datdestinyd:

My mother is a die-hard conservative Republican. When I told her I had registered to vote, she rolled her eyes at me. When I asked why, she told me that “the worst thing for America is young, stupid liberals voting.” Liberals in the U.S. outnumber conservatives. The only reason Republicans win is because more of them vote. If you want us to win this upcoming election, get to the polls and vote, especially if you’re voting for Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Hillary has a lot more money and name recognition than Bernie does, so the primaries will be very important. Even if Bernie doesn’t win the primaries, Hillary being president will be a lot better than Donald Trump or Jeb Bush running this country further into the ground. Abstaining from voting in the general election because you don’t like Hillary will give the Republicans a victory on a silver platter and that is the worst thing that could happen right now.

beefyseb:

If you’re Canadian and are 18, please VOTE. Seriously. VOTE. Be aware and proactive as to what the fuck is going on in your country. And I’m not going to tell you who to vote for but lets be real here. Don’t vote for Harper. 

jaanfe:

artielu:

kata-speaks:

swanjolras:

endquestionmark:

swanjolras:

okay jesus fuck this conversation has gone far enough so:

hey, so you like bernie sanders! i like bernie sanders too! i agree with his politics! he is doing better than people expected in the democratic primaries, which is cool!

what are you going to do if he loses?

because given the tone of the conversations i hear on this website right now– given the sheer hatred of hillary that’s emerging, given the overwhelming feeling that bernie sanders is amazing and the messiah and the only candidate that’s worth voting for in america– here’s what i see happening in mid-2016:

• bernie sanders, who despite his better-than-expected performance still has an unbelievably low chance of winning the primaries, loses the primaries to hillary clinton
  
• the leftist wing of the democratic party (that’s us– tumblr, yeah, but also the whole occupy-black lives matter-third wave feminist-young educated millennials crowd), having spent the past 10 months campaigning against hillary clinton, is overwhelmingly disappointed
• while a few people are willing to bite the bullet and campaign for hillary, energy is low, disillusionment is high, and many leftist americans don’t campaign, don’t donate, and don’t vote (or vote for third-party candidates, like the green party or the peace and freedom party)
• the republican party wins the presidential election.

(i literally shivered as i typed that last bullet point, btw– i know there are people voting in 2016 who were ten years old when obama was elected, and y’all may not remember much of the bush years. i was only 13 when bush left, but jesus christ– remember when hurricane katrina was overwhelmingly badly handled? remember when the patriot act passed? remember when the housing bubble collapsed? remember when the president said god told him to invade iraq? y’all wanna do that again?)

so what are you going to do if bernie sanders loses?

i need you to think about that now. i need you to not be surprised when it happens. i need you to not put all your hopes in one basket.

you think the gop won’t be pouring all their resources into this election? you think the superpacs and the koch brothers and the oil lobbyists won’t be throwing their money at ballot boxes until they spit out the result they want? you think the rich and powerful and conservative won’t be bringing their best game? 

they will, and if we don’t work twice as hard as they do– no matter who the democratic nominee is– we are fucked.

i need you to be okay with the idea of hillary clinton being president of the united states, and i need you to make peace with that before she wins the primaries, so that you’re prepared and ready to campaign for her with all your might if she’s the democratic nominee.

because i honest-to-god believe this country will not survive another four, eight, twelve years of a republican administration.

#remember ralph nader? #I FUCKING WELL REMEMBER RALPH NADER #WE’RE NOT DOING THAT AGAIN. (via swanjolras)

my hand to god i have seen so many posts on my dash that have been both heartbreakingly optimistic and absolutely mind-bogglingly uninformed (and naive, but that comes with time; information comes with googling the way the government of your own country works. fun fact: not all primaries are open primaries! i know! this is inconsistent! it is also the world that we live in and i don’t think we’re going to get around to redesigning the electoral system before november 2016. just saying) and, like every election year, i have sat down and thought, albeit briefly, about this possibility:

• the republican party wins the presidential election.

that is not a possibility that i can or will accept. i know we like to mythologize our figures here and put them on can-do-no-wrong pedestals, but, for god’s sake, to paraphrase: can we live in the real fucking world here, please? by all means, know that we can do better. by all means, know that we should. but here are some facts:

• the us electoral system is not going to change by november 2016.
  
