The 2024 US presidential election had been widely characterized as one of the most consequential political contests in recent US history. Although turnout was high for a presidential election – almost matching the levels of 2020 – it is estimated that close to 90 million Americans, roughly 36% of the eligible voting age population, did not vote. This number is greater than the number of people who voted for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.
More than a month on from polling day, eligible US voters from across the country as well as other parts of the world got in touch with the Guardian to share why they did not vote.
Scores of people said they had not turned out as they felt their vote would not matter because of the electoral college system, since they lived in a safely blue or red state. This included a number of people who nonetheless had voted in the 2020 and 2016 elections.
While various previous Democratic voters said they had abstained this time due to the Harris campaign’s stance on Israel or for other policy reasons, a number of people in this camp said they would have voted for the vice-president had they lived in a swing state.
“The Dems are out of touch on social issues, and have tacked too far to the left to appease a minority of progressives.”
Asshole.
And ignorant - they fell for the conservative talking points too
And us progressives feel ignored by the Dems. Wild
For those who aren’t aware already, “a minority of progressives” means “queer people,” specifically trans people.
This asshole is saying the Dems went too far in trying to make things more equal.
I think there are a lot of progressives, but I think not enough of them live in swing states. I’m one, and I know there are some around in the college crowd. When Michigan went blue trifecta in 2022, I thought the pendulum was swinging, but now it looks like I was wrong.
This guy might be an asshole, but I’m not certain that he’s wrong.
Progressivism is further-left than liberalism.
U guys need mandatory voting like what we got here in aus. And by mandatory it doesnt mean u have to pick someone (its ur right to spoil ur ballot) it simply means u have to attend a polling booth.
Voting is a duty not a right
We need laws that make it illegal to spread election misinformation. We can’t function as a society with this level of manipulation and outright falsities. Nobody knows what is up or down anymore and this is just the start of what AI and propaganda news media are gonna make possible in the very near future.
Who decides what is misinformation? The government who is in power and has a vested interest in maintaining power?
Internationally recognized 3rd party committee with elected members and strict regulations on conflicts of interests would be one option.
Or just stick with the current dumpster fire that could not possibly get any worse. (Well i suppose it could, and will)
We’re able to adjudicate things like libel and slander just fine.
Misinformation or misdirection for how to vote or voting practices? The AEC will have you for that.
Misinformation or straight up political lies to convince you to vote for them?
Thats allowed.In Aus politicians can say whatever they want to get you to vote for them/not for the other parties, but they cannot trick you into filling out your vote cads to vote in a way that you didnt intend.
Is even easier than that. They will mail the ballot to your house months in advance and you can study everything especially all local initiatives and then mail it back at your leisure and people still don’t do that. It’s madness.
The problem is that the powers that be used wedge issues and the cowardice of half the citizens to sway the elections however they see fit.
Do you think they would wound their own ability to game power from the system to serve the citizens?
Ranked choice voting would be nice as well. So would having more than two political parties.
Yes Aus has both of those things too.
Voting should also be easier.
We should be able to vote with our phones.
Their are problems with that see the multiple tom scott videos on voting.
“What is the point [of voting]?,” he asked. “Aside from a handful of weaponized issues, the parties are nearly identical. They both hate the poor and serve only their donors.”
We can yell at them that the handful of issues should matter enough, or we could actually try to get a popular candidate past the party itself and I to the general.
But shit isn’t going to change until we all admit the DNC isn’t automatically on our side. I’m more hopeful than I should be for the DNC election in February, but I’m ready to be disappointed.
I really wish we had a unified left because there are enough of us to make a serious push to take over the party, but we’re too interested in bickering amongst ourselves
to make a serious push to take over the party
No theres not. This is the effect of the lemmy echo chamber. America is A LOT more conservative than ppl here like to admit. The actual left of the Democratic party are ppl like Bernie and AOC and they’re definitely not celebrated inside the DNC
too interested in bickering amongst ourselves
That’s because three Democratic party is a coalition of liberals and conservatives
Surprised not to see some self-unaware someone arguing that this position is somehow too far to the right or something
We 100% don’t agree on everything, and I don’t know how unified we can be given the number of diverse interests under the umbrella. Feminists don’t have any natural overlap with folks who want to eliminate cars or with atheists. The only unifying goal that makes proponents allies is opposing conservatives.
