I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
Considering this group you’re pointing out wasn’t big enough to make Harris win maybe Democrats should focus inward on their own failures instead of playing stupid ass finger pointing games with people left of them. Y’all lost despite your stance on genocide, not because of it unfortunately.
I absolutely agree. It is horrific to see people going through the most dehumanizing of treatment by the Democratic party getting screamed down by white moderate liberals for not falling in line exactly as the Zionist machine wants them to.
More like “we fed you the result of your own actions and now you don’t like the way it tastes cuz you got worse than Harris”
No matter what else happens the fact will never change that you could have picked Harris and actually saved Gaza. But instead you pretended game theory wasn’t real and let it be destroyed by trump.
you could have picked Harris and actually saved Gaza.
Nope. This analysis is unrealistic. I would accept “Harris would have been tougher on Netanyahu,” but under Biden, an estimate of over 200,000 Gazans have died, and Harris showed no signs of diverging from his policy. NO outcome “saves” Gaza.
Well, I agree that NO outcome in the US election could save Gaza.
Probably for different reasons than you, though.
In any case you will find a lot more abstainers on lemmy.ml or hexbear, if your goal is to actually reach a significant number of them
Probably for different reasons than you, though.
which? sorry i can’t read minds and i wasn’t picking up your subtext :P
Many stayed home, how can you quantity their reasoning? They’re absent, but what you can say is for those that are capable of voting, didn’t care much they trump could win.
how can you quantity their reasoning?
Well instead of pretending it’s unknowable we can look at the demographics of who voted for Biden in 2020 but refused to vote for Harris.
It was Boomers, genX, and older Millennials. Who were white men/women and hispanic men. Most likely stayed home because these groups have well known deeply rooted misogyny.
Young people, gaza protesters, didn’t vote, the same as young people vote every election.
I mean, the endorsement of war criminals didn’t help.
Correlation/causation.
Without hard stats you can’t define their reasoning. You can only determine what they are accepting of by not participating.
That said, I certainly won’t argue against that group being quite misogynic
You’re allowed to go look at the Democrat voter demographics in 2020 and 2024.
Democrats had less votes total then 2020, and the largest groups that stayed home proportionally compared to last election were white men/women and hispanic men. And misogyny/machismo culture are the only thing in common between those groups that has relevancy, because Kamala had the exact same policies that Biden did as a white man and they had no problem coming out to vote for him.
That’s the most accurate explanation i have been able to come up with after combing through the data last year.
The protesters were almost all younger than 30s, and that group voted almost the exact same as the last like 15 elections. They barely vote at all. It just doesn’t add up at all for that to be it.
I get it. But that’s not conclusive.
If you’re doing a test and asking people to take vanilla or chocolate ice cream, or none, you cannot know the preference of the none’s.
You can guess, based on looking at their past dessert choices, but you cannot know.
Edit if you extended the experiment to say everyone will be served, and if you don’t pick you get vanilla, the most you can possibly say about the none’s is that they aren’t offended by having vanilla picked for them. (Assume everyone will eat the food. It’s the only possible food before starvation or something)
Nothing will ever be conclusive without being omniscient.
You are the one who decides if you keep moving the bar or stick to accepting what we can know instead of using speculation to justify hating your neighbors.
how can you quantity their reasoning?
How can you? and do you think chastising is gonna be the magic solution to fix it?
I didn’t you silly goose.
And I’d call it less “chastisement” and more identifying my enemy: those comfortable with trump
It’s funny how they raged online shitting everywhere, but they are nowhere to be seen IRL
And In The next panel a Nazi is stabbing the marginalized person and the dem is saying you voted for this.
You guys always tell half the joke.
It’s good to leave it open to interpretation, to keep people guessing.
They didn’t vote for it though. They just didn’t vote to stop it.
They were mainly upset that we don’t have a choice to not support genocide.
Which just betrays their utter ignorance of US history. Slavery and genocide built this country, of course we’re gonna support it.
From what I have seen they seem pretty aware of the history of white supremacy and genocide. I don’t know that this is particularly good analysis.
Expecting it to change any time soon was their naive mistake.
Imagine believing that Trump’s genocidal policy is somehow different from genocide joe and kamalacaust. It’s a continuation that they actively enabled and now support.
Do y’all understand how watching these creeps support a genocide for more than a year might have caused them to lose?
