cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16451158
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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Then the posts aren't encouraging them to change any behavior. This premise only works if you have partisan voters deciding not to vote because of the Both-Sidesism.
If it is the default case that a party already does not have the ~~any~~ votes of the largest mass of voters, then the parties should focus on gaining their support.
But also: more libertarians protested the GOP over Both-Sidesism than leftists, so technically it still had a net benefit effect for Harris. Which further demonstrates how flawed the whole premise is.
Wait are you legitimately claiming that both sides rhetoric doesn't discourage voter turn out? Do you have literally any evidence to support that claim?
I don't know about 'discourage' since I was referring to protest 3rd party votes. But too many people didn't even know Biden dropped out to suggest the rhetoric was causing meaningful influence.
Now, I do know that RFK and Chase Oliver together took more votes (~0.9%) than the Greens and PSL combined (~0.7%). So as far as protest votes over Both-Sideism likely went it probably didn't hurt Harris, and may have actually been a net gain for Harris.
The entire combined third party vote would have had to pretty much 100% gone for Harris for the Democratic Party to have won the popular vote (which is still irrelevant because of the electoral college.)
I don't really follow.
We're not talking about well informed Lemmy users weighing the policies of candidates and deciding to abstain from voting because Gaza.
We're talking about apathetic low information voters looking for an excuse not to get off the couch on polling day.
"Both sides" is the classic strategy to keep these voters on the couch.
I guess, though a meme on Lemmy talking about social media posts would have me leaning to the former than the latter. I would wager, in fact, this meme is very strongly directed at Lemmy users who weigh policy.