Democrats need to fall in love. Republicans just need to fall in line.

It’s like you read the meme and went yep, totally their fault. I’m ok with my life gets shittier until I fall in love with a politician. It’s not my fault. I am owed this.

Is there a term for the political version of an incel?

Like. lets talk about what happened.

it’s reasonable to claim that Gore actually won in 2000. There were sixty one thousand votes that had not been machine-counted because of rampant, clearly partisan, bullshit reasons (among them “hanging chad”,). the Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual count of those ballots with SCOTUS, lead by Scalia, decided to stay because the recount would give Bush a veneer of “illegitimacy”. (gee. wonder why, ya fucking partisan hack.) To be perfectly clear, Gore lost Florida (and the electoral college) by 570 votes. The decision in Bush V. Gore to stay the manual recount basically handed Bush the win. (and, I might add, cast doubt on the legitimacy of bush’s win. it was handed by a court that had no business ordering that stay. But did anyway, because they’re partisan hacks. I’m not angry, honest.)

Kerry flip-flopped more than a fish out of water, making it hard for independents and centrists to know what his positions actually were. 2 years prior to the election he was, for example, staunchly against gay marriage (and lets be honest, the US was very hostile to gay marriage then. There’s been a massive sea change in that, but it hadn’t happened yet.), but in 2004 signed a letter urging Massachusetts to not outlaw gay marriage. Further, he had the personality of a cold fish. and his running mate was an empty suit with nothing to back it up- who couldn’t even deliver his home State of North Carolina… In short, you had a couple warm bodies running. At the time, Bush was still riding high off 9/11 and the Iraq war and americans were still angry at that; the war wasn’t unpopular yet. Katrina hadn’t happened yet, and Bush was still reasonably popular. So, of fucking course Kerry lost.

Hillary. Where do we begin? her emails? lets start there.

Sure, “HeR EmAiLs” and “LoCk HeR uP” is an idiotic rallying cry of MAGA morons everywhere. But, even so, she conducted official Sec of State business on a personal email routinely. It’s such a great rallying cry because it actually has some teeth. it should be scandalous. Even if she was perfectly not-at-all-corrupt, it looks that way. I- and most everyone else- would be legitimately fired for conducting that level of business off a personal email. it should be 100% unacceptable. Not saying she should have been locked up or grilled the way she was. But seriously. It looked bad. and it played in the news.

Then we got Benghazi. an American ambassador died in a terrorist attack. There’s some things that hindsight says they could have done differently. Republicans latched onto it for political theater, with 10 different investigations and multiple sessions of grilling Clinton, who even then was the presumptive nominee to replace Obama. there was some funding that her office denied, she might not even have been aware that “she” denied it. Hindsight’s a bitch. Anyhow… the republican shenanigans played well in the media.

Oh. “Super Criminals”. Hillary was very unpopular with minority voters- particularly Black and Latinos. sound clips calling for law-and-order tough-on-crime calling black people “super criminals” didn’t help. there was a lot there, especially with her attitude, but in the end they simply didn’t show up for her. Even if you look at women voters, she under-performed compared to Obamma. (i mean, he looks mighty fine in a tan suit… sorry, sorry. couldn’t resist.) Like, how unpopular do you have to be as a woman, to lose women voters from Obama’s election, when you’re running against Donald- “grab them by the pussy”, “When you’re that rich they let you do it”, “Octopus-Arms” -Trump.

Lets also talk about how she boosted trump specifically because he was “a clown” or whatever. She gave us trump and then proceededly arrogantly not campaign in key states.

oh, and there’s more that I just don’t have time to get into… but we got Whitewater, Travelgate, filegate; and shit rolls down hill so lets toss in Paula Jones and Monika Lewinsky scandals. Like there’s a lot of smoke there, and there might be a couple fires, or maybe they’re just really not that corrupt as people and it’s all a big missunderstanding. but again, that plays in the media, and it looks bad. Hilary was the definition of The Establishment™️ running against an anti-establismhent candidate. Of fucking course she’s gonna lose, and she really didn’t help matters by fucking around with not campaigning in key swing states because, “naw, it’s fucking trump”.

Yup. so aside from Gore, there’s really rather good reasons to have not liked them, and the DNC idiots thought they new better and ran them anyhow… and we got fucked because of it. blaming voters for your own stupid blunders seems to be a DNC favorite. And they’re doing it again.

There’s been a flood of these type of memes lately trying to voter shame.

AOC for President with Biden as VP. It would destroy the Republicans… they’d have strokes within a few days. With Biden as VP all the boomers that actually like Biden will be onboard.

We only have 2 options for president.

This kind of thinking is how you end up with only two options.

A third option emerges when enough people say “I am not voting for either of those two”.

You either vote for one of those two or you are ok with either.

Or, it means you’re not okay with either.

We need to push for Ranked Choice Voting (or anything better than FPTP).

Canada has FPTP voting and still manages to have four federal political parties.

Australia has ranked ballots and effectively has a two-party system that hasn’t changed in 80 years (though they do sometimes manage to get some independents elected to parliament)*.

I’m not saying the voting system is irrelevant. But the true obstacle to multi-party democracy is the fact that voters think in a polarized two-party way (that you are currently reinforcing).

* This is a description of Australia’s House of Representives. Their Senate uses proportional representation, and does have more than two parties. And technically Australia has three political parties in the House of Representives, but two of them have been in a permanent coalition since 1946 and are often treated as a single entity, with the result that Australians consider themselves to have a two-party system.

I mean, voting blue no matter who is still in my best interest.

I hate it and it sucks, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Hilary lost to Obama in 2008 because she would not shut up about how Aktuly Very Correct she was in her endorsement of the invasion of Iraq. She would not shut up about how international trade deals are cool and deindustrialization of the Midwest was an improvement. She kept getting caught in very stupid conferences with two dozen billionaires saying how we’re going to fuck the middle class raw.

And eight years later she decided to run the exact same campaign while secretly funneling money to Trump as a straw candidate she could easily beat in the general.

And then what happened?