And you’re still crying about it and blaming voters instead of opposing genocide. Pathetic and gross.
This is simply not true. When Gaza is gone I hope you realize what you helped do.
Imagine believing that Trump’s genocidal policy is somehow different from genocide joe and kamalacaust
Why did Bibi want Trump to win so badly?
Thank you for your analysis. This is valuable and I appreciate it.
In two short weeks. He’s managed to put into place an ultimatum where the Palestinians either leave their homes forever, or become one with the craters their homes will become if they don’t-
… and you are STILL here expecting anyone to believe the bOtH siDeS bullshit?
Pathetic and gross indeed.
We had a choice between voting in a system that allows us some power to dissent and have a voice versus… this. The frustrating thing is this situation was just as advertised in Project 25, and then some.
We did not have an ideal choice, but we still had one. Now, here we find ourselves.
The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
Give them something to vote for. You can write articles of many paragraphs to analyze the course of the election, but in the end it boils down to this: The DNC pissed off too many of their voters and offered nothing in return.
“DNC gave me nothing in return so I’ll let the US slide out of democracy”
Smart. Those pissed off voters? Fuck them.
Exactly this! You can’t just “lesser of two evils” your way through life as you slide towards hell. “Lesser of two evils” isn’t a choice, it’s a hostage situation.
I had some vote blue no matter who nitwit yelling at me the other day about this. i asked them what are we supposed to do when 2028 is Mitt Romney (D) vs Trump ®. They said you vote Romney.
People who voter shame others when both parties have crossed their personal morals are the reason the Democats don’t ever run on anything substative. They have forgotten they have to earn votes. They’re not owed.
And they have forgotten that when they lose, real people suffer deeply for it. The democrats sin of apathy is often worse than the republican sin of cruelty. At least the republicans are honest about how they want to screw over the country.
Choosing the bigger evil ain’t the way out of it though. Unless you are an accelerationist that believes things have to get worse before it can get better.
You can’t get out of a hostage situation by making out with either of the two bank robbers.
no one is making out, but you if it’s life or death you would listen to their demands until help arrives/opportunities arise.
This ‘logic’ (and metaphors are not logic) is why help isn’t coming.
then are people actually punching the robbers themselves?
The reality right now is the bigger robbers are now taking things even more brazenly.
By not voting, you are telling both robbers “both of you are free to do whatever you want”
God I hate the stupidity of blue MAGA.
I did vote. You don’t know me.
Your stupidity, and the reason you can justifiably be called blue MAGA, is that you don’t understand what the primary responsibility of the politician is, and instead blame the political parties failures on the voters. Because the Democratic Party can never fail. They can only be failed, right?
There is one group that can and should be blamed for identifying, and then happily handing power over to fascists. Hint: it isn’t the voters.
Blaming the voters is some Stockholm syndrome level bullshit to protect the campaign consultants and other unelected assholes that got rich off of this loss. That is who you are protecting.
The lesser of the two evils didn’t go after the bigger evil, offered nothing, said the economy was doing great as people suffered higher rent and groceries, and then wondered why people listened to the lying devil saying that they would fix their problems.
They don’t want to offer solutions, they want votes.
Yeah. No matter how I look at it, this seems to be the only real solution that would have helped.
Gaza was bombed into a parking lot under the Biden admin. Harris was going to continue Biden’s policies. Liberals are just mad because now the policies Trump is implementing affects them. They never cared about Palestinians.
I think they offered more than most people see on social media. Their messaging isn’t great and I’ve seen a lot more left-leaning youtube channels talk about them but not outside of that.
Then again, I’m also not American so I don’t know.
Lastly, the non-voters are as much to blame in my opinion. If you didn’t know you should have voted, that’s on you.
That’s sorta the problem with the Harris/Walz campaign, and why I’m thinking this was malice rather than stupidity. Their policy on their website and a lot of the early rhetoric was very progressive, which led to Harris getting the highest single day of donations and the largest number of small donations the DNC has ever seen.
After the money had poured in from all us poors, including my $20, the campaign started shifting its message further and further rightward to appeal to more and more corporate donors, all the while still asking progressives for more money. Eventually, the speeches being given stopped matching the previously posted policy platform at all, and we started to get the absolute insane shit like Obama telling black men to fall in line.
I think they offered more than most people see on social media.
