as a big fucking cope. Sure, you’ve got agency in this system, buddy. Sure you do.
Yea, I never once claimed to have agency in our system, and the liberal rallying cry about voting is absolutely an example of that. What are you actually upset about? That I am accurately describing our shitty society?
No, that you have the smug superiority of someone who is like “I vote with my principles” which is great and all, but it literally doesn’t make you better than anyone else or have a reason to tell others that participating means “they support it” especially if that’s literally the only actual agency they have in this shitty fucking system, voting. (Protip, it’s literally the only agency they have.)
On top of the verifiable harm that attitude that does to minorities in the USA. It’s easily arguable that no matter what party you vote for, you’re hurting minorities all over the planet, but sorry sir, I’m about general harm reduction, even if it’s halfassed in the short term.
I don’t think letting the worse win for your pyrrhic personal victory is in any way fucking helpful, nor is acting like you’re somehow better, smarter, or more capable than others for it, or that it means they support those things.
I’m on the left, and you’re just being a smug asshat, dude. Maybe not classist, but sure obviously think you’re better than everyone else here. Do you think that’s helpful? Great job not using classist words but still acting like a smug know it all prick who thinks they know better but can’t be fucked to actually help educate, but instead wants to put others down for not already knowing. Sounds pretty fucking classist to me.
Like there’s a thousand ways you could have participated in this thread without being a rude jerk. You chose to be a rude jerk, what does that say about you?
I get it, you are “on the left.” You would have voted for Obama a third-time if you could, Biden was the next best thing obviously. Anyone who implies differently is an “asshat.”
Resorting to making assumptions that couldn’t be further off base? Obama solidified the worst aspects of the Bush presidency and told us to “look forward, not backward” in regards to fucking war criminals. He had plenty of scandals that were mostly swept under the rug by the media. He himself admitted that if he had ran in the 1980’s he would have been running as a Republican. He ran on a public option but then said “Fuck you people” and gave us RomneyCare.
Seriously, grow up. Instead of addressing anything substantiative about how you’re being a rude asshat, you’re just continuing to be a rude asshat. Truly, do you think being an asshole like this helps spread a leftist message or are you just an authoritarian fuckin tankie who thinks you have to make everyone do it by force because you’re too much of a rude asshole yourself to be able to educate anyone else? Because for someone who thinks using the word “yokel” is too much, all you’ve done the whole thread is shit on anyone else for having a differing opinion or having their own thoughts, going as far as to claim to know what they believe based on how they vote, which is classist as shit genius. My literal first response to you was very polite and you kept being an asshat, and that’s why I didn’t let it go.
You might think the downvotes are from “angry libruls” but guess what they’re from people who think you’re acting like a condescending asshole. Like, this isn’t fucking reddit, it’s Lemmy, and the fucking devs are god damned communists. Why the fuck do you think I wasn’t scared away by the talk of them being tankies (I checked, they’re not, I’m not so sure about you.) and made an account on lemmy.ml? It wasn’t for shits and giggles or to troll. My fucking Avatar is god damned Situationist Guy Debord.
Has anyone ever told you, “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole,” because you need to fucking hear it.