It’s wild to me that we’re having a discussion about Israel in these comments, voters told us exactly what their major concerns were and they were economic and it wasn’t even close. Foreign policy, trans issues, etc are all hot button topics easy to argue over but voters felt the economy was bad and that’s the biggest reason Trump won.
29% - Ending Israel’s violence in Gaza
24% - The economy
12% - Medicare and Social Security
11% - Immigration and border security
10% - Healthcare
9% - Abortion policy
5% - Don’t knowThese kinds of questions lead almost invariably to expressive responding which is valuable information and something we should always dig in to, but it does not have a one-to-one relationship with actual voter behavior. In fact it can deviate quite far from it.
Easy example: “if Trump were convicted of a felony would it change your vote?” At some point you saw as high as 20 to 25% of a Republicans falling into some sort of reconsideration status, but obviously it did not have an impact at all when he was convicted. That response didn’t tell you what they were going to do, it told you what they think they were supposed to value and say. It more reflected on the kind of person they thought they were, which is somebody who cares about justice.
No one is going to openly say “I care about the price of groceries more than the mass murder of innocents.”
What I’m pushing back on is “it wasn’t even close”
Maybe Gaza wasn’t the deciding factor, and obviously we can’t know for sure because this is all hindsight and because polls aren’t necessarily always perfectly accurate for the reasons you said, but I don’t think it should be dismissed. It was close.
Wild. When you dig into those poll results it is sadly clear that Kamala only would’ve won by pivoting right.
Except these people didn’t decide the election, because almost nobody who voted where it matters did this and if every one of them had shown up the outcome would have been the same. Across the six states that flipped from 2020 to 2024, Harris lost less than 80,000 votes combined. She was less than a percent off Biden’s record setting performance. Trump gained more than 800,000 votes in the same places. The block that decided the election was not Democrats ‘staying home,’ it was independant and irregular voters showing up—for Trump.
She got 7 million fewer votes than Biden.
Now I’m not saying the economy wasn’t important, I’m just countering the claim that “it wasn’t even close” - it clearly was.
Good job pretending like you don’t understand that the electoral college exists and why that matters.
And in order to figure what was most important to voters you also have to consider the ones that actually, you know, voted. Which that poll almost entirely ignores.
Okay, so the poll I linked were people that voted. They cast ballots for someone other than Harris.
Online sample of 604 voters fielded from December 20 to January 07, 2025.
Lol
So they polled people who were chilling on the internet over the holidays, like 6 weeks after the election
Pardon me if I find Pew more trustworthy
IMEU and YouGov are generally considered credible sources, but okay.
You give them sources they agree with and they still ignore the facts of reality.
Well… They felt it was bad, but actually it’s pretty fucking good. So the cause is clearly uneducated dumbfuck voters? Keep em stupid and keep em watching TV.
There’s a lot of ‘either-or’ fallacy going on here.
You can be pissed off at Biden and Harris for their enabling genocide; angry at the DNC for making the same mistakes again and again that keep opening the door to fascism, recognize Trump as the worst case scenario, vote for Harris despite the bullshit above cuz she was the clear lesser evil, be angry at other voters for either overtly supporting fascism or allowing it to win in some self-defeating act of defiance, and recognize that people are burnt the fuck out and drew the line at both sides supporting genocide to just clock out and let the world burn cuz nothing else is working.
Pointing your finger at any one person or concept isn’t going to accomplish shit. We’re dealing with a system that’s absolutely saturated with compounding failures.
The solution? I don’t fucking know. Probably nothing Lemmy’s TOS would allow us to discuss. But two or three or fifty etc things can be true at the same time, and what we DON’T need to be doing is fragmenting communities that see eye to eye 99% of the time - that’ll just package ourselves up in little bite sized pieces for the fucking Nazis to steamroll like they did the last time.