The problem is that they made big promises in the early Harris campaign, then continuously abandoned them and watered them down until the campaign became a shadow of its former self. Equally problematic is that they continued to shift to the right and adopt policies that are unpopular with their base. I mean remember the border wall? And of course let’s not ignore the elephant in the room that was Gaza.
Giving subisidies to green energy companies and improving the GDP doesn’t tangibly improve people’s lives in 4 years and that’s what people wanted.
It also takes longer than 4 years to rebound everyone out of the spiral Trump left the nation in. I think messaging around realistic goals and checkpoints could go a very long way to allowing people to understand no President is going to save everyone in a single term, or probably in 2 terms, especially if they have a crater to climb out of just to start at zero. Real change is a long term goal, it would take multiple administrations working towards a goal.
Americans are not educated enough to understand any of that.
They’re hurting finantially, so they get mad and vote out the incumbent.
Democrats push policy like the avg american went to their ivy league schools.
It’s not even really that, it’s just that home loans of like 10,000 to people who have made rent for the past 2 years and have a salary of over 80,000 but not over 200,000 and own a small business and own at least 2 cats but not over 3 cats and have a birthmark in the shape of a strawberry, isn’t very enticing or hopeful policy. Neither is campaigning with liz cheney when like 200,000 people are being killed with US bombs.
The DNC platform was free medicine, money out of politics, and taxing the rich.
If they could have resurrected a Unicorn live on stage and it could have magically cured cancer in the radius as thanks: people would still be shitting on them all over the internet.
The DNC platform was free medicine, money out of politics, and taxing the rich.
Money out of politics? From the DNC? Do you seriously believe this? When was the last time Hardis talked about this in her campaign?
They voted on campaign finance caps and limitations in 1995 and 2002 which passed and was sued by Citizens United in 2007 when 5 republican leaning SCOTUS judges struck it down as unconstitutional, and the DNC tried to pass more campaign finance laws recently with HR 1 For the People Act in 2019 and 2021 and again as Freedom to Vote Act in 2021 and 2023.
So yes, the DNC have actively attempted to pass campaign finances for over 20 years. That’s a core part of their platform.
Admittedly I didn’t know that, but also where was any of that in their 2024 platform? When was the last time Harris included getting money out of politics in her campaign speeches?
I think they focused too much on emotions and cowboys in their advertisements as well, but it’s not like they never stated their intentions. People just don’t talk about this stuff in social media, these days, and thats sadly exactly where most people hear about politics in general.
The reason I’m asking is that the Harris campaign progressively dropped or watered down its promises throughout the campaign. For example the wealth tax promise started out good (I don’t remember how much) and ended up as an unfulfilled Biden-era promise. Statements or promises from the early part of the campaign, let alone from before the campaign, don’t reflect the choice voters had at the ballot box. One example would be the DNC going from rejecting the border wall to promising to build it.
The Democratic platform is really quite leftwing. It contains things like increasing the minimum wage, getting money out of politics etc etc. The problem is in how they run campaigns. The role of consultants is far too big, and this lets the GOP set the agenda.
Example: The GOP talks about the border constantly->media reports on the border-> voters in focus groups report caring deeply about the border->Dems campaign on the border (arguably their weakest point).
If Kamala had campaigned heavily on healthcare (say expanding Medicare), she could have shifted part of the focus away from the border and towards healthcare (the GOPs weakest point), which shifts the momentum.
The same happened with many other topics. The campaign talked about the economy (whatever that means, but somehow voters associate this with GOP), rather than raising minimum wages or building homes (a strength of Dems). Climate change was never even mentioned throughout the campaign.
Dems have to find a way to lead the conversation, rather than follow a conversation set by the GOP or they will never win.
The DNC platform in general has a lot of leftwing policy yes. However, they’re very… noncommittal about it. The party leadership is a bunch of geriatric centrists who only pass some progressive policy among an ocean of status quo centrism. However, that part alone is… fine. It’s not good, but not really a big problem. The big problem is how they sideline their leftwing platform whenever there’s an opportunity where they think they can do that without being flayed by voters, such as in this election. I’ll paste my reply to the other guy here.
The reason I’m asking is that the Harris campaign progressively dropped or watered down its promises throughout the campaign. For example the wealth tax promise started out good (I don’t remember how much) and ended up as an unfulfilled Biden-era promise. Statements or promises from the early part of the campaign, let alone from before the campaign, don’t reflect the choice voters had at the ballot box. One example would be the DNC going from rejecting the border wall to promising to build it.
