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Comment on We may clown on him a lot but it's genuinely quite dystopian how much power Elon Musk has.
TheFriar@lemm.ee 5 months agoI dunno. His own staffer came out and said their entire purpose was to keep Biden from winning re-election. Third party candidates don’t typically siphon votes away from the party that religiously tows the line. The republicans have gotten their voters in lockstep formation, to a scary degree. The democrats have a harder time because their needed voters are a wide swath of different people, from those scared of republicans (really the dems bread and butter), to people who want social programs, to liberals, to liberal-leaning conservatives (though this group has been disappearing for a while), to leftists that begrudgingly vote for the lesser of two evils…it’s a melting pot. That’s also why the dems have a harder time winning, typically. The dems and the left will debate procedural shit for how to accomplish similar goals. The right is all emotional appeals/reactionaries. Herding cats vs shooting fish in a barrel. I wouldn’t be so sure about RFK jr only appealing to the right.
gardylou@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You’re not thinking correctly. The right is not a giant monolith. Many people who lean right or are centrists voted for Biden last election because they too despise Trump. Those are the kind of people who will vote for RFK. Now, they still get to vote against Trump, but don’t have to vote for Biden. And yes, of course voting 3rd party is essentially the same as voting for whoever wins up winning, but people are idiots and don’t understand that logic.
TheFriar@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Yeah, I think that’s generally the idea. But i think the same would’ve been true of Gary whatshisface in 2016, the libertarian guy. I’m not really sure that’s how it shook out in the end, though.
I also think the more-likely-to-be-democrat voters are probably just generally more likely to vote third party, knowing it’s a throwaway, in order to send a message. The right really doesn’t ever seem to break apart, that ~48-50% of people seemingly can’t be turned away no matter what happens. Look at all those street interviews done recently. Those “anyone but trump” republicans, when pressed on who they’d vote for if Nikki Haley couldn’t win the primary, they all waffled for a minute before saying they’d vote for trump. After calling him a fascist, a racist, etc. The conditioning on the right is so strong. It needs to be studied. I’m sure it will be if humanity survives the next 20 years.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Trump doesn’t really tow the line, through. He’s a manifestation of a revolt from inside the GOP’s white nationalist electoral core, against the financial internationalist who have controlled the party since Reagan.
I don’t think it’s clear who RFK is really feeding from. It’s possible his voters simply wouldn’t turn out if he wasn’t on the ballot. But it’s doubtful that he can steal Biden voters by parroting Trump positions.
Liberal admins don’t debate procedural shit, they kill legislation hostile to their donors with technicalities. These same technicalities never affect our illegal wars or unconstitutional policing or criminally unconscionable polluting or corrupt corporate bailouts.
The big difference between libs and cons is that cons demand their red meat and are willing to lose an election or two to guarantee it, while liberals are constantly running scared of their replacements in the next election.
The emotion you see isn’t unique to conservatives. It’s simply rewarded rather than shamed.
TheFriar@lemm.ee 5 months ago
No, but their voters would sacrifice themselves to toe the line. That was my point.
I dunno. There are plenty of relatively shallow thinking democrats. It’s called a “protest vote” for a reason.
I didn’t mean “procedural shit” like inside baseball house floor procedural. I meant the voters are multifaceted and disagree on how to achieve what liberals and leftists can generally agree upon: social programs and the like. See what I’m saying? I’m really tired and I’m not explaining this well, but I’m talking about even if leftists and liberals and democrats can all be somewhat on the same page about a general to me they’d like to see, there are segments of that voting populace that would withhold their vote if the the issue is discussed isn’t exactly to their liking. The voters are finicky. On the right, the voters toe the line pretty much universally. No matter what happens, the republicans can’t seem to lose votes past a certain point. The democrats have to get a lot of stuff right for a pretty diverse group of voters, all in a row, to keep their voters turning out.
If I’m understanding this correctly, I think I strongly disagree. But can you clarify this? Because I’m not sure I do actually understand what you mean.