alt Hacker NewsSerious 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?
Replies
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.
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.
> 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.