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I'm seeing a consistent stream of content from people these days decrying Biden and saying that they're not going to vote for the Democratic party in the election. This is one example:
Here's another:
And here's a tweet indicating that voting for the Green Party is not the same as voting Republican:
This sort of thing seemed to start around the time the Israel-Palistine culture war heated up and I haven't really seen it stop. I've even seen one that says that our choices for November are basically Voldemort and Palpatine.
This may just be coming from social-media acquaintances of mine and just the sources they follow (I have a lot of really leftist acquaintances), and may not be representative of the general populace. I really don't know.
I find this interesting for a few reasons.
Imagine how annoying they are if you'd prefer Biden to win.
One underrated thing about living in Australia with compulsory, ranked choice voting, is that our political discourse is blessedly free of this kind of self-indulgent signalling. We obviously have our own domestic foibles (per Walter Cronkite: too many journalists, not enough news) but more generally: structuralist comparative analyses of political discourses strikes me as something both rich and relatively understudied -- especially in wider conversations about polarisation, epistemic closure, radicalisation, new-media landscapes and so on. There's been some research on how the US primary system exerts a centrifugal force on candidates (e.g. adams/merrill), how polarisation necessarily sustains marginal turnout (e.g.), and so on but I haven't seen a holistic structuralist take on all the factors together in those conversations.
There's clearly some lensing/closure effects that makes these kind of sentiments in the US particularly annoying when mediated through social media and the Algorithm, but the actual underlying cause seems much more rooted in the inability of the political system to a) co-opt and recuperate extremists (or more broadly, those whose views aren't represented by mainstream parties) and b) handle and mitigate swathes of society whose potential votes are rendered statistically meaningless (both in reducing this alienation in absolute terms, and alleviating how it feels on the ground).
Australia has a few structural advantages in this regard that makes the political discourse significantly less annoying than America. RCV lets minor parties absorb fringe or special-interest positions, while necessarily funnelling their preferences inward to more major parties (effectively defuses the 'no one represents me' line and complaints about picking the lesser of two evils). Compulsory voting makes political expenditures targeted not at maintaining turnout in single-issue, activism-bound constituencies (abortion, guns, most obviously in the US) which allows these factions to be more effectively clientalised by major parties: ideological activism groups must be catered to in the US to avoid demoralising them as turnout engines. In Australia where they can't deliver turnout, these special-interest activism groups can be much more easily captured -- someone particularly interested in abortion might get upset when the libnats loosen access, but they're hardly going to preference labor over it.
Yes, I am profoundly grateful for the way that living in Australia makes so many of these arguments moot.
Turnout is irrelevant. All elections have 90+% turnout. It is impossible to win by turning out the base.
All votes must be full-preferential. It is therefore impossible to harm your own side by voting third party. All votes will ultimately flow to either the first-ranked or the second-ranked party.
The Australian system isn't perfect and it's possible to contrive weird edge cases where you get unintuitive results, but in the main it is just so much better than, well, almost any other country in the world (and especially messes like the US or the UK) that I have to feel grateful for it.
I still marvel occasionally at the fact that a solid third or more of the political discourse around the 2019 election revolved around minutiae regarding the refundability of tax credits attached to retiree superannuation accounts. Just weeks on weeks of it, probably lost Shorten the election. Australia may not be a particularly intellectual country imo, but the proverbial 'pub test' here presumes a baseline level of Tocquevillian political literacy/sophistication far beyond what most countries could hope for. I don't think that's necessarily because we're particularly special as a people (perhaps a little bit), but we have some very well-constructed institutions that curb some of our worse impulses.
I'm kind of excited that we're going to get a serious debate over nuclear power this election.
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