You’ve got black folks who are going to live their entire lives oppressed by systemic racism being told to just go along with getting rights excruciatingly slowly and trust their grandkids will have it great.
I’m afraid as much sense as your point makes, it isn’t realistic.
Problem is that leftists like money, too, and aren’t afraid to exploit others in order to get it.
“What a circus” say eligible voters who didn’t vote in the 2024 election:
The clowns are the ones who fall in line believing that things will improve.
I didn’t find Harris compelling, just more of the same.
Well you’re sure not going to get more of the same now. Good job, shithead.
the problem is, we still gotta beat Trump.
I dont think anyone knows if actual leftist messages will actually work, but holy shit it’s gotta be better than diet, no caffeine, low sodium fun size Bill Clinton Zero.
Good job, shithead.
Yeah, keep blaming the people “not falling in line” instead of just running a candidate that supports them.
That’s how we got 2 Trump presidencies and people like you still haven’t learned from it.
If anything, this should teach people like you that expecting people to “fall in line” no longer works and you should support different tactics to prevent further conservative blowouts.
I don’t think people like you are capable of learning from this, though. You’re just going to get angrier and keep repeating the same mistakes expecting different results.
You’re right. I do blame people for “not falling in line” and letting a genocidal fascist dictator who made no secret of that gain control of a nation because they didn’t find the opposition “compelling.”
And as far from not having learned, I think what you haven’t learned is that 2024 was the last real election in the U.S. in your lifetime.
Harris lost. You got what you wanted. Be happy about it.
Yeah, you’re delusional and incapable of arguing in good faith.
And yet I did not insult you.
And if you think I’m delusional about what Trump is going to do, you’re in for a very rude awakening.
Yeah. You’re too distracted by the other guy being the antichrist to focus on how democrats would rather have trump than a progressive in office.
Until that culture changes, we shouldn’t expect our government to change.
Clearly you’re doing your part in making sure things stay exactly the same, while somehow expecting different results.
I think there’s a word for that, but I digress.
You’re right. I’m “too distracted” by the fascist dictatorship to play what if.
What part should I be doing? Insulting people on the internet? What else are you doing?
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Well when you get Biden pardoning a judge who literally took bribes to send kids to jail to benefit a for profit jail, I’d question how compelling the Democrats are.
Instead of voting 3rd party and trying to change things, many Americans seems to be locked in a pointless argument over which party is the least shit.
Maybe you shouldn’t worry about them being compelling when the alternative was fascism.
How are you still arguing this?
Because it is all a lie to cover up the truth. They want everyone to think of them as righteous, good, and caring. Hell, they want to think of themselves that way. But deep down they know it’s not quite true. There’s something they hate that is more important than what happens to anyone else, and even to themselves. I suspect that for a lot of them it’s extreme sexism… Sure, they are all for a female president. As long as she is perfect. Says everything perfect, does everything perfect, and it would really help if she had a penis too. Or maybe they didn’t want an Indian or another black person… Whatever it was it was more important than their so called support for the Palestinians, support for the Ukrains, hate of fascists and Nazis, ect ect…
Whatever it was, the blood of the Palestinians, Ukrains, is a small price to pay… But whatever it is, it’s heinous and they know it. So, rather than admit to everyone, and even more importantly themselves, what they know is truly disgusting, they pretend that it was something that makes no sense. “She didn’t explain her policies, we didn’t like her policies on something even though her opponents were 100 times worse…”
It’s a smoke screen for the truth. Intellectual Dishonesty. They are lying to us and themselves.
At least the maga crowd has the guts to admit their hate. They come straight out and let you know that they are fine with the world burning as long as whatever they hate burns with it.Well then I guess you’ve gotten what you wanted. Enjoy the Trump administration and the all new domestic genocides.
Not all the people who didn’t vote for Harris are Trump supporters; there are a lot of leftists and progressives who believe that they can’t survive any more late-stage capitalism. They recognize that the only peaceful chance to stop the wealthiest 1% from ruling is to stop electing them and stop electing the people who are bought by them.
Corporate democrats are better on certain social issues but they’ll still put wealth over people, and they’ll never move left. It’s why we have the cruel health system we have today. It’s why the banks got bailed out and never got regulated. It’s why the Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed. Heck, 81 Congressional house democrats just voted for a military spending bill that denies medical care to trans kids.
Kamala Harris is a corporate democrat.