There literally is only one party(no pun intended) worth holding accountable, and that is Biden, Harris, and the Democratic party leadership. Sure you can be angry at other voters for not voting how you wanted, but that’s not productive, and ignores the issues that made them vote however they did. The Dems one job was to appeal to their voting base, and they failed miserably. Holding them accountable is the only solution that actually addresses the issue, which is that millions of people are dissatisfied with them. You’re not going to bully a huge amount of Americans into changing their minds, but putting pressure on the Dems, whoch is what the ‘undecided’ voters were all about, might eventually yield results. It might have even happened in this last election if other so-called progressives hadn’t taken such a strong stance trying to silence them, or accuse them of being russian trolls. If the polling numbers had been worse in the year leading up to the election, if the ‘blue no matter who’ crowd had taken a stand, if people hadnt theown away their only leverage months before the election even happened, then maybe the democrats would have altered their campaign trajectory and we wouldnt be in this situation. As it is the DNC are the only ones who are truly at fault.
As it is the DNC are the only ones who are truly at fault.
They certainly hold a large share of the blame, but my point is they’re not the only ones who fucked up.
Since we’re following parallels to pre-Nazi Germany, let’s compare it to that. They had a similar cascade of failures that lead to the Nazis rise in power, so as a ‘what if’ kind of thought experiment, what should _____ have done in order to prevent that rise (and ultimately the Holocaust)? The blank applies to any of the key players, ranging from the established government, to the individual citizen, and everyone/every group in between.
All of them fucked up to some extent - some WAY more than others, but the important bit is that their collective effort (or lack thereof) failed.
I’m sure you see where this is going. Fast forward to today and we find ourselves in the same boat, riding the razor’s edge edge of that exact same failure… but as dangerously close as we are, we still haven’t gone full Nazi, so we’re still (barely) in ‘what should ____ be doing’ territory. Not what should we have done, but what should we be doing.
And like I said in my previous post: I don’t know. Probably something we’re not allowed to discuss per Lemmy’s TOS, so I guess we just skip that part of the conversation while we’re here. What’s left? Mutual aid. Planning. More planning. What are the most immediate threats we’re facing under the worst case scenario, and how are you prepared to handle those? Do you have a passport? Where do you plan to go if you need to use it? Is it up to date? Are you equipped to defend yourself in the event that you belong to one of the groups Trump targets via stochastic terrorism? Do you own a firearm? Have you cleaned it in the last decade? Is the ammo still serviceable?
Those are the kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves and anyone in our life who’s part of a group targeted by Trump. Here and now, I don’t really give a shit about the DNC. What’s done is done. I’m worried about what I need to be doing to keep myself safe. I’m worried about whether or not my trans neighbors will be able to stay safe, or the immigrants who have come to support my community through their labor, or, or, or, – you get the point.
What we need right now is unity. If it becomes evident that Trump or his admin lack the capacity or spine to go full Nazi, then fine, let’s spend our energy on bitching out the DNC. Right now we have bigger fish to fry.
Do what you need to do to be safe, and please help others on that path as you’re able.
I don’t directly blame Biden though.
The blame falls first and foremost on the DNC. It’s likely that if they hadn’t overtly sabotaged Sanders, Trump wouldn’t have even had a first term, much less a second.
I blame Biden for his administration’s unwavering support of Israel’s ongoing genocide campaign. That 100% depressed voter turnout.
I saw a couple heavily down voted articles that said that was the largest issue and around 30% of people who voted Biden 2020 but didn’t vote 2024 gave that as their reason.
It’s fucking insane so many people immediately started denying that was the biggest issue
The stupidity is with these fools thinking Trump would be better for Palestinians.
If it wasn’t obvious with Trump moving the embassy to Jeruselum and telling Bibi to, “Finish the job” while privately meeting with Bibi to likely stall a ceasefire agreement pre-election to make Democrats look back, Trump definitely is fully enabling of said Genocide, likely making it worse (eg, you think he would’ve pressed for a humanitarian aid route into Gaza? FUCK no.)
So then the logical thing to say in an inevitable binary-choice election is: “if Trump and Biden/Harris are equally bad on Israel/Palestine policy (they’re not), is Biden/Harris better on other issues, notably domestically, like oh I don’t know women’s rights and climate change?” You bet your ass.
Hence why couch sitters and Stein voters piss me off far more than Trump supporters, themselves; for they should know better. Yet they fell for the online astroturfing disinfo wars. Drank the Russian vodka.
