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Imagine getting 80% of the vote in an unopposed election, in a massively important state, and completely ignoring the explicit reason why. If Biden loses Michigan it will 100% be his fault.
Worth noting that Michigan lets people vote on either the democratic or republican ballot, regardless of how they are registered. Lot's of people like myself chose to vote on the republican ballot against Trump because we felt confident in Biden winning. That probably put him closer to 80%.
Lot's of people like myself chose to vote on the republican ballot against Trump
Yup. Me too. Had to hold my nose to do it though.
Go ahead and vote against Biden in the November election then too. When Trump's Nazi Regime is rounding up Muslims to put in camps, at least you will have stuck it to Biden.
I fully don't get why people are reacting so much to this. Why the fuck shouldn't I vote against Biden in the primary? He's going to be the nominee regardless, this is exactly the time for Democrats to get out those protest votes.
Biden will win the popular vote by a record-breaking amount, 100%; there is no question about that. However, the United States does not elect a president in accordance with the popular vote.
Biden can lose the electoral college at the fringe, which is literally every other metric. If you care about the presidency, care about the fringe; and do everything possible to shore it up.
Tens of thousands of Michiganders on Tuesday cast their ballots for “uncommitted,” putting them on track to garner more than 10 percent of the vote statewide. That figure seemed likely to exceed past levels of “uncommitted” votes in Michigan Democratic primaries, though fall short of sparking a political earthquake.
I would say that as a Biden supporter, I do have some jitters, but "angst" isn't the right word. The current fraction of "uncommitted" votes is 13.3%, which isn't much higher than Obama's 10.7% in 2012. The difference could be random noise, but if it does represent approximately 2.6% of voters voting in protest then it should be something that the Biden campaign takes into account to some extent.
The weird thing to me is how many people showed up to vote - a little over 760,000 as opposed to 195,000 in 2012. I'm not familiar with Michigan politics enough to explain this, but I assume it wasn't caused by the presidential part of the election and it might have altered the average demographics of the voters relative to 2012.
760,000 as opposed to 195,000 in 2012
Probably because Michigan had a caucus in 2012, not a primary.
It's because we can vote by mail now. Biden was the only one on the ballot in my city, no down ballot positions at all. I voted since I just had to drop it in the mail, but I wouldn't make a trip out in February to vote for someone running pretty much unopposed.
In 2016, Trump beat Hillary in Michigan by less than 11,000 votes
Yesterday, 101,436 Democrats voted uncommitted in a noncompetitive primary against an incumbent president after just 3 weeks of statewide organizing to advocate for an "uncommitted" vote selection
The Democrats should be extremely worried. They would need to win Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania to get 271 electoral votes without Michigan. Do we feel so confident in that result to entrust the future of American democracy to it?
I think it's a mistake to count all 100,000 uncommitted votes as results of that protest. (But it was clever for Tlaib to pick something that surprisingly many people would have done anyway - it was impossible for her to lose in the court of public opinion even if literally no one actually supported her.) The 1/5 or so of the uncommitted votes that were (by my estimate) protesting are important but they're not essential. Their votes have to be balanced against appealing to other voters elsewhere and against what Biden considers to be prudent policy.
Worried? Why? Did you not see Trump lost 35% of his own primary as a former president. There are WAY more warning signs for Trump in the general. 40% of Haley voter are never Trumper republicans. Pair that with him not being able to clear 65% as a former president and he’s toast.
If the extra 3 points of uncommitted don't vote Biden in the general, Trump wins Michigan. His victory margin last election was less than 200k votes.
In 2020 38% of the vote was from Dems, 38% from republicans...
What wins/loses Michigan is independent voters, and Biden doesn't do well with them, because they want more than "I'm not the other guy! Even tho we agree on lots of stuff, we're still different"
Hell. biden isn't even doing well with Dem voters in an unopposed primary.
That should make everyone very concerned, but there's a vocal minority of Biden supporters who demand 100% loyalty and 0% questions.
More like we're tired of people like you not offering any solutions, just shitting on the only non fascist with a chance.
The reason Biden got such a big uncommitted vote is the current ongoing genocide in Israel. The solution is him doing more than simply calling Netanyahu an asshole then turning around and saying "I'm a Zionist".
IDK, it could also be that Biden is continuing the trump era "lock kids in cages" border policies and has signalled he wants to be even more cruel at the border. So he could stop that as well.
The time has passed, but he could have also not ran this time around. However, his ego got in the way. He has had dismissal approval numbers and he still chose to run which has put us in this position.
The solution is for Biden to listen to the voters before November and to change tact on critical issues. Before he loses a chunk of voters that simply don't vote because the choice between two genocidal candidates violates their moral compass.
I say all this as someone that will vote Biden. He's out of touch and running a terrible campaign. For fucks sake, he should be saying "abortion" at every rally, but he won't because he's a devout Catholic that has a hard time hitting so hard on a clearly winning issue.
His campaign can be summed up as "I'm not trump" which is exactly what fucking got trump into power the last time.
Could just be that you can only run so many campaigns in a row with "If you don't vote for us, it's going to be the end of the world as we know it. And at least I'm not as bad as the other guy." With the exception of Obama's first run against McCain, that's been the pitch for every single election I've ever been able to vote in, as well as a few before it. It gets old real quick, makes them come off as insincere, and doesn't motivate anyone when we're still largely dealing with the same BS issues that we were 20 years ago.
Trying to browbeat people into voting with the same old song and dance has diminishing returns, especially when your candidate is increasingly out of step with many of the voters they should be courting on major issues.
We're just suppose to be happy with voting against a facist instead of voting for someone who's political philosophies match our own. The worst part is Dems don't realize this is basically going to be every election from now on and if they don't change their tune they'll lose to voter apathy
Well read leftists have often said things like neoliberalism leads to fascism, or neoliberalism holds space for fascism to take, and I can't believe how few people have recognized that they've been right about that all along. It's not even just a duopoly issue too, fascism is rising around the whole world.
Bruv, I’m just making the rational choice in a binary system. The choice that leads to less bad shit happening to me and the rest of the world.
Begrudgingly voting for Biden probably isn't enough. It's too close, and Biden doesn't excite voters enough.
You need to get others to do it too. And the fact is, that's really hard to do if you're trying to convince voters directly.
What's easier and has a chance of working is being outspoken now before the general has even started, and pray that someone on his campaign team realizes Biden is going to have to move left to beat trump.
Or you could tell people to shut up and hope Bidens campaign team realizes on their own before it's too late while getting zero feedback from voters.
Pick inaction all you like, I just don't like it's chances.