Comment by INTPenis
7 hours ago
Serious question from a clueless european here, who should they vote for?
To us on the outside, getting filtered news that trickles down, it just seems like there are no candidates. One is 79 and one is 83, where are all the young politicians? Why does the media choose to only emphasize a few of them at the time?
> One is 79 and one is 83, where are all the young politicians?
Down ballot. There are very few elections where nothing on the ballot is of stake.
The 83 year old wasn’t the candidate.
If you're talking age, the US just had a 60 year old run in the last election and the party that complained to no end about the elderly running for office still voted for the 80 year old. Next election, the other frontrunner is currently 58. We had a strong 38 year old candidate in 2020 but the South collectively still doesn't like gay people enough to have him win the primary.
> We had a strong 38 year old candidate in 2020 but the South collectively still doesn't like gay people enough to have him win the primary.
That 38 year old, along with the rest of the center left candidates, all dropped out to ensure the 70 year old candidate could beat the other 70 year old candidate. "The South" had nothing to do with it.
Incorrect. Buttigieg won #1 and #2 delegates in the first two primaries of Iowa and New Hampshire. It was only at the fourth primary, South Carolina, when Biden won 6x the votes, that the Buttigieg campaign dropped realizing they had no chance because of underperformance in only the South.
Only 54% in SC say homosexuality should be accepted by society. 42% in Arkansas. In 2025! https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1lxzznb/acceptance...
The 83 year old dropped out before the election took place. Kamala Harris is 61. No spring chicken, but at least not old enough that she should've retired years ago.
The two-party system will always leave you with suboptimal choices when it comes to casting your vote, but the alternative to Trump was two decades younger.
US elections happen in two stages, a "primary" where each party decides their candidate and then the "general" where the final winner is decided. It sounds like you may only be getting news about general elections (and may have missed the news where the 83 year old ended up getting swapped out).
Yes, the system sucks and there should be more and better candidates.
But when one side represents fascism and the other doesn't the choice is still easy.
There are plenty of young politicians. Their parties deliberately keep them out of power. Political power in the united states gets strangely concentrated by our 2 party system in a way that tends to ossify policy and promote more ring-wing versions of both parties.
(also a Brit)
Biden was no longer a candidate even by the time the last election happened.
Look to Mamdani. Note that the real election there was in the primary. If you squint a bit, the US electoral system looks like the French one. There's two rounds of voting, and in the first one you get to pick who is the crook that will be put up against the fascist in the final round.
It's going to be boring and time consuming, but people have to use the levers they do have available to do internal Democrat party politics if they want to improve the situation.
If there's one thing both parties agree with, it's that you can't ever vote for a third party because that's effectively voting for the other major candidate. So the problem of not having more than 2 choices perpetuates indefinitely.
> If there's one thing both parties agree with, it's that you can't ever vote for a third party
Actually, both major parties (not always at the same time) have a long track record of working very hard to promote voting for third-party candidates, doing things like funneling funds covertly (or simply nudging donors) to fund their efforts, assigning party activists to support third-party efforts, etc.
Of course, they exclusively do this for third parties whose appeal is, or is expected to be, mainly to people whos preference, if choices were limited to the major parties, would be for the other major party.
Because it's not just rhetoric, as long as the electoral system isn't reformed to change this, getting people to vote for a minor party instead of your opponent like demoralizing them and getting them to stay home, or disenfranchising them (two other things the major parties have been known to try to do to populations likely to vote for their opponents otherwise) is a lot easier and exactly half as useful, per voter, as getting them to switch to you from the other major party.
That only works if the message of the third party is more appealing to those voters. And so the major party also pays attention to which third party messages from those who would support them are getting through and changes.
It is also helped because many of the people who are insiders in the major party are secretly voting for the third party when the majority of primary voters (who are rarely well informed) force someone they don't like on the party. They can't do anything this time, but they can send a message to each other where they failed.
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Whichever choice has the least favour is malleable. Right now, by switching up their candidates and policies, the democrats can't do any worse than they're already doing, which is losing. If the democrats next time, then the republicans will have 4 years with nothing to lose.