Part of this is bad campaigning, yes, but it’s also undeniable that they actively attempted to shift to the right in this election. They didn’t campaign on progressive economic policy because, if they did, they’d find themselves obliged to make good on at least some of those promises, which would piss off their donors. I mean remember the “nothing really comes to mind comment”? Talking about the wrong things is one thing, but when asked about the right things the Democrats gave very wrong answers.
Give them something to vote for.
This. We saw the energy and joy when Biden dropped out, and it was reflected by Harris almost matching Obama’s small donor numbers. Hope. Change. They were simple campaign slogans, but people coming out of the Bush era wanted to believe, and had a candidate to believe in.
It’s a damning indictment that my most genuine electoral engagement, in my entire adult life, was voting “Uncommitted” in the 2024 Democratic primary. That was my most enthusiastic, “I 100% support this” vote ever, because almost every other time has been against something/one, or accepting lesser. From ballot initiatives, Senate races, down to the local comptroller chair.
Contrast that to my vote for Kamala in the general afterwards. It’s so unbelievably hollow to say “our democracy is strong” when the choice is always ‘well they’re better than them’.
Kamala supporters should look in the mirror and ask themselves why they’re ok with their candidate enabling genocide
She used the only power she had to try to negotiate a ceasefire. What you are saying simply isn’t factual.
The only thing she wanted to change about bidens administration was to add more Republicans, the same administration that was regularly sending arms to Israel. Palestinians weren’t allowed to speak at the dnc. She had plenty of opportunities to show support for the Palestinian people, every time she supported Israel instead.
She didn’t add as many republicans as Trump did. Trump want to put American boots on the ground in Gaza for the US to take control. How many Palestinians did Trump allow to speak?
If those are your concerns, you chose poorly.
Nice deflecting from your rebutted “factually untrue”
To answer this new prompt, just because Trump supports genocide doesn’t mean you needed to accept Kamala supporting genocide
I chose not to engage with your strawman. It was not a rebuttal. She tried to negotiate peace. That’s a fact. Trump wants to remove all Palestinians from Gaza and take it for the US. That is a fact.
It was gazas best chance at actually existing. Also she was the only one with a chance at 270 electoral votes
Your turn. Why did you vote for someone who couldn’t get to 270? Do you not realize you literally helped trump?
Voting is not supporting and my state went blue so no I didn’t. Also that’s not relevant to the conversation at hand. The point is that she was a shitty candidate that supported genocide and mostly ran on not being Trump. But when people correctly point that out, many such as yourself get more angry at that person instead of the shitty candidate. What it feels like is you’re married to the dnc, and when someone accurately tells you that they’re abusive and they’re cheating on you, you shoot the messenger.
No one is inspired to vote for the lesser evil. Be mad at the dnc for running a campaign of “we’re not going to help anyone but at least we’re not Trump” instead of actually trying to be good. Working people are your allies, not the elite trying to divide us with stupid electoralism.
why they’re ok with their candidate enabling genocide
I don’t think this is a fair analysis of any real person’s position.
That’s a real comfort to all the genocide victims
It certainly isn’t. Victims of genocide are unaffected by any individual’s mindset. I fully agree with your position; I’m simply advocating for an exploration of that mindset to inform better future choices.
May not be their mentality, but that is the reality when you show more contempt for those mad about said genocide enabling than for the figure you’re advocating for despite them enabling genocide
I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
I didn’t abstain. I voted for a candidate that didn’t support genocide while living in a solidly oligarch controlled state. What you would probably call “throwing my vote away.”
But no voter had a say in this past election. It was a struggle between the corporatist and oligarch branches of the capitalist class, and the oligarchs threw more money at buying the election.
That’s it. No need to vote shame, regardless of if someone did or did not vote. It should be blatantly obvious by now that the Office of the President is (well, was) a rental. Now the oligarchs bought it from the corporatist landlords and plan to remodel and reside in it forever.
There is no war but class war. Nobody is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves. Organize. Let’s make voting useful again.
At least the better part of them are now posting under the hashtag
#DonaldOfDeath.It becomes more simplified if you just look at the US as a one party state with two divisions that serve the same one party leadership.
The time for voting is over. It’s time for fighting now, and I don’t think “I told you so”s are helping us unite and work together right now.
Both can happen at the same time. We don’t need to love our ally to fight against a shared enemy. Especially when you feel your ally helped empower them.
