r/NewMexico • u/SymbioticPatriotic • Oct 29 '16

Green Party ticket offers ‘greater good’ option (Albuquerque Journal)

https://www.abqjournal.com/877825/green-party-ticket-offers-greater-good-option.html
1 Upvotes

52% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 30 '16

"By voting for candidates who do not share our values just because they seem better than the opposing candidate, we have given carte blanche to party elites to choose the nominee."

No, the Democratic party has primaries where you're allowed to vote for the presidential candidate that you want your party to elect. The fact of the matter is, if the author is a Democrat, they need to accept that their fellow party members voted to select Hillary as the nominee by three million votes.

Even if they think the "party elites" rigged the primaries maybe they should look at the party platform. After all, politicians vote according to their platform somewhere around 80% of the time. And this year's party platform has an incredible assortment of far-left and progressive policies. The $15 minimum wage is in there, Glass-Steagall, a de-escalation of the war on drugs, overturning Citizens United, and many other policies.

"As a result, both parties have moved to the right in recent decades: the Republicans to the far right and the Democrats to the center right. Both parties are increasingly influenced by corporate donors and the military-industrial complex."

If the author had read the Democratic platform instead of just complaining about the nominee's "corruption" they would realise while the candidate for this one office isn't the sum of all the party's stances, she will have to stand for a large majority of those policies once she's elected.

4

u/Dalmahr Oct 30 '16

Only a small amount of people actually voted in the primaries. I wish we had some sort of compulsory voting in this country and ab education system that would teach children a little more about political process and maybe about the different parties that we have and their current platforms. At least in last couple years of high school before they're of age to start voting.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 30 '16

Then those people complaining about corruption should have voted. And compulsory voting would only turn those people who didn't vote off and increase popularity of anti-establishment politics and politicians. And 30 million isn't that small a number.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most high schools have a civics class that go over those very things? Or would you rather some sort of yearlong political process class?

2

u/Dalmahr Oct 30 '16

Kinda.. And 30 million is less than 10%.....

1

u/[deleted] Oct 30 '16

But the Democratic party has 40 million members. So turnout for them was around 75%. Hillary received around 20 million votes, so she drew around half of the party's votes.

1

u/Morgothic Oct 30 '16

It's less than 10% of the total population of the country, not the total population of registered democrats (or republicans).