this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
429 points (83.1% liked)

politics

19144 readers
2860 users here now

Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

Rules:

  1. Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.

Example:

  1. Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
  2. Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
  3. No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
  4. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
  5. No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

That's all the rules!

Civic Links

Register To Vote

Citizenship Resource Center

Congressional Awards Program

Federal Government Agencies

Library of Congress Legislative Resources

The White House

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Partnered Communities:

News

World News

Business News

Political Discussion

Ask Politics

Military News

Global Politics

Moderate Politics

Progressive Politics

UK Politics

Canadian Politics

Australian Politics

New Zealand Politics

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It's an important fact, but hardly a major or unique case. I know I've personally never felt like any of the candidates in any of the elections I remember were great, just "good enough" or "better than some of the alternatives," I certainly would've replaced them if I could.

Looking at some recent primaries

Back in 2020, Biden only had 51.7% of the votes in the democratic primaries. That made him by far the biggest single candidate, but that also means that almost half of democrats would have probably been happy to replace them with one of the other 4 candidates if they could (though they would have disagreed on which of the 4.) Most of them would still go on to vote for biden despite him not being their first pick.

In 2016, trump won with 44.9%, again the biggest single candidate, but that means that 55.1% wanted not trump. Of course most of that majority still held their nose and voted for him in November, but the majority of them probably would have been happy to replace him at that time if they could.

2008 was really fucking close for the Democrats, Obama beat out Hillary with 48.1% of the vote to her 48%, and the remaining 3.9% voting for various other candidates, that means that the majority (51.9%) of people wanted a candidate other than Obama. Same year, McCain won his primary with 46.7%, so again the majority did not vote for him but for various other candidates.

And I think it's pretty safe to say that in just about any election throughout history, voters would like to replace the opposing party's candidate if they could, no surprise there.

A really big news story would be if the majority of the party not only would replace their candidate if they could, but were actually in agreement on who they would replace them with. If 6 in 10 Democrats said "We would like to replace Biden with this one specific other person that we all agreed on" then that would be big news.