Technically, it could also mean that people who didn’t want to vote for a major party abstained from the election altogether (e.g. why wait for an hour and a half if you think not voting at all would accomplish the same thing?)
if you think not voting at all would accomplish the same thing
It doesn’t achieve the same thing though. There are all sorts of narratives that can be made up about why people decided not to vote that the establishment can use to excuse its own horrific behavior. A vote for a third party is a much clearer message, and it helps said third parties build momentum, even if just on a local level.
On the other hand, i won’t judge people who decided that not voting was the best way for them to protest, i live in Europe and voting is probably easier here, barely takes a couple minutes and we usually have polling stations within walking distance. Which is why personally i still go out and vote, not for a third party because here even the third, fourth and fifth parties are neoliberal warmonger Washington puppets, but for a party that i know will barely get a few thousand votes in my entire state, but at least is anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-genocide.
It’s depressing but it is what it is and you have to start somewhere even if small. The most important work we do as communists happens between elections anyway. Elections in a bourgeois dictatorship are the sideshow of the sideshow. Organizing, agitating and educating is what we should be putting the majority of our effort into.
Now i’m not sure if this graphic is accurate, and i’ve seen other reports that put Stein around 20% in this district, but either way it’s a powerful message of what happens when your candidate unapologetically supports and enables a genocide. I wish we could have seen these kinds of results for third parties all across the US, but at least this is a start.
Technically, it could also mean that people who didn’t want to vote for a major party abstained from the election altogether (e.g. why wait for an hour and a half if you think not voting at all would accomplish the same thing?)
It doesn’t achieve the same thing though. There are all sorts of narratives that can be made up about why people decided not to vote that the establishment can use to excuse its own horrific behavior. A vote for a third party is a much clearer message, and it helps said third parties build momentum, even if just on a local level.
On the other hand, i won’t judge people who decided that not voting was the best way for them to protest, i live in Europe and voting is probably easier here, barely takes a couple minutes and we usually have polling stations within walking distance. Which is why personally i still go out and vote, not for a third party because here even the third, fourth and fifth parties are neoliberal warmonger Washington puppets, but for a party that i know will barely get a few thousand votes in my entire state, but at least is anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-genocide.
It’s depressing but it is what it is and you have to start somewhere even if small. The most important work we do as communists happens between elections anyway. Elections in a bourgeois dictatorship are the sideshow of the sideshow. Organizing, agitating and educating is what we should be putting the majority of our effort into.
Case in point:
Now i’m not sure if this graphic is accurate, and i’ve seen other reports that put Stein around 20% in this district, but either way it’s a powerful message of what happens when your candidate unapologetically supports and enables a genocide. I wish we could have seen these kinds of results for third parties all across the US, but at least this is a start.
It’s hard to read that as anything other than, ‘if you had met us halfway, you’d have won by a large margin’.
These are all excellent points.