Oct 22, 2020
The cost of voting for Biden
Not saying that the other candidate is better
We’re less than two weeks away from the US election. I know that this article is being posted on Medium so there’s probably something like a one in a million chance of you supporting Trump.
Don’t worry — this is not a post about supporting Trump.
We all already know what a tragedy having four years of Trump has been. And so the response has been to rally around Biden just to get Trump out of office. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t, but we should all be aware of what is the true cost of rallying around Biden.
First let’s assess Biden’s qualifications:
- He’s not Trump
- He’s not Trump
- He’s not Trump
Have you ever met a single person who was actually enthusiastic about Biden himself rather than Biden as just the option to get Trump out of office? I know I haven’t.
That’s not the worst part. There’s no need for us to be incredibly enthused about a candidate for us to vote for him or her. But shouldn’t we at least know what the candidate stands for?
Let me ask you this question — asides from being a Democratic candidate that leans a little toward the center, what can you honestly tell me about who Biden is as a person or what types of policies he might support?
I doubt many people would come up with a good answer to this question. I know I’m not able to. When rapper 50 cent finally found out about Biden’s tax plan, he threw his support behind Trump even while acknowledging that Trump hates Black people. What I’m trying to say is — maybe we should do a little research before blindly supporting the “other guy”.
Some of you may say that “anything” is better than Trump. This may be true in some cases. But to make an unconditional statement like that is a little reckless. BET Founder Robert Johnson, while not supporting Trump, has come out many times and said he would prefer the devil in the white house to the unknown.
So what if we have no idea who Biden is? What is the cost of getting him into office?
Most of you reading this have probably done some type of analysis before at work. Maybe it was the conclusion of a marketing campaign and you wanted to see how it performed. Maybe it was an AB test and you wanted to see which strategy worked better. Maybe it was the launch of a new product offering.
This is the most basic thing a business does. Take actions — analyze those actions — make future decisions based on previous analysis. I don’t think many of you will deny this. For many of you, this is the crux of your current job.
Now let me ask you this — do you think the political parties will do the same? Do you think the political parties will take a look at the data and analyze the trends? Do you think that the political parties will analyze every data point of the 2020 election and use that to make future decisions?
Of course they will. These political parties are massive bureaucracies who employ people to do the same work as any corporation would do. Now the question is, what conclusions will they come to?
The Democratic party can force its preferred candidate on the electorate
Going back to what I mentioned earlier — absolutely no one is or was excited about Biden. But he was, from the start, the preferred candidate from the party leadership.
Despite many other candidates having much more enthusiastic popular support and much more clear visions on what they want for the country, the Democratic party managed to force their candidate through. This happened in 2016 with the party forcing Clinton through and this happened again in 2020 with the party forcing Biden through.
Some of you may deny that there was any wrong doing by the party. Biden just happened to win and we have to accept that he was the choice. But we all know that large institutions can set rules and disseminate information in a way that favors one outcome over another. If you think this happens in the realm of social relations or race relations — do yourself a favor and capitulate. If institutions can be too powerful and deleterious in one realm, you must be willfully ignorant if you don’t think they can be too powerful or deleterious in another realm.
You probably identify as being part of “the people”. Let me ask you this. In the 2024 primary, do you think the party will give a damn about what “the people” are enthusiastic about? Or do you think they’re just going to continue pushing their preferred candidate?
More importantly — will your voting behavior in the 2020 election cause the Democratic party to be even more aggressive in their tactics to push their preferred candidate in future primaries and elections?
Minorities will vote Democratic no matter what
This is really, really dangerous. Many of you may not believe this or understand the phenomenon so easily,so let me illustrate with a business analogy.
Let’s pretend you’re shopping for avocados. You can go to the neighborhood supermarket and buy a decent avocado for $2. Or you can go to some fancy supermarket and buy a questionably better avocado for $4. You like the environment of the fancier supermarket and the lighting in that store makes the avocado look better and so you buy the $4 avocado. You’re not the only one — many other people think the same way as you do. So the supermarket raises the price to $5. A few of you grumble, but when it comes time to buy avocados again, the overwhelming majority of you will buy that $5 avocado.
