Privilege:

1) Dismissing advice about how to persuade voters—even though the stakes are so high.

2) The smug belief that people on the fence ‘just don’t get the risk.’ Rather, they understand too well the longterm risks of maintaining a status quo that, for them, was a crisis. https://twitter.com/jeremylarter/status/1300076168427769856

Many voters are balancing the real risks Trump presents against the fact that harm reduction voting is exactly what enabled the rightward drift that brought us Trump. What they’re looking for is some assurance that the Dem Pty has a floor. That 4 years from now will be different.

Many of these people aren’t accelerationists— precisely bc they appreciate the risks of a Trump win. But they’re also deeply resentful of having to sublimate the real harms they endure under the status quo to ward off endless new threads enabled by the two corporate parties.

There needn’t be a trade off: Since the policies these voters are asking for are also extremely popular with the Democratic base AND many Independents and conservatives, Biden could adopt them and become MORE electable. We could beat Trump and dramatically improve lives.

But Biden can't do that if he, and much of the party, remains beholden to corporate donors and advisors that back the interests of their industries over the interests of Americans.

Leftists understand this, and have pretty low expectations of Biden as a result. But they want to extract some meaningful concession. Something like marijuana legalization: It's so popular and doable by executive order that none of the usual "incrementalist" rationale applies.

And yet Biden wont. At this point, it's obvious that many aren't "withholding" their vote. They're asking that their vote not be taken for granted. If Biden refuses to do the bare minimum to secure much needed votes (not to mention volunteer support), where does the onus lie?