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I am not convinced any significant number of people voted for Trump because they supported Palestine. Feels like a massive straw man meant to stoke divisions in the left.
No, they didn’t, but I think a lot of people didn’t vote for Harris who otherwise would have
Quite possibly but I think that has as much if not more to do with Harris massively failing to be the exciting not completely pro-establishment candidate we needed.
“I’m sorry. It was between literally the man who will destroy the country and told us as much and someone just not exciting enough. Gotta do better, Dems.”
This isn’t helpful, I never said they were smart or correct, I said I understand how we ended up here and I sympathize with people who are suffering and angry and very ignorant and susceptible to propaganda. The DNC didn’t fail at being objectively better, they failed at making people feel heard and convinced that there would be hope of real systemic change and not just roughly what we have had for the past 20-30 years.
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I think you accidentally replied instead of editing your comment
Yeah, seems likely, connect has some really annoying habits around replying to your own comment…
Why would the democrats not do everything in their power to defeat the republicans? This includes giving equal access to the electoral system to 3rd parties. This is a existential threat, act like it! Bring in everybody, let’s fucking all work on this together!
Democrats preferred the country to be destroyed over having to compete for your vote. Party over country at the highest level possible.
I understand that genocide isn’t an important issue for libs, but for most of humanity it’s pretty important.
quickly shuts history book and tucks it in his backpack
Yeah totally. That checks out.
Most American liberals have gone full blown mask off about not caring about genocide. It’s WILD to see.
Y’all might as well be trump voters in my books buds.
Blue conservatives
I mean out of the candidates she was less evil, but vote for the evil? She didn’t even promise to solve any of the long standing problems voters face and vouched to support new trending problems.
I’m not an American, but when the whole point of one(of two for some reason, and that won’t change for some reason) political party is that they will fuck you in the next 4 years, and the whole point of the other(again for some reason there aren’t any good people going into the government for years) is to fuck you harder but they also will fuck other chilling people who may understand now the real problems or(probably in the dreams) actually break the system(via either revolt or civil push against the first party), why would you vote for the first?
They didn’t vote for Trump - they misunderstood the system that was in place.
Republican citizen groups have been going over the rolls in key states and removing by challenge registered Democrats who had any small errors on their registration sowing confusion and making otherwise eligible people ineligible.
Republican resources were used to amplify third party candidates who never had a hope of success due to the nature of construction of the system to create spoiler effects. If you thought Jill Stein was a real electable option you can look back at prior elections.
The concept of moral abstention from this election removed people who otherwise would have voted Democrat as the lesser of two possible evils from the system.
Basically since First past the post is a winner take all system Even if 70 percent of the public hates the Republican platform all they have to do is win a majority voting share, that doesn’t mean they have to win your vote. They just have to mean that they have to remove your vote from supporting their main competition. They can do that via sowing apathy or divison or by changing the structure of the voting process through gerrymandering and other tactics that any dedicated volunteer can do if they are willing to slog under the assumption that what they are doing is ethically sound “payback”. The fact is that these voting systems do not support the will of a majority and both established parties have benefited from that historically… But Republicans stopped playing by the rules awhile ago and they are marketing masters.
Since Republicans have basically outlined their goals to destroy the checks and balances of the system of government basically all they needed was to keep up the ruse that the system somehow rewards people who act outside of the two party choice the system was designed to deliver. Democrats, hoping to play the long game couldn’t out the system they have benefitted from as being a rigged game if they wanted it to continue … So anything but a vote for a Democratic candidate was basically automatically an increase in share to the Republicans by virtue of subtraction hence why a lot of us are unhappy…particularly those of us who tried to explain this shit beforehand and were told we were scum for supporting genocidal regimes. I don’t like Democrats but they at least support the Laissez-faire systems that allow leftists to utilize their power as private citizens to support foreign intervention. I don’t give a snowball’s chance in hell that the support people have managed to give Palestinian interests thusfar will be able to continue at all under the Republicans.
3rd party didn’t amount to shit. It’s the lack of a campaign that has any messages other than “vote us or you’ll get Hitler” and “we’re Republican Lite, the reasonable racist”. It’s the chasing of a handful of Republican voters which didn’t amount to shit instead of coming up with popular progressive points that are simple and effective.
50k for a home loan if you’ve been a good boy is weak. Pro military shit is exhausting. Doing nothing on Gaza was unpopular, but hey AIPAC loves it. Saying you won’t do anything different from Biden was sweet and touching for Old Joe, but a horrible idea to win an election where he’s been unpopular.
Honestly… You were voting for a Hitler that would destroy protections and target vulnerable people on your home soil as scapegoats or a group who can be counted on at least to uphold the freedoms you and vulnerable groups have as a citizen on paper. Those were the only two choices you had. You can rail about how sub par your choice was but in the end you had two… and you didn’t fear the one you needed to enough in my opinion.