What do you think happened here? A business evaluated its customers and tried a price increase experiment. The results showed that it’s more profitable to charge a higher price because there is no loss in the customer base. In fact, the supermarket doesn’t even need to import higher quality avocados in order to charge a higher price. They spend more time on adjusting the lighting and tweaking the words to describe the avocado since the financial return of doing that is much higher than actually improving the quality of the avocado itself.
Now, how does this all relate to voter statistics and minorities?
Minorities LOVE voting for the Democratic party. Here are some statistics.
In this chart, you can see that Black people prefer Biden to Trump on a 89:8 ratio. That’s really, really high.
There’s somebody in the numbers department of the Democratic Party who going to look at these numbers and make this recommendation: Black people are going to vote for the Democratic candidate no matter what and we have the numbers to prove it. Why should we spend time actually improving the quality of the platform to gain their support?
That person in the numbers department is Biden himself. This is not fake news or a fabrication or anything like that. Biden, himself, outright said: “Latino community is diverse, ‘unlike the African American community’
Now, we all know that he didn’t mean to say this in a racist manner. But think a little harder, regardless of whether his intention was racist or not, the result is still the same. The Democratic will NOT focus their attention and resources on making a compelling platform for Black Americans. Because they don’t need to. And the numbers prove that.
The same exact problem exists for Asian Americans. Asians prefer Biden to Trump on a 75:22 ratio. That’s still really, really high.
I think this problem is actually even worse than that for Black Americans. At least the Democratic Party comes out and showers the Black community with positive words and occasionally passes policies that are supportive of the Black community.
The Democratic Party has done NOTHING for Asian Americans and yet, many of them will still blindly vote almost exclusive Democratic. The Democratic Party can’t even pay lip service to Asian Americans.
Even though Asians have suffered the worst outcomes so far for any racial group in the US as a result of COVID, the best that the Democratic Party was able to do was put together a vote to say that racism is bad. While some people may point out that how could Republicans vote against a meaningless bill that does absolutely nothing other than just say that racism against Asians is bad, here’s the other way of looking at it. The Democratic Party thinks that the only thing that they need to do to earn the Asian vote is pass a meaningless bill that says racism is bad. And Asians fell for it.
Ironically, for certain voting demographics, a vote for Biden is actually a vote saying that you don’t matter yourself.
Your vote is a vote, but it’s also a data point
And that data point will be analyzed objectively to seek out patterns that can be exploited for the future.
If you feel like you must vote for Biden, then do it. But be fully aware of what the truly cost is and what we may be giving up in the future for what we consider a win today.
My vote is to abstain
For me, my vote is going to be to abstain.
This is what my data point will suggest. Both parties have put up laughable candidates for different reasons that Americans should be embarrassed with at the end of the day. As an American, I’m not going to blindly support that system which prioritizes either incompetence on one side or political favoritism on the other side. Both parties openly and regularly insult Asians and have done very little to make any policies that specifically improve their lives. As an Asian American, I’m willing to hold my vote for a candidate that will do more to cater to the the specific needs of the Asian community.
Don’t give me that propaganda about how it is a duty to vote or blah, blah, blah. I am voting. I’m voting for my data point to show a message that I think will ultimately be the best for the country over the long-run. Just because you’re upset that I haven’t been brainwashed by either side into blindly supporting their buffoon doesn’t mean what I’m doing is “un-American” or “un-Democratic” or whatever else slogan you want to shove down my throat.
Also, I still vote in local elections, where there is less of this non-sense political fighting going on and more of actually solving problems that affect communities.
Whatever you’re going to do on election day, there’s nothing that I or anyone else can say now to change your mind.
All I ask is this.
Think a little. And understand the real impact of your vote. Both in this election and whatever else happens in the future.
