- cross-posted to:
- politics
- cross-posted to:
- politics
President Joe Biden will travel to Michigan on Tuesday and walk the picket line with members of the United Auto Workers union, he announced Friday, a trip that comes after the president faced political pressure to ramp up his public support for the union members.
“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create. It’s time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs,” Biden said in a post to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Biden’s trip, and the historic presidential appearance on a picket line, underscores the political opportunity as the strike against the nation’s three largest automakers – General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis – enters its second week. It will come one day before former President Donald Trump, currently the front-runner in the GOP presidential race, is scheduled to deliver a primetime speech to an audience of current and former union members, including from UAW, in Detroit. Earlier in the week, Trump’s team confirmed he would be skipping the second Republican primary debate for the Michigan speech.
I’ve spent most of my life supporting 3rd parties, but with someone like trump trying to destroy democracy and our freedom, I have no choice but to vote for the person best equipped to stop him. If there was a more tolerable republican, I’d consider going back to supporting the end of the 2 party system
Supporting third party candidates at the federal level doesn’t mean ending the two-party system… it means you value pride over pragmatism. This has been a problem since long before Trump ever came within a stones throw of the white house.
I value what having more than two parties would bring us… but its delusional to think they can be anything but a spoiler for presidential races, until we do something much further down the chain.
Plurality voting only really works well in two candidate elections. In three candidate elections, you start to frequently run into problems with spoilers.
‘Social utility efficiency’ is a mathematical measure of how happy people are with the results of stimulated elections. Plurality scales far worse than any other reasonable method.
Because of that, the best performing third parties in countries that use plurality are regional ones. You’ll have local elections where one of the national major parties is functionally a third party.
Trying to oppose the two party system by just voting third party is about as effective as trying to end car dependency by just biking down major stroads. Without changing the underlying environment (e.g. switching to a better voting system or building a protected bike lane), most people won’t follow you.
“Vote for us! You have no choice!” Is a shitty message.
I have always felt that way, but we’re so close to the tipping point of our democracy coming irreversibly unraveled that pragmatism is the only rational course for someone that believes in democracy. We should all be single-issue voters if the issue is democracy vs fascism.
If the party would quit taking advantage of us having no choice, the argument that we have no choice would sound a lot less like gloating.