You can continue to beat your fists about how shit the Democrats were but if you wanted more options then that was not your moment to demand them. As one who is LGBTQIA+ in Canada with a lot of American friends I know so many people who are now scared for their lives and livelyhoods who are abandoning marriage plans in favour of courthouse weddings and are scrambling to try and get visas. I know the realities of them finding long term safety here is a shit shoot and I am trying to do what I can. I am seeing the cost of people I know upending their lives because they no longer feel safe. I was here for months beforehand listening to so many people looking at this two choice system and treating the election like a game of chicken. I am so personally angry because so many of you might as well have said “Well that’s a rainbow colored sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
I might not be the one to try and justify how Democrats were not good enough for you because that wasn’t the question you were being asked.
First of all, the thing I was responding to was your comment on 3rd party voters who (last I checked) had less votes than were needed to bring the Dems over the finish line. Jill Stein is a grifter who is probably on Russian payroll, but she is not the problem.
Second, I can make the same argument as you: the party risked it all to run on a corpo interest campaign even though people were fed up on it, just so they hadn’t have to anger those interests by running a more successful one. Now queer people are in danger because of it. What you’re saying is that instead of a party running a campaign that hinges on misinformed people voting for them, on a platform that doesn’t do anything for them, these misinformed voters are at fault. It’s just not.
This goes into the third point, you say those were the only two choices Americans had. These choices aren’t static. We all had the same conversation when it came to Joe Biden being the nominee, people also were saying Dems had to change their candidate. But people like you were saying no, these are our choices, deal with it. But after the debate all of a sudden change was so easy and natural. Your argument is bullshit. Harris nominated Walz as VP and was lining up a more progressive stance. But after some neolib pollster told her that doesn’t win her stuff, guess what? She changed her campaign back. By the way the Dems should litigate for damages on these pollsters and open up homeless shelters in their offices.
The people are racist and misogynist. Everybody knows that. Most people are living paycheck to paycheck, can’t afford housing and groceries and would rather vote a fascist who promises to change things. The Democratic party set up a campaign that hinges on these peoples virtue and promised things staying the same as before instead of change. That is the problem.
If you are concerned with 3rd party voters, then you should be working on replacing First-past-the-post voting where you live. People should have their vote counted even if their preference didn’t win. Everyone should be represented by their choices in the voting booth. People shouldn’t have to strategicly vote.
You clearly understand the flaws of the voting system, time to put it to good use.
I hope you swing by my ask lemmy post to discuss your recent commitment to passing electoral reform in your state.
I mean, I am Canadian and have been writing my MPs for literally years now and doing what rabble rousing I can but it really is a ridiculously hard system to crack. It was everybody’s election promise 10 years ago back when Trudeau was first elected and I am a part of a group of people whose rage has been simmering like the surface of the sun for decades.
Getting people to actually UNDERSTAND first past the post as a systemic weakness it is and to buy into electoral reform is grassroots hell. One thing you have going for you is that essentially the entire system is breaking down and is cause for immediate genuine alarm which if you do this right should light a fire under your asses to actually march and DEMAND change.
I agree. I also think the problem was never they wouldn’t vote for Harris. The problem was Harris needed turn out and if all the messaging around her is constantly negative people will not turn out.
I have the feeling that since the vote is over, a lot fewer people are here to defend their “ron’t vote for harris because palestine” stance. Like something was switched off…
I notice that some of them have pivoted to “this was completely the fault of the Democrats, the voters are blameless” messaging, which this would fall under.
Messages of urgent concern about what we need to do for the Palestinians have completely evaporated though, yes. It turns out that it began and ended with not voting for the Democrats, and now there’s nothing particular they want to say about Palestine. Good thing that was all we needed to do, huh? We really squeaked one out there, I guess, with our victory.
No. I don’t know why you aren’t seeing them but they are very much still there. This is just yet another effort to blame the people instead of the party that couldn’t get people to vote for it. Which is their entire job.
Yeah I don’t know what these knobs are talking about, I still see lots of people talking about Palestine and the genocide and the democrats complicity. Libs are just making shit up now.
I remember in the weeks following the announcement that Biden would step down and endorse Harris people dug into her voting record and revealed that she was one of the furthest left-leaning members of the Senate, up there with Sanders and Warren.
Now that she’s lost the election all of a sudden so-called “progressives” are claiming she lost because she was basically a Republican.
The GOP’s strategy was clearly to promote voter apathy and drive down turnout for people more likely to vote Harris, and it worked. Trump finally won the popular vote- and he did so with about 6 million fewer votes than what Biden got in 2020.
Far too many progressive, and maybe even moderate Dems and independents, really believed all the nonsense. “Both sides are the same”, “you’re vote doesn’t matter”, “there’s no way Trump can win”, “Bidenomics is totally what caused the global inflation and we are just going to ignore that post-pandemic inflation in the US was the lowest of any developed economy”, “she’s a cop”, etc. Heck, maybe there is even some misogynist or racism on the left that may have hurt Harris. And now instead of just trying to dig out way out of decades of neoliberalism we’re just escalating to fascism.
