Where have you heard the second one? I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that.

It's legitimately possible the left abandons him and he picks up enough conservatives to win anyways.

Never seen anyone but the "Biden needs to earn my getting off my couch on election night" leftists say the second one

They're called Benoit balls

The fact that trump has won 50% of his elections and looks to be 2/3 in a few months should make everyone reconsider the quality of candidates we’re running against him.

After the Dems last lost an election, you got Biden as your next candidate. Why are you expecting this approach to suddenly produce a candidate you would like?

Republicans did that decades ago, and now have trump.

I might argue that Republicans didn't do that decades ago, and that's how they got two Bushes, a McCain, and a Romney. It wasn't until they abandoned the "electable" moderate Republican and embraced their ideological id that they got to their political messiah.

The fact that trump has won 50% of his elections and looks to be 2/3 in a few months should make everyone reconsider the quality of candidates we’re running against him.

I gotta say, I noticed the folks running in the GOP field and they all sucked hard. Trump was the raw meat candidate, but he wasn't even the most fascist asshole on the ballot. DeSantis was the guy who got off waterboarding people at Gitmo for a living. Hailey couldn't name a country she didn't want to bomb. Hutchinson's fundie base would have him rounding up the cast of RuPaul's Drag Race and marching them to the gas chambers. Only Ramaswamy is the kind of sociopath business conservative more fixated on looting the country than mutilating its residents.

Trump's given them license to go full mask-off, but he's not uniquely bad. He's emblematic of a party that's also frothed with bigotry, and just found a PC way of displaying it right up until a black man got into the White House.

Not getting mad at the people honest about the situation while there’s still time to do literally anything to prevent trump.

Biden won 2020 by 40,000 votes across three major swing states. He's losing all three - PA, GA, and AZ - by two to three times that under current polling. The theory that we can just Tinkerbell him back into a second term is simple cope. Biden's goose was cooked as soon as he fumbled the bag in his first 100 days.

Blaming 20-something tech savvy voters on Lemmy for hating the man over his genocidal support of Israel won't shift any of the critical swing-state 40-something blue collar voters angry at him over sun-setting all the COVID era public spending measures.

Non voters are either children or morons.

Rational adults realise that this is the system and you have to operate inside of it despite the compromises.

Now, you want to start changing the system, start a grassroots campaign, get into politics to change the system, more power to you!

But sitting on your ass crying about both sides while doing nothing, you are simply an immature moron.

I cannot blame people for feeling jaded or disillusioned. Would we vote for Bernie? We certainly would've if the DNC didn't provably sabotage his campaign. And I cannot ignore that Biden is old and deeply unpopular among leftists, yet our party refuses to offer up a better choice because they're counting on "the devil you know" to carry him through. Who could feel enthusiastic about that? I think the hope is that the DNC will learn some kind of lesson if he loses, though I know they won't. The trend of "reduce harm now, actually improve things later" has been going on for a long time. When is "later"? What up and coming voice on the democratic side do we have to look forward to?

I have to vote, because my number one priority is trans rights and there's only one party that will do anything to protect that, but I don't do it happily. I understand too that the "vote blue no matter who" crowd has similar pressing concerns that require harm reduction. But I dislike the characterization of anyone who feels apathetic about the upcoming election as idiots or Russian bots. When you're only voting against a candidate, it's hard to feel motivated.

Who I would vote for would be, for example, the third-party candidate I'm actually voting for.

The democrats can't be "shamed" into doing the right thing. They might be able to be pressured into doing it, and establishing a credible threat that you'll withhold your vote if they do something unconcionable is one way of exerting that pressure. They have exactly zero interest in the concerns of people whose votes are guaranteed.

And if they are completely unresponsive regardless, then the only hope of having our concerns listened to is to unseat them, by means of a third party. No matter how unlikely or how long it takes, it's still more likely than the possibility that Biden randomly starts caring about Palestinians out of the kindness of his heart.

I think you should vote for someone you believe in, rather than voting for someone who is not someone else

This would be the ideal situation, but for so long as we have first-past-the-post it's a fundamentally ineffective way to vote. Thanks to Duverger's law, unless one of the two big parties just so happens to coincide with your views then the best you can do is to vote against whichever of the big two you dislike most. "Big two" here depends on your constituency - it may not be Labour and the Conservatives locally, but it is true that virtually every constituency has at most two realistic options. Labour may not be very good, but if they're in power it's probably at minimum going to make this a better place for asylum seekers and trans people (or whoever the Tories would go after next), and Labour's voting record on the environment really is far better than the Conservatives' too.

Well as long as you have your pride as the world burns down around you :)

Neither party representing the people is very very different then saying both parties are equally damaging.

That's pretty misleading because it depends on what you mean by "the people". And the more complicated, less-emotionally satisfying reality is that both candidates were essentially chosen by different groups of "the people" in contested primary elections in 2016 and 2020. The system is inefficient and in fact designed to uphold the status quo, but still allows people to change it. And trying to change it by voting is a far more effective strategy than not participating and hoping the extremely status-quo biased corporate media somehow gives you attention and takes your side as a result.

Donate and campaign for your local ranked choice voting groups https://fairvote.org/ - if you aren't engaged in changing the system, you should be.

Until we have change like this, I'm still voting for the person who sucks the least, because I know only one of the two mainstream candidates will win.