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Wednesday's Most Active Threads
The topics with the most engagement yesterday included voting for third parties, colleges for conservatives, a niece estranged from her father, and a MCPS teacher's controversial social media posts.
The Gaza war thread continued as the most active thread yesterday with over 500 new posts. The most active thread after that one was titled, "Rob Reiner: a vote for No Labels, Bobby Kennedy, Cornel West or Jill Stein is a vote for Trump". The thread was posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. The original poster linked to a tweet by actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner in which he made the claim in the thread's title, essentially that a vote for anyone other than President Joe Biden is a vote for former President Donald Trump. This, of course, is only true if you would have otherwise voted for Biden. As one poster pointed out, if you choose to vote for a third party rather than voting for Trump, your vote helps Biden. This is the dilemma of a two-party system. Third parties act as little more than spoilers. It is no surprise that right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow, who has famously lavished extravagant gifts on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has given a maximum donation to the presidential campaign of Cornel West. Crow obviously has no interest in West becoming president and probably doesn't agree with him on a single policy issue. However, Crow does have an interest in seeing West draw votes away from Biden. Many of those who agree with Reiner portrayed those who might vote for a third party as naive or childish. One pro-Biden poster referred such voters as "idiots" and "morons". I am not sure that such language is going to be helpful in attracting others to your viewpoint. It is true that some of the posters who rejected Reiner's stance appear to be motivated primarily by emotion, but that is probably true of voters across the political spectrum. One, non-emotional argument that I see in response to Reiner is that third-party voters are disaffected and that they wouldn't vote for Biden in any circumstances. As one poster put it, "If Cornel West dropped out, his voters would either vote for another hopeless 3rd party candidate, sit out the election, or vote for Trump—in that order." While I didn't notice it in this thread, one of the biggest groups of disaffected voters that I've noticed are those who sympathize with the Palestinians in Gaza. They tend to strongly oppose Biden due to his complete support for Israel in the Gaza conflict. Their criticism of Biden has often been countered with a reminder that Trump will likely impose a Muslim ban and also be pro-Israel. Nevertheless, many of those concerned about Gaza have signalled that it is the line in the sand for them. They are essentially single-issue voters and should be viewed no differently than single-issue voters on any other topic. Moreover, with increasing frequency, I've heard the argument that Trump may ban Muslims, but Biden is participating in killing them. They don't necessarily see Trump as the lesser evil. Ultimately, attempting to guilt, shame, or bully voters to your viewpoint is probably self-defeating. If such voters are important to you, then they should be treated as such.