I’m trying to figure out if anyone would change their vote if there were different candidates, and what sorts of people fall into which categories: Always a D or R, depends on the situation/person (let us know what matters), sitting this one out, used to sit out but voting this time, or other (please explain). More than just the people here, I’m curious about any other people who you know vote in particular ways.
I’m a reliable voter. I vote in ever state and national election (but not local ones, because my residence is weird; my address is technically in one county, but the town my address is in is in a different county, so I wouldn’t have any political connection with the local races that I can vote in).
It would take a very unique ® for me to vote ®. Given their traditional policy positions that are pro-business, anti-choice, etc., I’m not sure who could even go that way. I suppose I could be convinced to vote for a libertarian running as an ® if they were able to make a case that they stood for strong individual liberty protections while also supporting strong regulations on businesses.
On the other hand, there are definitely (D) candidates that I would simply not vote for at all, like any (D) that was anti-choice.
Prior to 2016, my parents were 100% ®; they’ve switched almost entirely to (D) after seeing how radically the party shifted.
Most of my friends will vote D/Biden. And if they don’t, it’s because they don’t normally vote in the first place. For those that will vote, none will vote for Trump. Nearly all of us are left-leaning to varying degrees. Even a conservative friend will hold his nose and vote Biden. He doesn’t like “Sleepy Joe,” but he absolutely hates and loathes Trump. FWIW, I think the youngest of my friends are mid/late 20s, while I’m late 30s. Most of my friends are 30 and up.
My parents (60s) and brother (early 30s) will vote D, too. Parents are more moderate/center-left, while my brother and I are more more solidly left. We’ve all either always or almost always voted, at least in these bigger elections.
No one I know IRL (which includes online friends because we’ve met in person many times) has really talked about not voting for Biden or sitting it out because of his debate performance, age, and/or perceived lack of lucidity. My friends and I joke about it, sure, but that’s it. A couple of us have brought up the possibility of replacing Biden, as part of casual discussion, but they didn’t really go anywhere. Which I took as not really caring to doing so or that it wouldn’t matter and wouldn’t change their positions.
Anyway, at least in my circles, in my bubble, I haven’t come across anyone who’s now on the fence with Biden or were going to vote but now are unsure.
That’s encouraging!
I know at least 3 friends who are not voting for Biden, over Gaza. My guess is they all abstain entirely. They probably won’t matter, because they’re in California.
I know several “closet-Conservatives” (working in tech, that’s pretty common) who seem to be split pretty evenly on whether Trump is a positive or negative to them, but only one has expressed interest in a specific non-Trump candidate, which was Ramaswamy (and in 2016, Yang). 2 of them moved to Texas from California, over the past presidential term.
Family member-wise, most of them- sadly- are Trumpers, and not malleable. They’re pretty geographically-dispersed.
The exceptions are my and my partner’s dads, who are never-Trumper Republicans, who both voted Blue in 2016. They both consider themselves “Eisenhower Republicans” (smdh). They’d both switch back to voting Red with a non-Trump candidate.
I vote in a solidly blue state, so for about 20 years before the last election, I voted 3rd party generally as a protest to the platforms of the 2 parties, especially the drug war, mass incarceration, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and climate change.
Over time I think we’ve made considerable progress on these issues, and though we aren’t 100% where I want to be, I have no problem voting Biden in this and last election to show solidarity against Trump.
Even though I really disliked Biden last election I still voted against Trump and after seeing what he accomplished in his first term, which is probably more than any Democrat in my lifetime, I have no qualms about voting for him again. Obviously I don’t like his position on Israel, but it’s the same of every D in my lifetime, and when the alternative is a fascist USA which will likely lead to the loss of Europe also to fascism, I have to suck it up.
But to answer your question, yes I always consider the candidates. I have even registered R before to vote in their primary because I felt it meant more than voting in the D primary.
I have democratic relatives that register Republican because their local elections ALWAYS go to republicans and they want the least-bad republican to win the primary – even if they then vote against that person in the general election.
My immediate family are going to hold our noses and vote for Biden, we lived through the Trump era and actually left the US partly because of that.
I can’t say for sure anymore about my extended family. Parents for sure D but oldest bro has remarried to a Christofascist, and my sister also found religion but she was a cop so I’m pretty sure she’s been propagandized enough by right wing rhetoric that she votes R, her pwice of shit husband, and ex husband for sure do.
My other brother and his fam are D’s…so its a net win?
I may change my vote for different candidates or a different voting system. I currently support Cornel West. Biden was not a great candidate in 2020, but I was convinced we could move him left. There has been an “always D” tone on Lemmy until the recent debate.
Beyond voting there are more issues to work on like: building community, mutual aid, cardio, survival skills and marksmanship.
I’m pretty sure everybody I know is voting for Biden even though like half of them at least don’t approve of his policies. Specifically, every leftist I talk to is against his continuing to give arms to Israel, but recognizes that Trump would make things much, much worse.
I think he’s going to win by a pretty wide margin. Political polling is fundamentally flawed and self-biasing other than at exit polls. The media is trying to make Biden look like a confused old man, but he’s got enough on the ball to listen to the people he’s put in charge and to get a good read on the situation. He doesn’t have to micromanage everything, he needs to know how to delegate, which he clearly does.
That’s part of the problem with the current ways of looking at politicians in the US, especially the office of the president. We look at this one figure head and just see like, their personality. As if they’re going to wake up in the morning and just wing it based on their gut instinct. I’m sure Trump does that, but most presidents have advisors that they actually listen to and that actually have qualifications.
Biden is a decent president because his VP and his cabinet are decent. He could literally die in office and we’d probably have nearly the same policies.
Do the people you mention always vote? As a Yellow Dog Democrat who never misses an election, myself, I don’t really influence the outcome. I’m just one of the predetermined Ds. The only person I know who is voting R – an ex-boss firmly in the Trump camp – is an equally reliable R, so we kind of cancel each other out.
Probably not. But I also live in Massachusetts, which hasn’t voted Republican since Ronald Reagan.
I typically vote in every election. I think I might have missed a mid-term or two in the past couple decades. Maybe more than that, but I haven’t missed a presidential election and I’ve always voted Democrat.
If we had ranked choice I’d probably be more into some leftist third-party, but it is what it is.
The right would have to put up a very different candidate with reasonable policy ideas for me to even consider them.
The left could put up a potato against Trump and I’d join the spud revolution.
Trump is objectively horrible for the US. But what’s even more horrible is that nearly half of the country are so invested and embedded into the cult that, short of his departure from this earth, they will never accept another candidate, and even then the next in line is likely to be just as bad or worse. They want to “own the libs” so badly they are willing to destroy the country to do it.
So to answer your question as I see it, the only way we can get out of this mess is to make critical thinking education the top priority of the US — which will take decades. But the people in power do not want that and will fight it with all the entertainment news power they can muster. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll just get their pawns to storm the Capitol again and again.