Can they though? I mean to some extent maybe but I think it needs to be carefully articulated and respectful. The typical one line takedowns are just signals of tribal affiliation, they don’t persuade anyone and just increase animosity between us.
I agree.
Funny how this always only applies after the election after things have gone South. Any asks to come together during the election where fighting together actually matters is met with derision and “how will we force DNC to change otherwise?”
I’m done. Dirtbag leftists have shown they are not and never will be real allies. Their naiive ideals and the sound of their own voices are more important to them than the suffering of marginalized communities in the US.
We’re done with you.
I voted and did the liberal things. I’m not sure what more you want from me. If you won’t help us fight then that’s your choice but spare me the infighting please I am so over it.
I advocated for voting for Harris, and did so when the time came. I also don’t think this blame game gets us anywhere, and I’m already a little sick of talking about it.
I’m also done defending the Democratic Party as a whole. Individuals, yes, but not the party. I’m realizing through this that I have a certain reflexive need to correct misinformation about Democrats, but I’m clamping down on it.
I will never regret choosing to vote third party no matter what happens. I will not regret my vote even if Trump marches me personally into a gas chamber. The sooner you get that through your heads, the better. You will never be able to “scare me straight” by pointing to the Republicans, no matter what they do.
The reason things have gotten as bad as they are, to where we have to choose between genocide and genocide-lite, is because of a complete unwillingness to have a spine and draw a red line, out of fear of letting the other side win. We have sacrificed every single standard and principle in the name of that fear. This “common sense” strategy of unconditional support of the lesser evil is actually completely insane, and easily falls apart under scrutiny.
However, if you cannot be persuaded that we are correct, then it is better that you see us as stubborn and irrational. Because a stubborn and irrational person will only be persuaded by giving them what they want, and not by words or anything else. If you want to make sure the Democrats actually win next time, the best strategy is to pressure them into conceding to our demands. Which, if you think about that for 5 seconds, it makes our approach seem a lot less stupid and irrational, but what do I know, I’m stupid and irrational.
It must be easy to stand from on high in judgement of others when you aren’t the one that stood to lose anything, because It’s the ones that have nothing to lose that always go all-in at the table.
Your lack of regret clearly illustrates that your decision was influenced by a colossal amount of entitlement.
The vote wasn’t between genocide and genocide lite. It was between genocide lite and genocide, plus additional genocides, some domestic, plus economic sabotage, plus the emergence of a new evangelical southern Baptist military regime.
I don’t think that narrowing the scope of the voting gap to just you is helpful, so I don’t want to use this as a moment to level scorn. I just want to be very clear that the premise you presented is wrong. Very wrong
Sure, the material consequences if you, specifically, live in a swing state. I do, so I voted for Kamala. But this take, applied outside of states that were up for grabs, is asinine. But hey, nuance is for people who don’t want to just keep trying the same failed approach to presidential elections every 4 years and would rather bitch about anyone less moderate than them.
But this take, applied outside of states that were up for grabs, is asinine.
What take? Philly D’s post question or my own response to it? (/gen I am just missing what you are referring to promise!)
I took your response to be supportive of Philly D’s post, but sorry if I misunderstood.
Yeah no worries I was more looking to genuinely engage with the question he asks. No blame before the question is answered :)
I guess your title really gets to the heart of my take on this. If there aren’t material consequences for most of the people who voted third party I really don’t understand the anger a lot of people feel towards them. In swing states sure, but for the rest of the people? It just doesn’t make sense to me unless there’s some fundamental misunderstanding about how our elections work.
unless there’s some fundamental misunderstanding about how our elections work.
Yeah, this is pretty much the core of it, I think. There were very minor attempts to gain nuance on the issue, say, there were people in the swing states that were committing to a vote towards kamala which would be contingent on an equivalent one or two protest votes for a given DSA or PSL or whatever other kind of candidate in a non-swing state, so as to be a protest vote.
I think the underlying logic kind of remains the same though. You can’t leverage votes, because democrats don’t give a shit if they lose, realistically. That’s jack shit, to them, they don’t really care one way or the other, I think. Cynical part of my brain says that trump probably didn’t even really want to run a second time, and also didn’t really want to win, and is just coasting on the momentum that he had previously which has sort of locked him into the track he’s currently on, which would at the very least comically make this election a comical contest between candidates who are almost actively trying to lose.
