Moderates Should Vote for Harris
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The dumb part of your brain says "both of these options suck". And your brain naturally wants to say "at least the Flaming Hot Cheetos have flavor and are interesting".
Maybe you actually want stale Flaming Hot Cheetos. I will not judge you for that. But for everyone else who is despairing that "both choices are bad", I implore you to reconsider. While both choices are unappealing, that does not mean there's not a substantive difference between the two. Your brain is being tricked.
I will not waste your time trying to sell you on how good or exciting a head of cabbage is. You can walk away with the bag of stale Cheetos, telling yourself how much you love it and how anyone who would want to eat a cabbage is stupid. They are stale, they are untrustworthy, they will make you sick and paranoid. Or you can pick up the cabbage, know that you made an adult choice, and walk away with a clean conscious.
But it just so happens that those ~90% are divided both bitterly and evenly. Which means the election is going to be decided by a small percent of people.
The former group is increasingly baffled by the latter, since the differences are so stark. It's hard to imagine what kind of person doesn't have a preference.
I'd say that the OP is encouraging people to realize that the difference is very real and will have a significant effect on their lives. They are not addressing the large majority of people whose minds were made up years ago.
We can disagree and quibble about all the rest of it: policy, character, blah blah blah. There are lots of other things I don't like about Trump, or Harris for that matter, but none of them are anywhere close to the magnitude of that.
I was born in 1974 - no US president (or plausible candidate for president) has ever before done something so manifestly disqualifying. I've never made a comment like the above about any of them.
It's not like he was "demanding signature matching for votes to see if there was in fact any fraud". He threatened the Georgia state attorney general, and demanded he and his colleagues there find a way to falsify the election results.
It's thankfully a simple matter of public record, so if you don't remember the details, you can go and listen to the recordings again[1].
[1]: These recording were published by most major news organizations, so this is not the only place to hear them, just the last place I remember doing so: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/opinion/donald-trump-ezra...
They don't see his behavior as pathetic. They see it as a noble attempt to fight powers so vast they dwarf even that of the President of the United States.
You and I see that as absurd and can point out numerous contradictions. But they firmly believe that the election was, in fact, stolen.
Which means that no matter what, one party or the other really is trying to steal the election. It has taken us a long time to get here, but we are in deep trouble and I have no idea how to get out of it.
It is my belief that Trump's side is very wrong, and that a loss on Tuesday will force them to reconsider the policy of buying so heavily into a false version of reality. But we shall see.
On inflation/economy: Trump's plans will cause massive inflation and damage the American economy: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/16-nobel-prize-winning-econ...
On immigration: Anybody serious about illegal immigration would clamp down hard on the employers who hire illegal immigrants. Trump had 4 years to prove he was serious, and proved he wasn't.
What? Trump’s tariff policies alone would cause more damage to the US than anything Harris is proposing.
It's much less likely to happen though than a tariff plan, which is actually under the president's ability to get done.
The scale is vastly different. "essential goods during emergencies or times of crisis" is vastly different than "20% on pretty much everything".
Seems many people want to vote for the "exciting" candidate instead of voting on the issues. So they seem to want the one that mostly one keeps you entertained :(
In 1994 ... members of the Greatest Generation (then ages 67-81) — favored the Democratic Party over the GOP (49% to 42%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/30/a-different-...
A considerably different Democratic party. In 1994, Bill Clinton signed the largest federal funding bill for police and prisons in history. In 1996, he told the media "I remain opposed to same-sex marriage" and signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned federal recognition of same-sex marriage. That same year, he signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, "the ultimate goal of [which] has been to deter further illegal immigration into the US".[1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_Immigration_Reform_and...
And Americans still can't afford health care.
In my experience the best way to stop banana republic from happening is to always give power to the party with less power (which was democrat last time, republic this time), as both parties have a danger of trying to accumulate too much power nowdays.
As a Hungarian I see my own country going down economically because Hungarians outside my country got voting rights and benefits because of Orban without reqirements for taxation, and now we are stuck with a dictator.
Of course US has a much more stable system, but the leftist strategy there seems to me like a parallel to what Orban was doing on the right.
First of all, new migrants can't vote without becoming citizens. So even if it did increase Democratic votes, it would be on a much longer timeline.
Second of all, the last democratic presidents actually did a better job of returning migrants, just without all of the drama and commotion: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-re...
The reality is both parties are currently tough on illegal immigration. But one party is overtly nationalist about it.
If they vote with a provisional ballot, then once again their registration will be checked before their ballot is counted.
> As a Hungarian…
Where are you getting your news from in Hungary that is both reporting on US politics but also is so confused about the basics of how voting in the US works?
They seem to be missing the irony in their complaints; the constraint is intended upon those doing the governing.
Transcript:
John Kerry: And I think the the dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing. And it's part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It's really hard to govern today. You can't, you know, there's no, the referees we used to have to determine what's a fact and what isn't a fact, the kind of, you know, been eviscerated to a certain degree. And, people go, people self-select where they go for their news or for their information, and then you just get into a vicious cycle. So it's really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 45, 50 years I've been involved in this.
And, and, you know, there's a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities, in order to guarantee that you're going to have, you know, some accountability on facts, etc..
But look, if people go to only one source and the source they go to is sick and, you know, has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.
So what you need, what we need is to, is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having, you know, winning enough votes that you're free to be able to, to, implement change.
Now, obviously, there are some people in our country who are prepared to implement change in other ways. And . . .
Børge Brende: So you're questioning, really, for [if] democracy can survive unregulated social media?
John Kerry: I think democracies are, are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges that we are facing. And to me, that is part of what this race, this, this election is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?
Here’s a better idea: don’t give power to the party that’s trying to turn the country into a banana republic.