Vote Democrats if there is no progressive alternative. But always primary progressives in Democratic primaries.
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2026
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The time to argue and complain about candidates is during the primaries. When a candidate for a party has been chosen you vote with the party. Out system is the way it is and no amount of protest votes are going to fix it. Do not vote 3rd party in the general election.
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This is the way, at least until we get rid of First Past the Post and other Ordinal voting systems.
Score, STAR, or Approval would all make primaries unnecessary, and also reward people for honestly voting their preferences. Which is sort of why there's so much pushback against them.
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Lemmy users in socialism.ml actually define Putin as progressive (I wish I was joking)
EDIT: look at them all brigading me below. PUTIN SUCKS and North Korea is an authoritarian shithole!
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Why yes, I have noticed the pre-election uptick of posts like this designed to prep the masses to slavishly vote for whatever do-nothing Biden/Kamala/Hillary joke candidate the establishment will be choosing for us next time. If Kamala won we'd all be having brunch right now, right?
You know how you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
It's better to take constant bites, no matter how small, than vomit up everything you've eaten in 20 years while you imagine being done.
You can keep waiting for perfection, but it probably won't be here before damnnation.
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Not in near as great a volume as during the presidential years, but there's the usual drum beat of 'Dems bad so don't bother cause it's all useless' type posts. Might be that I see less though having defederated the triad when I switched from Lemmy to Piefed.
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I live in a state with partially open primaries that goes red 90% of the time. In order to maximize the effectiveness of my vote and thereby maximize my voice, I registered as an independent and generally request a Republican primary ballot.
I then have to sift through each list of candidates looking for someone who doesn't mention Trump and has a stated policy goal that isn't evil. There's usually one candidate who mentions their focus as being healthcare or education. This is a fairly laborious process and there are plenty of races where the least-worst option is still a horrible person. However, given the winner of the Republican primary has a 90% chance of winning the general AND voter turnout for the primary is generally under 10%, I know that this is effective.
Anyway, doing all this because it is the most logical course of action where I live and then seeing people cry about only agreeing with 87% of one candidate's policy goals always annoys the hell out of me.
I've done similar in the past. In my instance, this doesn't necessarily work:
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All of the R candidates mentioned Trump, directly. However, one of them mentioned Trump's name in the context of opposing some of the more extreme and unpopular Trumpnanigans.
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The ones who have a focus on healthcare and education have VERY different ideas on what it means to support those. Nearly universally they mean pushing healthcare even further into the private sector, allowing scam plans that cover practically nothing and are "insurance" in name only, or things like that. The ones talking about education want to privatize that that, switch to voucher systems that people can use in private schools, and other nefarious things like forcing Christianity into the schools.
But either way, these folks aren't the ones who ultimately get chosen in the primary because they're never extreme enough.
The crazy part about living in a rural, red district is that even the majority of Democrats on the primary are basically Republican-lite and often "former" Republicans. Go figure.
But either way, these folks aren’t the ones who ultimately get chosen in the primary because they’re never extreme enough.
I think this is primarily due to the fact that the practice hasn't caught on or been promoted effectively in deep red states. If you had a movement to get people voting in the only election that matters in their state to the point where moderates started winning, you'd permanently start to shift the policy positions of candidates. Nikki Haley didn't win the primary but she was only able to hang on as long as she did due to this strategy.
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Isn't it always pre-election? Every two years and all.
Meanwhile, the reason that the claim is so prevalent is because it is so true.
bOtH sIdEs are anti-union, anti-labor, pro-corporate, and pro-billionaire.
US workers have lost income and standard of living for over FIFTY YEARS. You will hear this for the rest of your life, because it's an indisputable fact.
The USA needs a labor party, the Democrats are no labor party.
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A lot of DSA/progressives won the primaries because taking AIPAC money is now generally considered toxic. Also, there's not currently a national election contest featuring blue-flavored genocide enablers. It's almost like people learned something from the experience last election. Just running as "not as evil" isn't really an effective electoral strategy or something.
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I've also noticed a significant increase in "the right did something awful and the left's response wasn't good enough, how could the left do that, the left is terrible, I'm not going to support them" type posts and replies.
Purity tests are bullshit, especially when the things that precipitated the "insufficient" response is literally fascism
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