And like I told the person before you, she lost so you got what you wanted. Enjoy the fascism and the genocides.
I actually voted both third party and for Harris, so maybe don’t assume you know how people voted or what they want.
I’m not the guy you were responding to. I responded to your question about how he could still be arguing such an illogical argument.
And to reiterate, his entire argument is a lie. It’s a smoke screen to hide the real reason he didn’t want to vote for a woman, or a brown person, or whatever his hang-up is.Sorry, I agree with you.
How you still did not understand that this way of arguing won’t change anyone’s mind?
“Choose between slow sleepwalk to fascism or this rapid honest one”.
I can’t fathom why people put all the blame on the voters. Dems could a and should have done more. Harris got billion dollars for her campaign!
Biden pardoning his son is understandable, but a giant Fuck You to everyone else. He got his, now the rest will live with consequences.
DNC has fucked the USA again and again. How about some blame there.
If it doesn’t change a person’s mind, it’s because they don’t understand it.
Why would I care about changing anyone’s mind at this point? America is going to be a fascist dictatorship. Any sort of semblance of a free and fair election are over.
By understanding the problem potential solutions may emerge.
Doomerism helps the owner class, they need you to feel helpless and isolated. Don’t let them win.
Do you know nothing about Project 2025? You’ve had a long time to learn about it. The whole point is to keep Republicans in power perpetually and remove any need for legitimate elections.
And you think you can vote your way out of that?
(By the way, I love how you’ve gone from “this sort of arguing won’t change anyone’s mind” to “why aren’t you trying to change people’s minds?!?!”)
Re:btw what do you mean? It’s the same thing: you should be trying to change people’s minds, and be better at that, and I’m bringing your attention to it. You are a prolific poster all over the fediverse, so you can have a big impact on people. And I think you are aware of it.
I’ve known about the P25 for a long time, I’m well aware of its consequences. Burying our heads and losing our hope is the only way they can get away with it.
Kings have fallen, and we all should do our best to not create them again. That includes understanding those who voted for them. Ignoring the problem or its root cause won’t change anything.
I keep repeating this line in my head:
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
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Fortunately Biden wasn’t on the ballot
No, but “i wont be fundentally different from Biden” Harris was.
One guy said this “VP Harris failed to demonstrate she was ethically or intellectually capable of executing the office, repeatedly failing to detail out her policies…" It’s infuriating that people continue to believe Harris never detailed her policies despite the fact that all she talked about was policy. All they had to do was pay attention to her and she would talk about her policies, it seems like they just didn’t want to even pay attention to her. Or that because she didn’t detail alllll of her policies then that wasn’t enough. Add on that this person calls her intellectually incapable of talking about her policies, basically calling her stupid and it’s just exhausting.
This whole article continues to make me believe in the fundamental problem with Democrat voters which so many people have shown. The democrats have to run the perfect candidate with the perfect policies or the charisma of Obama who promise the world, while the Republicans can run a guy who says immigrants are eating cats and dogs and because the Democratic candidate wasn’t perfect, the Republicans win.
And then when the Democrats do promise signficant change and it doesn’t immediately happen, Democrat voters punish them for it, they lose the midterms, and any change that was in the process of happening gets stopped dead. But when Republicans promise the world and don’t deliver, Republican voters reward them for simply promising it.
“Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.”
Institutional vs anti institutional. Dems are institutional and the institution sucks. Trump is a sledgehammer. He promised alot of sledgehammering. Not good, but that’s irrelevant. The Dems need to stop protecting the broken system of neo liberal economics that fucking Regan invented and chasing the phantom center right vote.
Aka. swing left or die.
Lol this was a 1:1 repeat of 2016.
I voted and sat back as the Dems threw away their election by willingly ignoring their constituents in exchange for AIPAC money.
the only conclusion is this is the model for both parties into the foreseeable future.
All I got from this is that Democrats, progressives, and Americans are fucking absolutely stupid regardless of education level.
Why are you lumping progressives in with them?
Trump won 2 presidencies because democrats actively work against progressive agendas which would actually benefit regular people.
Progressives work against progressive agendas by naming pro-safety policies like “don’t have police respond to mental health patients” as the Fox-news like “defund the police”.
Yeah, I feel like this last election was an awakening for me of exactly how stupid, selfish and ignorant this country is on average. This country is just dumb as shit and proud of it.