I blame everyone. The GOP and Trump of course. The billionaires (the loud ones like Musk and Bezos, but also the quieter ones like Thiel and the Walton family). Russia of course. The spineless politicians and government officials who refused to put Trump behind bars. The DNC for the shenanigans they’ve been pulling with primaries for the past several elections and for planning to run a walking corpse in 2024 instead of setting up a real successor to Biden. All of the people who voted for Trump and the other Republicans. All of the left-leaning folk who didn’t turn out for Harris. The decades of the GOP undermining democracy (really starting with pardoning Nixon, the whole Regan administration, the hanging chads in 2000, Mitch McConnell taking over the courts, etc).
The only comfort I have is that I know I did my part and voted.
She was one of the furthest left Senators. Then she ran to the right as hard as possible during her short campaign. She took progressives and leftists for granted and lost.
I keep seeing that claimed everywhere. I’ll admit that I make an effort NOT to consume political ads (or ads in general really) but I don’t remember anything right-leaning from Harris outside of supporting the status quo for Israel and Palestine.
I did hear ads on the radio in stores supporting making billionaires pay their fair share and lowering taxes for the working class. Ads attacking Trump for giving tax breaks to billionaires and wanting to cut Medicare and social security benefits. Ads supporting pro-choice and attacking Republicans for wanting to ban abortion. It’s possible that there were ads for different demographics, but the same radio station was also airing right-wing ads with incredible amounts of transphobia- dead naming and misgendering individuals and claiming they were criminals coming for your children.
It’s entirely possible I missed something because there’s just way too much election content for one person to read, but I really have no clue where the narrative of the right turn is coming from.
She also sought endorsements from Republicans who supported George Bush lying to the US to get 4,000 Americans killed. She tied the party line on a victorious economy while people are still struggling. And no a tax break isn’t going to make my rent go down or groceries cost less.
I haven’t seen any data on it yet. But I also would not be surprised to find out people believe she doesn’t matter for abortion because of state protections being enacted.
At the end of the day the message was she wouldn’t do more than inconvenience the wealthy, she wouldn’t work on the cost of living crisis, she likes the Republicans, wants to go hard-line on immigration, and is staunchly pro Israel.
4000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Kurds and Syrians.
Yup but the average American really doesn’t care about that.
You know inflation is happening world wide. America compared to other countries is rather doing well. I know doesn’t help you but also don’t think there is much a pesident can do. And there is research they the standing president doesn’t have much effect on the economy.
As Trump is about to remind us a second time, the presidency actually has a fuckton of power behind it.
Why is it when Democrats are in office they claim no power, and Republicans are in office we find out the rules are made up and the points don’t matter?
Some things Biden could have done.
- Built housing through HUD and charged no more than cost for rent.
- Create a federal grocery store that only operates in food deserts and monopoly areas. Prices are at cost, not market.
- Federal hiring as a last resort. Anyone willing to work but unable to find a job can get this job. Duties are being a gopher in your local government building and attending 4 hours of job training every work day.
- Directing the construction of federal wind, solar, and battery complexes to further shift us into clean energy.
- Directly paying gas stations to install level 3 chargers, starting in areas with few public chargers.
Inflation is a piss poor excuse to do nothing.
I would blame any Democratic candidate if they DIDN’T try to pry whatever “moderate” Republicans are left from the party. As long as they don’t compromise on policy in order to do so. Once again in asking: where did Harris do that?
Also if you’re trying to use the >4,000 US Soldiers who died in the Iraq war to make some sort of emotional appeal it’s not working. The fact that you’re going with the 4,000 number and not bringing up the 200,000 Iraqi civilians who died is a pretty strong indicator that you don’t actually care about human lives.
The economy recovered from Covid better than any other industrialized country. And you’re absolutely correct that tax breaks don’t lower prices… I have no idea what compelled you to say that. Tax breaks for the working class would grant them more income to purchase goods and services- the policies aimed at reducing inflation and in particular lowering the prices would be different policies. Things like having a strong FTC that rejects the mergers between the handful of grocery stores chains. Increasing the minimum wage. I could go on and on but really anyone informed knows that Harris’s policies would be better for the working class while Trump’s policies are going to be benefit the elitely wealthy and crush everyone else.
The thing on abortion is pretty wild speculation, and is really crazy when you consider that women have already started dying in states that have banned abortions. Like you in waiting for data, but unless we see a bunch of ballots voting for Dems in state and local elections and and either abstaining or voting for Trump, this isn’t a valid explanation.
“At the end of the day the message was… (A bunch of Republican talking points)” Isn’t answering my initial question of what the Harris campaign did to turn right. Seems like you’re just continuing to parrot Republican talking points on what they want people to think about the Harris campaign rather than living in reality.
