The “mass” is small and more importantly, located in safely blue states anyway. I’m extremely liberal and I accept that these presidential elections are never going to be about me. I still vote in them because I’m not a moron. But I put more of my energy into the Democratic primary, always trying to tug the D party left. And I focus on state county and city ballots where these ideas are much more in play.
That’s the adult move here. The teenager move is to vote 3rd party or not at all because the political world hasn’t rolled a red carpet out to your doorstep.
ironsoap@lemmy.one 3 months ago
That’s an interesting example, I’ll have to look it out and see if the context bears it out. I say that as although yes he might have only gotten 43%, the question is how many registered voters didn’t vote and how many eligible but unregistered voters there were.
Vermont has a fairly high voter turnout, but looking at Vermont’s Secretary of State 2016 had a voter turnout of 63% of Voting Age Population from census population. So that 185k of 505k thousands people who didn’t vote.
Also if I have the right numbers from Vermont’ SOS, that’s 43% of the state total 63% who voted.
I’ve read other demographic breakdowns on those who don’t vote which is worth looking into, but it’s hard for me to see someone say that there isn’t a mass when we have this huge population of American citizen who don’t vote. Something between 35-45% of the US just doesn’t. That’s a huge swath of disenfranchised people.
Carrolade@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I agree, but I’m leery of any argument saying those are mostly progressives. Anecdotally, progressives are usually more activist than the rest of the population, not less.