With Trump’s help, Republicans across the country are sowing doubt about next year’s congressional elections—and gearing up for 2028.
Special elections in Florida and Wisconsin have suggested that voters are already fed up with the Trump administration and point to the possibility that the 2026 midterms could be a blue wave. As Trump’s failures continue to mount, Republicans have good reason to fear a backlash.
Perhaps this explains why Trump is intent on bolstering the election denial movement, which has lately notched a number of key victories. On March 25, the president signed Executive Order #14248, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which neither preserves nor protects our elections but rather undermines them.
It is a clarion call to Republicans throughout the nation, who are being encouraged to question the legitimacy of any election loss and ultimately establish a permanent electoral advantage by challenging and removing eligible voters from the rolls. Now, with Trump’s executive order, they have insurance: a way of tipping elections in their favor by choosing the voters rather than having the voters choose them.
Voting caused the problem, it can solve it too. But here’s the thing: for voting to solve the problem, you have to actually do it and play the game.
Every 20-25 years some rightwing psycho wins and inflicts some horror on us because new voters don’t remember what happened the last time people said “both sides are the same”. You kids know that whole Iraq war and torture thing was avoidable, right? So was Reagan’s annihilation of the middle class.
this overly simplistic and completely ignores the impact of things like voter suppression or propaganda or narrative control
Well yeah, but part of the voter propaganda is telling people both sides are the same. I get that there’s pro capitalist media bias which at its root is caused by extreme financial inequality. But fixing that financial inequality requires government action, and that requires voting. For the people who will do the inadequate version over the people who want to make it worse. Incremental change through pressure + time, just like everything else on earth.
Bush was forced onto us by the Supreme Court in a judicial coup that basically set us on our current trajectory. Trump has never won more than 50% of the vote, even this time around he only got 49.9%
In a democratic country this shit wouldn’t happen. Elections have always been dubiously free and fair in this shithole.
I’m in my 30s, hardly a kid. I’ve watched this shithole country get worse and worse my whole life, and I am beyond convinced that we will only stop it with political actions that go far beyond the ballot box. You’re going to have to get your hands dirty.
If we’re allowed to vote for the next president you might as well, I know I will, but stop pretending it is nearly good enough.
There’s definitely giant inadequacies in American democracy, but still I fail to see how voting isn’t good enough. If people voted for Gore instead of Nader, American history would be very different. We’d have avoided a giant tax cut for the rich l, withdrawing from Kyoto, and a trillion dollar unnecessary war. Wealth inequality wouldn’t be as bad, there would definitely be earlier progress against global warming, and we could probably afford real universal health care by now.
Ideally after voting in the right people, we’d fix all the democracy problems. But still I’d say voting alone would make a huge difference. Anything else meanwhile - protests (BLM, Gaza), violence (Matthew crooks, Luigi) has at best accomplished zero, and in reality seems to have done serious damage to the causes they were seeking. The one exception I’d give is boycotts - like the Tesla boycotts that have destroyed their sales numbers.
People did vote for Gore. Their votes were invalidated by the Supreme Court. The election was stolen.
Playing with historical counterfactuals is pointless anyway. Voting is over. They aren’t going to let us vote them out of power anymore. The elections will either be canceled or rigged.
It’s time to do something else.
We need organized labor actions. We run this country and we can shut it down. That’s how we got the New Deal.
Don’t forget the vandalism and arsons. There’s more than one way to hurt a business.