• the notes on your tumblr post about bernie sanders’ ideology are not going to translate to votes.
• those votes are not as big a percentage of the voting population as you think they are.
• even if they were, bernie sanders is not going to be able to wave a magic wand and:
• turn those ideas into policies
• get those policies signed into law
• get those laws implemented
• they aren’t going to be perfect anyway.
• can you imagine the reactionary voting in the election immediately following that anyway.

this is not how politics works. you don’t vote a politician into office and then stand back and watch the world fix itself! you don’t get to do that. it takes work and it takes time and it takes, sometimes, the willingness to accept and keep pushing through lowered expectations. i’m happy for your optimism and i’m happy for your energy. we need those! don’t lose them. do, however, remember that there is context to this, because we live, again, in the real fucking world.

#i have read posts calling hillary clinton problematic.#i fully expect an edit of bernie sanders in a flower crown to cross my dash sooner or later.#real. world. (via endquestionmark)

THIS.

FUCKING THIS.

FUCKING EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS.

And this has an embarrassingly low number of notes.

I know how a lot of people here feel about Hilary. If I had my druthers, I would MUCH rather have Bernie Sanders as president because his politics so closely align with my own. Like, stunningly close. A-breath-of-fresh-air close.

But consider these words from an ancient, jaded, 34 year old fuck who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000…

NONE OF US agreed with Gore. I mean, not really, at least. He was Republican-lite. First off, his wife Tipper was a friggin’ censorship Nazi, Gore was a Southern Baptist who was mum on gay rights, and while he gave lip service to climate change, please note that An Inconvenient Truth had not been produced or filmed, and there wasn’t much in the way of supporting the Kyoto protocols in his platform. He supported the limited military action in Iraq, supported NAFTA, and supported driving our production overseas. There wasn’t much to his platform other than “less scary alternative to Bush”. In other words, he was problematic as hell.

Then there was Ralph Nader, a consumer rights advocate, a proponent of gay marriage before it became a mainstream cause to champion, against NAFTA, spoke out against the military industrial complex, was pro-union, and anti-corporate.

And I voted for him. Proudly. In the general election. My reasoning was that nearly everyone I knew was voting for him (and everyone I knew were fellow college age leftists) so if enough of us got together and enough of us wanted that change to happen, then it would, right?

“Well, we’re talking about the primaries,” I can already hear you say. And yes, we are. But consider this: if Bernie ends up not winning the primaries, and no one turns out to the polls to vote for Hilary so they can “make a statement” or because she’s “problematic”, or turns out and votes Green or some other third Party for those same reasons, then history will repeat itself with disastrous consequences.

Here’s what happened on election night, November 7, 2000:

We waited.  We watched Gore lose in battleground state after battleground state by just about the same number of votes that went to Ralph fucking Nader. Bush took all the dip shits who thought he’d be a swell feller to have a beer with. And then Florida and the recount and the Republican Party-led coup that stormed the voting recount, triggered the Supreme Court ruling and handed George W. Bush control of the country.

The first thing Bush did was reverse each and every executive order Clinton had put in place over the protestations of a crybaby Republican Congress, and most of those executive orders were designed to protect the middle class from corporate America and protect our budget surplus from the military industrial complex. Then Bush instituted legalized class warfare: the tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and still do to this day.

Then 9/11 happened.

If you’re 22 right now, then in 2001 you were 8 years old. In 2001, I was 20. I watched friends of mine who had joined the military because there were few other opportunities for them after high school get shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan and get their limbs blown off by IUDs. There are people I knew, people I ate lunch with every day, who are FUCKING DEAD right now.

This country was an unchecked fascist dictatorship for six years. Don’t believe me? Here’s the dictionary definition of fascism. And here’s what happened during the Bush regime.

Torture. Suppression of the press. Siphoning the nation’s wealth to the upper 1%, creating our current aristocracy. Investments made by principle members of the Bush regime in for-profit military-industrial corporations that were tasked with murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Sunsetting the assault weapons ban. The Defense of Marriage Act. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The loss of an entire city and fucking nothing done about it as people were drowning and starving to death in New Orleans. No Child Left UnTested Behind. A color coded number system on every day of the news telling Americans how frightened they needed to be that day that hilariously enough coincided with how far Bush dipped in the polls that week. He dipped, we went up to terror threat: orange. His poll numbers went back up. Like clockwork.

Between 2001 and 2005 us leftists who thought that there was no different than center-left Democrats and right wing Republicans got hit by a giant clue by four and watched the fucking Republicans dismantle our safety, economic security, and our entire way of life. No, the centrists are not the same. THE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ARE NOT THE SAME. One faction sort of listens to us. The other doesn’t give a shit about us and actively promotes policies designed to kill and silence us.

…

So for all the “problematic” that you imagine a Hilary Clinton presidency could be, I want you to imagine a Republican presidency (pick one) in which they want people like us fucking dead as pawns in their war games or fucking dying because they’ve stripped away the Affordable Healthcare Act.

