It would be nice if the far left, for once, did some introspection.

[bekkilyn]

204. I think you're giving these people way too much power

There's always going to be some people who will vote for whatever 3rd party is available. If they didn't vote Green, they would have voted Libertarian or something else for their protest, but the amount of people who did these things is insignificant compared to the greater whole.

While it might be true that if all of them voted for Hillary in the general election in the three important states that she lost, what are the real chances that they ever would have done that? Many of them might have just stayed home rather than vote at all, and there's not a single state in this country where a small minority won't vote for a 3rd party of some sort, so refusing to just take this into account isn't productive.

Maybe you can win their votes, or maybe it's a better strategy to focus more on the apathetic people who don't vote because they aren't excited by the choices provided to them, or no one has demonstrated that it makes any difference who wins...what whatever reasons people have for not voting.

Or maybe focus on all those people who voted for Obama...twice...and yet decided that this time around they would vote for 45.

Or maybe have our candidates actually visit those states next time.

But putting all your focus and vitriol on a few people who really don't make that much of a difference in the larger scheme of things isn't helpful and you're making it sound like the small number of people who voted 3rd party are crucial to Democrats winning elections when it's probably better to just go with the assumption that there are always going to be 3rd party voters and put focus on other things that are more in your control, like giving them reasons why they should trust and vote for your chosen candidates. Trying to scare people into it doesn't work because if people view your candidates as just slightly less crappy than the ones you are using as a scare tactic isn't motivating enough. We've seen this in action zillions of times. At *best* it might work short-term, but then next election people go right back to the way they were before.

It's all about marketing strategy and while we can't easily control things like Russian interference, GOP propaganda, hackers, etc. we *can* control how we present our candidates to people and the strategies we employ to *earn* people's votes. It doesn't help to keep blaming things out of our control when he haven't done nearly enough to improve the things that we can control.

And also, I would suspect that the vast majority of the people on this site do tend to vote Democratic at least most of the time and did vote for Hillary in the general election, but posts like your OP come off as an attack on people who support progressive policies such as universal health care, paid family leave, immigration, etc. And hence you get all the people jumping into these threads arguing to the death because some person or issue that was extremely important to them was just maligned. (And when you leave things open such as "far left" without giving people more specifics, then people just assume it means whatever they think it means, and so for example, you just attacked single payer healthcare, even if that's not what you meant.)

As far as what the "far left" has accomplished, FDR accomplished quite a bit. So did Eisenhower. They both supported policies and ideas that are considered extreme and unrealistic today when you get into discussions with the "sensible" people. MLK and other civil rights leaders accomplished a lot of great things and we need more. Being "sensible" about it isn't going to cut it. People are tired of waiting for the "right time" for civil rights, gender rights, healthcare rights, family rights, etc. We need good candidates who *unapologetically* support these things in both words and actions.

However, I would agree that people who belong to an official Communist Party in this country probably haven't accomplished very much, and I doubt people in our country would support their views in any widespread ways no matter how much they try to build up support because they really are "far left" and aren't presenting the social and economic policies that people want in this country.