Edit: The user below keeps curiously deflecting, so I’ll just cut to the chase by going above:
Genocide (a) has a spectrum of severity and is not a boolean function, while (b) Gaza isn’t the only place an attempted Genocide is currently being carried out; Ukraine is another place — and it is abundantly clear that both Biden and Harris were better than the Putin-sympathizing puppet that is Trump. So if you didn’t vote, worked against Harris, voted Stein, etc. then YOU, too, are complicit with blood on your hands of WORSENING not one but TWO genocides.
yeah no. If people seriously abstained from a vote because of Israel and Palestine, and that abstention allowed Trump to win, then the democratic voters deserve to never win an election ever again.
I still believe 2016 was the most important election of our lifetimes, but this one is was a close second, World War III is basically in its pre-game show. and this is how people voted. Just kill me now. ffs
Uh… Trump actually did something about Gaza so it seems the Gaza protest non-voters got what they wanted.
Your fallacies are:
- Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
- Begging the Question / Circular reasoning
Try not to construct your beliefs atop a flimsy house of cards.
Can I have that in English? In case you’re saying what I think you’re saying, you should read [this>(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/15/a-stern-message-how-return-of-trump-loomed-over-gaza-ceasefire-negotiations).
The thing you people don’t understand is, for people that understand genocide, understand electoralism US dead at the moment we do it.
Trump doesn’t enter into the equation. He’s not a Boogeyman you can wave.
Genocide always expands. Jews weren’t Germany’s first or primary target. They weren’t even in the top five.
Biden made genocide the official position of the modern United States, meaning the US was going to target women, lgbtq, minorities besides Palestinians no matter who was in office.
No matter how you people bitch and moan about how awful it is that you’re now higher on the list of victims than you were before, it doesn’t change the fact you started this genocide domestically. It will be known in history as Biden’s genocide even as Trump continues it.
Nah, we can argue that the conservative AIPAC that has lobbied our government for decades and put both parties into a bind of blindly supporting zionism at the risk of otherwise being labeled antisemitic as being part of the root problem.
There’s a reason both Bibi and AIPAC wanted Trump reelected, and logically, you’ve only exacerbated the suffering of Palestinians everywhere.
Genocide (a) has a spectrum of severity and is not a boolean function, while (b) Palestine isn’t the only place an attempted Genocide is currently being carried out; Ukraine is another place — and it is abundantly clear that both Biden and Harris were better than the Putin-sympathizing puppet that is Trump. So now YOU are complicit with blood on your hands of WORSENING not one but TWO genocides.
So I’m sorry but your logic still is not holding any amount of water.
Fascists flock together, hence why Biden went around Congress multiple times to deliver arms to Israel and sent troops without congressional approval to Israel.
Aipac didn’t care who got it hence why they were one of the biggest donors to the Harris campaign.
I’m sorry you got duped into being the bad guy.
Biden cannot unilaterally send aid to Israel without apportioned money being approved by Congress. You may have forgotten this was the stumbling block to getting aid to Ukraine in the first place that stalled for a year thanks to Republican obstructionists?
Yes, AIPAC plays both sides. They still preferred Trump as president. Connect the dots as to why.
I’ll just repeat what was obviously, desperately deflected:
Genocide (a) has a spectrum of severity and is not a boolean function, while (b) Gaza isn’t the only place an attempted Genocide is currently being carried out; Ukraine is another place — and it is abundantly clear that both Biden and Harris were better than the Putin-sympathizing puppet that is Trump. So now YOU are complicit with blood on your hands of WORSENING not one but TWO genocides. So I’m sorry but your logic still is not holding any amount of water. Read again: If Biden is indirectly complicit in Palestinian Genocide, then so too are you for voluntarily making it worse in both Gaza, AND Ukraine.
Trump doesn’t enter into the equation. He’s not a Boogeyman you can wave.
He’s going to be president in two days because of people like you. The blood of Palestinians, Ukrainians, and women and LGBT folks in the US is on your hands.
No, he’s going to be president in two days because Hillary Clinton decided to boost him up using her connections in the media because she stupidly thought she could win against an anti establishment candidate while representing everything americans hate.
Big? Sure. Biggest? No. Biggest was “the economy”. It’s practically a law of nature that inflation ends governments.
No, it beat the economy.
I’ll try to find it
Edit:
According to the poll, 29% of that voter group said “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was the “most important issue” for them in the election.