So please Support Bernie Sanders. Support him because if enough leftists make their voices known through his candidacy, then NO MATTER WHAT it will influence the DNC platform next summer. Support him because we’re all passionate about returning America to a thriving, working democracy and flushing out the corporate lobbyist corruption that has held our entire government hostage for a decade.

But if he doesn’t win the primaries then you need to support Hilary Clinton. And I’m not kidding, I’m not being hyperbolic.  If the Republicans win, then you need to start preparing yourself for life under a fascist state.

Hint: it will help if you’re fundamentalist Christian, wealthy, white, straight, male, and cisgender. 

Otherwise, you’re fucked.

All of this. Read it. I also lived through the Nader debacle. Vote for Bernie in the primaries if you agree with him. I like a lot of his politics too. But then you MUST SHOW UP FOR HILLARY IN THE GENERAL ELECTION OR WE WILL END UP WITH A THIRD PRESIDENT BUSH.

Three Supreme Court Justices are very old and may die in the next Presidential term.

www.rockthevote.com

#RockTheVote

theperilsofpenelopepitstop:

zaewen:

theperilsofpenelopepitstop:

I see all of y'all hopping on the Bernie Sanders train and that’s cool, because he has some awesome ideas. But, if he gets elected, please remember that he’ll more than likely be fighting a Republican controlled Congress and the President’s powers are limited.

Please don’t get this guy elected because you want things to change and then abandon him when that change can’t happen immediately.

That’s a really good point and also why we should encourage people to vote in the congressional elections in 2016 and 2018 so he can get a congress that will actually work with him. Vote in all elections! From city to congress to presidential

Very true! Midterm elections are suuuuper important and you should vote in them!

mech-bull:

elrondxrn:

iammyfather:

zeshuetoral:

prideandpen:

theliberaltony:

2015 is the first year that the Millennial generation makes up more of the voting age population than any other generation.  

That is why the older generation is trying to suppress your vote. They know that you can change the world they destroyed.

The first step we should take is getting Bernie Sanders elected President of the United States. We should show the world that we refuse to stand aside while an older and smaller generation insists on the destruction of our Democracy.

This is just the beginning, This is the first year we have as the largest voting generation in US History.  

Let’s make the most of it.

Don’t forget to register as a democrat and vote in the primaries!

Please vote in the primaries, it’s arguably more important than the general election will be this time around!

Don’t forget local elections, they are the foundation that builds future politicians.

ALL OF THIS

Sure, but let me add: vote your preference/conscience in the primaries, but in the general, vote for the Democrat candidate, no matter who it is. Don’t vote for an independent or third-party candidate, don’t vote for a write-in, don’t sit out on principle or whatever. Vote for the candidate that is

close enough to more progressive ideals AND has the best chance of winning. Learn from past mistakes on this one - the lesser of two evils is still better than the alternative. Also, check your local requirements; you don’t necessarily have to commit to a party affiliation to register to vote.

nikita-alba:

loveprouvaire:

So, here in England there is an election coming up and as a politics student who is under the legal voting age, I am getting incredibly frustrated at the fact that I can’t vote. BUT. Hopefully someone out there is reading this who can.

In the UK right now, we’re dealing with a participation crisis. Low voter turn-out in the 18-25 age group has led to our generation being ignored and having to take much harsher cuts and policies than our elders, who have a higher voting turn out. This means that your participation is crucial! This means that you turning out could have a direct effect on the changes that are made to our lives!

Since political education in this country is pretty shitty for everyone who doesn’t have a special interest in it, I’m going to just leave you this to help you make up your mind on who you want to vote for- there are quite a few out there but this seems to use the most accessible language.

Please, I am begging you to turn out. This is not nothing to do with you- a descision made here could directly affect your life in the future so please don’t think that it’s someone else’s right to make that descision for you! VOTE!

Jesus Christ - YES! You have a voice, use it! You don’t trust the party leaders? Do something about that. Show the Government that you ARE willing to vote, but you want change. This is so important! Also, small thing - the election isn’t just in England - it’s the whole UK

fffcuk:

dear “don’t vote” side of tumblr

do you remember when you convinced most registered voters to sit out the mid term elections a few months ago & caused the republicans to win both the house & the senate because “voting is pointless!”

OR do you remember when people “not voting” in Florida caused George Bush to be elected for a 2nd term???

FUCKING VOTE! REGISTER & VOTE! EVEN IF NO ONE FUCKING VOTES SOMEONE WILL STILL GET ELECTED SO NOT VOTING IS LIKE THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO