Illegal vote suppression elected Trump, but even if it hadn’t, you should blame Democrats before blaming people who voted for third party candidates. Now, if you’re talking about people who “protest voted” by voting for Trump (in both the primaries and the election), then sure. Those people did, in fact, play an instrumental part in electing him.
Why blame Democrats? Well, beyond just kinda being Republican-lites:
- for opposing ranked choice voting (and alternatives)
- for not rallying around progressive candidates
- for not choosing Kamala via primary elections in 2024
Democrats are the bare minimum “harm reduction” party, and I don’t bare any ill will toward people who voted for them rather than a party that would actually try to effect change, but the opposite mindset - blaming third party voters for not voting for Democrats - is very shortsighted. And as third party voters have never had the power to enact RCV or STAR voting or otherwise improve the system, blaming them instead of the Democrats who have had that power is inane.
I’ve voted for a Democrat every single presidential election that I’ve been able to, but I honestly wish I hadn’t. I’d much rather there be more visibility for third parties, and for more people to feel empowered to vote for third party candidates.
There have been so many places in front end web dev that used the abbreviation “a11y” without defining it (or explaining the 11) that for years I assumed it was just the name of a particular library that had gotten Kleenexed.
(To be clear, I’m using “Kleenexed” as a verb here to mean “genericized explosively, as if a sneeze.”)
It didn’t help to look at the code, either. “Okay cool, so all this does is add a bunch of random extra tags to the DOM? Doesn’t seem super useful but okay, I guess there’s probably some tool out there that depends on them but we probably don’t use it.”