Gaza was followed by the economy (24%), medicare and society security (12%), immigration and border security (11%), healthcare (10%) and abortion policy (9%).
I wasn’t thinking so specifically about Biden voters who stayed home in 24. I see that’s what you were talking about initially.
If you simply ask everyone who voted for Trump, the economy was the top issue. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/13/what-trump-supporters-believe-and-expect/
That’s all I was saying. But there are, I think, three groups which it would be interesting to have this answer for. The first is the one you mentioned. The other two are people who voted for Biden and switched to Trump, and people who chose not to vote in 2020 and voted for Trump in '24. I couldn’t find those answers readily.
are you noticing that your comment regarding the yougov poll stating this fact is getting more engagement than any of the other comments and are you also noticing that they’re all refuting it?
Nope, but I block alot of people who refuse to address how to gain voters back and just want to screech at them (even tho they’ll never see/hear it).
It makes social media a lot better and I highly recommend it.
Right, but again, the only reason that was relevant is because the DNC sabotaged Sanders and forced Biden on us instead.
They sabotaged Sanders twice, technically.
And Hillary Clinton literally ran with a “Pied Piper Strategy” to elevate Trump because she was convinced she was going up against Jeb Bush. She wanted to make the right-wing seem unhinged and god damn it she got what she wanted, they’re actually unhinged.
Pied Piper Strategy
It seemed like a good idea to me, given the information available at the time. I didn’t believe that the American public could support a man like Trump. I don’t think I was particularly uninformed, or that my judgement was poor.
Better not vote for the Kamala because she “supports” genocide. I’ll just sit back and let the guy that said he’d let Isreal wipe Palestine off the map win. That be much better, and I can lir to myself that I didn’t take part in a system that gave us these two choices.
This is a great example of why Democrats lost: feeling entitled to votes. You don’t get someone’s vote just because the other guy is worse, you have to get the vote out by convincing people you will help them. “Stop whining about drowning in debt and the rising COL, the economy is great” obviously didn’t do that. Better double down on it and call everyone morons, I guess.
But like what’s the other option? You know you’re getting one or the other, and one is going to hurt a lot of people rather directly.
Really, though, the time is now to start trying to make changes, when we’re in an election that ship has sailed and you ARE picking the lesser of two evils.
The other option is what people did: staying home, not voting, and not caring which one they get because neither one has done anything to improve the material conditions in their day to day lives. All the yelling about duty and democracy isn’t going to do shit to motivate people who are up to their ears in bills and working three jobs to pay rent.
Like, obviously that’s not ideal. I’m one of the people who is at risk during a Trump presidency, I know he’s the worse option. But the DNC can’t coast on “wow those guys are just so bad” forever, they have to actually do something.
And yes, I know Republicans try to stop the government from doing literally anything helpful at every turn. That doesn’t mean the Democrats have to lose their fucking spine about it. If they’re not even willing to threaten the nuclear option with the filibuster then they’re not even doing politics, they’re just getting paid to argue politics on TV with their office buddies.
Sure I get it, and I don’t disagree, the dnc cannot just coast on ‘well at least we’re not THAT bad.’ But if someone stayed home and didn’t vote or voted 3rd party out of spite, I have no patience for their calls of ‘boo boo don’t blame us, blame the dnc!’ I know several people who are terrified about what the incoming presidency could mean for them, and I am also afraid. Sure the dnc and the democrats don’t do very much for us, but at least they are militantly opposed to us.
Again, the time to start pushing change is NOW. Not in 4 years, when if we do nothing we will once again be stuck with well, at least is isn’t actively awful.
That is if we even have a democracy for next time.
Yeah, for the most part I don’t disagree. I held my nose and voted Harris even though my presidential vote doesn’t matter in a blue state anyway. I just think the responsibility ultimately lies with the DNC, not the voters, since the DNC’s job is literally to get Dems elected. I’m not particularly optimistic about how much the DNC really supports us, even if they are for sure better than Republicans.
I’ve stopped expecting anything in the way of progress nationally that isn’t coming out of the courts (SCOTUS is weirdly a mixed bag in this regard). I’m not expecting any of them to stick their neck out in the next 4 years when I’m already seeing think pieces about how trans rights cost Dems the election.
Do you disagree, was voter turnout for Democrats not low? Or are you being sarcastic because you can’t address the content?