Non voters are almost as dumb as the trump people.
Not really. There’s substantial evidence to indicate that voting does not significantly impact policy.
I think people like you are just grasping at straws to avoid admitting that you put your faith in a failing process.
To further drive your point home-
The evidence isn’t that voting doesn’t affect things. That’s a moronic conclusion. Its that largely things the public wants are vetoed by corporate influence.
The evidence is that voting affects things the corporate class is indifferent to- the easiest thing to point to is that the individual pet projects of candidates have an outsized effect: The invasion of Iraq being the easiest example of where the intention to create a war that hundreds of thousands died was essentially because the guy that won the 2000 election had a fixation.
Not voting takes less energy than voting for someone that doesn’t represent a potential voters interests. That’s not stupid, that’s just taking the path of least resistance.
I blame my peers who didn’t vote just as much as my peers who voted for Trump for what is to come.
I’m done giving a shit. We had a chance to stop this, and we sat on our ass.
I blame everyone who hasn’t learned from 2016 that expecting voters to “fall in line” is not a winning strategy.
Unfortunately, you’re showing us that you still haven’t learned from your mistakes so I expect more conservative victories in the future.
Anything to avoid helping out poor people at the expense of the rich, right?
I live in a blue state but that doesn’t mean I’d be justified in believing that I should sit it out. Even if that insane logic about not needing to was valid, there’s other shit on the ballot. And even if my vote for or abstaining against an uncontested incumbent is irrelevant, there’s still ballot measures that need to be understood.
The large number of eligible non-voters is primarily a result of those individual’s responses to propaganda. This did not happen by accident. I don’t blame the person that got conned, I blame those running the con job.
What propaganda? Running a shitty candidate that doesn’t represent the interests of working people is not propaganda.
If anything, this derision towards those who refuse to “fall in line” reads like propaganda. It makes sense that people like you would peddle it without even knowing.
So wait, if your state wins, the excess votes don’t matter towards the presidential candidate?
Nope, they just go to the popular vote as bragging rights. It’s a stupid system.
i guess it’s similar to our system here in canada, however many ridings the party has dictates their position in the house. its really dumb because some reps might be great people, but the leader is a total dingus. I don’t know what party i am voting for because i have lost faith in all the parties in my county.
I despise humanity’s current timeline. Can it fuck off, please!?
Meteor 2028!
Rejoice!
“It doesn’t matter” (and they’re right) is always going to be the number one answer. Very few states actually have meaningful voting rights with respect to the presidential election. Lower races are sometimes more meaningful, but even then they’re frequently forgone conclusions. The only votes I had that weren’t a forgone conclusion was some municipal ballot measures.
And yet doing something is better than doing nothing. Everyone can’t just assume that everyone else will do the right thing.
The whole reason theyre foregone conclusions is because people stay home. Someone link the map that shows non voters win most of the country.
No, they aren’t. I know my local community. We’re a blue state and going to vote blue. Just because someone is a non-voter doesn’t mean they have radically different political beliefs than the rest of their community. They’re usually listening to the same broadcasts, having the same social networks, and growing up with the same pervasive political biases. Some will diverge from the norm, but by and large non-voters simply don’t care enough to form a new political opinion. For every besieged opposition voter with learned helplessness there are ten who if they were forced to make a decision will just reference the general prevailing opinion.
And yet everyone here bitches that the dems aren’t left enough, etc. Imagine if non voters got off their asses and actually voted in the primaries.
I don’t buy that nothing would change. Don’t buy that at all.
Have you actually tried to talk to your non-voting friends about politics? An avidly political friend’s boyfriend, when encouraged to register and be ready to vote, wanted to vote for a shitty Republican because his name sounded cool. Even the ones who aren’t just outright dumb like this actively just avoid taking any position because they don’t know what the politics are and don’t want the responsibility of trying to learn. They default to very generally held sentiments and try to pick a name they’ve heard of before. They’re not the sleeping activists you’re dreaming of.
Im not saying theyre activists. I have and generally theyre uninterested (obviously) but would learn if they took the time to actually vote. That or their opinions line up with more left of center things but they aren’t represented by that because they don’t vote. (The experience is probably different given you live in a blue area and I in a purple one.)
Even if they don’t, they should vote regardless. It’s a civic duty.
Well, they may have actual made it so about what they fear about their vote “not counting” by putting the fascists in power
