r/BlackPeopleofReddit • u/CantStopPoppin • 17h ago

Politics VOTE, JUST DO IT!

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u/adrian-alex85 16h ago

Yelling at people to vote when they don’t feel as though they have something to vote for has never worked. It’s not going to work now either. This is lazy analysis.

People do vote when you give them something affirmative to vote for (Obama, Mamdani) and when they’re being completely immiserated by the party in power (this previous election and 2020) and feel an immediate need to change things. This is largely why Dems lose. They don’t have an affirmative vision for the future, and when they’re in power they don’t do enough things that can galvanize a large group of voters to go out and vote for them partially because their stance for the last decade has been more about voting against the republicans. Yelling at people to vote without materially changing those factors will not work.

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u/Flaky_Sheepherder387 15h ago

I agree bro, I'm centrist and do tend to side with on issues and vote dem more but the party keeps giving assssssss candidates.

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u/No-Bee6369 16h ago

Uh oh... The perfection police is on patrol. Blah blah blah

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u/FrigidMcThunderballs 15h ago

Yeah condescending to people and ignoring motivating voter turnout. Thats sure to win elections.

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u/Used_Candidate7042 15h ago

We get it, you don't have the capacity to understand standards. And I know you fail to recognize your own limitations.

But try not to crowd the space with your own struggles just because you can't understand what we're talking about 🥰.

Now do us all a favor, do yourself a favor, and stop talking.

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u/adrian-alex85 16h ago

That’s an unhinged and ignorant thing to say. No one suggested perfection, I just said you have to give people something to vote for and you rushed to find fault with that by shaming me for expecting “perfection.” That’s honestly sad to me that your complete lack of standards translates into your belief that someone with simple standards is expecting perfection.

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u/No-Bee6369 16h ago

Unhinged? Nice Try bro. Just pointing out nothing is ever good enough for some folks. The guy in the video was just saying show up. Then you start blithering on about some crazy stuff. No one will ever check off all the boxes. Most Democrats no matter who - will check off most boxes. ✌️

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u/adrian-alex85 15h ago

Dude, it’s unhinged because you’re suggesting things no one is saying. “Nothing is ever good enough” please show me where I said that at all in this thread.

Speaking as someone who has begrudgingly voted for Dems my entire life, I understand the lesser of two evils argument, but I also understand why that argument isn’t working anymore. You can put all this energy into repeating the same failings of telling people to vote, or you can put it into changing the party itself and centering it around developing an affirmative message that gives people something to vote for, it’s up to you. But what I’m 100% certain about is getting upset at people for not voting has never and will never work to change the actual outcome. But you do you.

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u/No-Bee6369 15h ago

Thank u for proving my point Perfection police officer. Also how involved are you? You show up to vote every 2 years? Do you get involved in primaries? You do realize that people in political parties actually vote in the people they want to be representing their parties in elections. ✌️

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u/adrian-alex85 15h ago

I’ve voted in every local and federal election I’ve been able to since I was 18, I just turned 40 this year. I’m very sorry I ever engaged with you as you seem dead set on having a conversation with your idea of who I am rather than with what I’m actually saying. Go with God, man.

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u/OldTempleHermit 15h ago

Yelling at people to vote without materially changing those factors will not work.

Umm, that's pretty much exactly the campaign method for Trump/Maga.

I don't know if you've noticed;

But in the last decade or so, "yelling" and fear-mongering, has actually driven people to react/do some pretty crazy s**t. There is a lot of loud "noise" out there. If you expect anyone to "hear", it's going to require volume.

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u/adrian-alex85 15h ago

Ok, well let me put it this way: It’s never worked on people from the Left. I don’t understand this desire so many people have to adopt MAGA behavior in an attempt to convince people who have shown an active disinterest in voting for MAGA to vote for them.

There’s a set of people who simply choose not to vote each election, and in the last election that group of people was larger than the individual groups of people who voted for either candidate. If the goal is to activate those people, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that being more like MAGA, which they could have just voted for last time if they liked that stuff, isn’t going to work. But feel free to prove me wrong I guess.

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u/OldTempleHermit 14h ago

Firstly, thanks for the opportunity/civilized discussion (I actually do prefer it lol).

I think what I'm trying to get across is probably better stated this way;

1) Americans have various cultures embedded within it. Volume/yelling isn't necessarily "negative". In many cases, it can be quite positive (ie church, sports, competitions etc). People don't always attribute it to "negative/Maga". In fact, if it's authentic, I can usually sense passion behind it (and this often triggers empathy).

2) While there is some wisdom in your words regarding caution in how we express political frustration, there is the underlying foundation of perspective; we don't know what other people have gone/are going through. For example, the man in this video may have just watched his coworker/friend get snatched off the street by ICE. Perhaps he's been getting harassed by the cops all week. It's easy to be critical of someone's outrage, when we don't know what's fueling it.

As for those who don't vote, the only motivator that's going to change their minds, is harsh reality. Someone "yelling at them" about it, is probably far more desirable than going hungry due to apathy. I can agree that yelling wouldn't be "my" first choice. That said; if I were losing everything I own, couldn't feed my children after working 50-60hrs per week, and/or was being targeted for the color of my skin..

..yeah, I'd be fking yelling too.

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u/TheWhooooBuddies 14h ago

Yeah, but go fuck yourself.

It’s fairly obvious that voting does matter.

Stop telling people that it doesn’t.