I’m pretty sure I directly addressed it. I don’t even know why you would think I was implying turnout wasn’t low. Fucking weird.
You didn’t directly address anything, you deflected legitimate criticism of the dnc to criticize voters.
Voters should be criticized, they made a stupid decision for stupid reasons. Every person has personal accountability and responsibility.
Another reading of the election is that people were unwilling to crawl over the bodies of dead Palestinians to vote for a choice between maintaining the genocide or increasing it.
I don’t particularly agree with that reasoning, but I understand it. Voters carry some blame, but it’s ridiculous to say that it’s mostly or even significantly the fault of voters. It’s primarily an issue with the electoral system and the political parties within it.
Since subtext isn’t your thing I’ll spell it out. If you sit out elections you’re a fucking idiot. If you didn’t vote for Kamala because she didn’t explicitly state she’d stop the genocide you effectively enabled someone that stated they would speed up the genocide. Again, a fucking moron. Sitting out an election does not remove you from the system.
Good job sending the DNC a message. I’m sure all the harm coming from the Republicans controlling everything for a minimum of two years will be totally worth it, and the DNC will definitely move in the direction you want them to.
I’m not even a Democrat or Liberal, but y’all need to live in the system we have and not the system you want.
Fuck’s sake.
The election was 2 months ago. Stop hinging everything on something that happens once every 2 years, because there’s nothing more to be done about it now. Kamala wasn’t going to do shit to stop the genocide, and voters showed that it was an extremely important issue that the democratic candidate failed to differentiate on.
Now we have a Trump presidency, paved by the DNC, again. What are you going to do to fight back?
especially since this is so completely different from every presidents lack of support for isreal even if you just take demorats into effect. Pluse the way the issue completely allowed a party that would fight isreal to win. And of course that we did not push our 911 agenda so much that any ally could say this is our 911 and immediately get not only from us but also from europe. yup. completely unique to biden and nowaday democrats.
Fuck people who didn’t vote over that. Like it or not, we have a two party system, and not voting was a vote for the current state of affairs.
Like it or not, those people have the right not to vote. Pressure your 2 parties to have less shit choices or that will continue
The parties don’t see not voting as pressure to change. They see it as permission to not give a shit about your opinion. Get progressives.to run in Democratic primaries then turn out to vote them onto the ticket for the general.
Sure, but they forfeit the right to complain about the current government.
Nope, that’s the neat part of our system
I don’t directly blame Biden though.
I do, he wasn’t capable to be president and knew he was just going to be an empty suit.
And he signed up for it faster than Reagan.
If Biden gave half a shit about America he’d never have even ran in the 2020 primary.
Mm… there’s some merit to that I guess, but that’s expecting more integrity from a politician than is likely even possible. If he wasn’t an ego-driven opportunist, he wouldn’t have had a political career in the first place.
No - I still blame the DNC first and foremost. Biden’s unfitness wouldn’t have mattered if the DNC hadn’t cynically and self-servingly engineered his win.
but that’s expecting more integrity from a politician than is likely even possible.
Don’t judge every politician as a block.
Some actually work for the people, they’re often called “progressives”.
Then we have “neoliberals” who propped up Biden despite him obviously being a shell of his former self.
They might have the same letter by their name, but don’t let that trick you into thinking they’re the same.
A good chunk of Americans are so poisoned when it comes to socialism that they think Biden is a commie and you think Bernie had a chance?
Yes.
Two things I believe in that context:
- Those Americans are louder than they are numerous.
- Some significant portion of the ex post facto “Sanders couldn’t have won anyway” spin was and is astroturf.
The last election just proved your first part wrong.
I think it proves me right.
Harris had a clear lead right up until she started backing away from her earlier more populist rhetoric in order to suck up to the corporate donors.
Her policies were significantly more progressive than Trump’s yet Trump won the popular vote.
I voted for Harris, but were her policies significantly more progressive than Trump’s. Which policies specifically? Harris lost because she moved right, and alienated her base to try to woo the center right. Leftist policy regularly polls really well with Americans of both parties once you remove party affiliation.
“An American Tragedy 2: How they’ll fucking do it again in a few years if Democrats keep running on a return to normalcy boogaloo”