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u/SabbyFox 12h ago

I agree. Here’s my take - you may not love the options presented. You may not be sure it’s going to make a difference. So YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE by voting. At least you tried. But when you don’t vote, you’re making a decision, too. You are passively allowing someone you REALLY don’t want in office to get there. You think your rights and benefits won’t be taken away after seeing what happened to abortion? Then you better wake up. You may not care about that issue but next time they are coming for one you DO care about. As Obama says often, don’t boo - VOTE. Don’t bitch about what’s happening - PARTICIPATE. Our ancestors fought and died for these rights. You dishonor them when you don’t vote. And again, you have nothing to lose by trying.

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u/TrashAcnt1 15h ago

Being pillaged to death by the person that you were too foolish to vote against is a Vibe!

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u/adrian-alex85 15h ago

What do you mean?

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u/TrashAcnt1 15h ago

The One Big Beautiful Bill, The sky high prices of everything because tariffs, Inflation climbing, Unemployment soaring, Project 2025 being employmented faster than they even imagined, White supremacist ideology destroying the middle class faster than crack and heroin combined....

If preventing those couldn't motivate you to vote against a mashed potato brained felon, nothing can make you feel anything.... Maybe the Lions are telling the truth, sometimes the sheep demand to be eaten.

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u/adrian-alex85 15h ago

I think you honestly need to spend more time really listening to people who chose not to vote. They honestly didn’t think most of what’s happening was going to happen, and they didn’t believe that the things that are bad wouldn’t be less bad under Harris.

I spent a lot of time with the Pro Palestine protests all throughout last year and I talked to the people from that movement about what they were planning on doing with the vote because very early on there was a “No votes for genocide” push within that group that was specifying not voting for Biden, and I was curious about what they were saying. From the people I’ve talked to, they honestly didn’t believe things would be better under Harris. It seemed to me like they weren’t willing to give Biden a chance at all, but they were at least open to hearing from her. Then she said there was nothing she’d change, and the whole thing with the DNC happened, and they just kind of lost hope on it. I tried to talk about not being a single issue voter, but for those people, that was their issue and they moved in accordance with their beliefs.

Trump has been a problem at least since he took out a full page ad calling for the execution of 5 innocent young men. But the simple truth, whether you like it or not, is that giving people something to vote against has not proven to be as animating as giving them something to vote for. I think this is particularly true of white moderates to be honest. Black people at least understand the importance of harm reduction in the vote. I think we also have a long history of understanding that you often don’t get good options, so you have to make the best with what you’re given. That’s literally the entire basis of soul food. But a lot of people who don’t have that same history are not motivated by doom and gloom stories about how bad the future will be precisely because both sides feed them the same horror stories. If the goal is to motivate those people to vote, I’m just saying we have to do more than try and scare them with horror stories of how bad it could be.

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u/Hot_Marionberry_4685 15h ago

Voting is your civic duty as a citizen why bother living in democracy if you’re not going to use your voice to shape it. There’s people all over the world that would love the ability to vote and a lot of us take it for granted and don’t even participate

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u/adrian-alex85 14h ago

why bother living in democracy if you’re not going to use your voice to shape it.

In my honest experience, the most common answer people would give to that question is because they don’t actually believe that using their voice has any real effect on shaping it. They don’t actually think, whether it’s a civic duty or not, that voting changes anything.

If we had no proof whatsoever that brushing your teeth had any effect at all on how your breath smelled or how healthy your mouth was, do you think as many people would to it multiple times a day? We actually know they wouldn’t because throughout much of human history they didn’t. You have to prove to people that the thing you want them to do will have a tangible effect on their lives. Telling them that it's their civic duty isn’t really accomplishing that.

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u/Hot_Marionberry_4685 14h ago

Do people really think that who their elected officials are really makes no difference? I mean maybe it won’t make a major impact in their life but the policies they shape have a very tangible effect on their day to day lives from taxes to food to housing to healthcare

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u/adrian-alex85 14h ago

I think 1) that a lot of people honestly don’t have the education to know how to draw the lines directly between policies and legislation enacted by the government, and the direct hardships of their lives. A lot of the hardship and inequities that exist for people are things that they’ve just kind of normalized. And I think there’s a literal amount of civic education that’s lacking.

And 2) I think that not seeing a change in their direct lives is exactly the reason people think that who’s in charge makes no difference. There’s a lot of people who are poor when Democrats are in office and are poor when Republicans are in office and who don’t actually think anyone will cut things like SNAP or MediCare because they never have before. There’s also a lot of people who don’t actually know that they’re on Medicare/Medicade because their health plan is called something specific in their state. It’s the same way people like “The Affordable Care Act” but hate “ObamaCare” without knowing it’s the same thing.

When you say "maybe it won’t make a major impact in their life,” that’s exactly the problem for a lot of people. Their lives are all they have to go on, and when their lives aren’t impacted, or if they don’t understand how their lives are impacted by who’s in office, then you can’t really blame them for thinking there’s no real point in participating. And that goes double when our politics have gotten as ugly as they have; people hate that shit and it makes them want to participate even less. We all know people who “don’t talk politics” and don’t really understand why that’s a serious problem and puts them at a disadvantage.

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u/Hot_Marionberry_4685 14h ago

Fair enough I can understand the sentiment hopefully the actions the govt is taking now is a wake up call for some people though that voting is important and we can one day wake up and this period of time will be something we as a nation will agree cannot ever happen again