[alt text: a screenshot of a tweet by @delaney_nolan, which says, “Biden/Harris saw this polling and decided to keep unconditionally arming Israel”. Below the tweet is a screenshot from an article, which states: “In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they’d be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less likely.”]
And Trump will be better for Palestinians how exactly? Anyone who prefers inane grandstanding instead of picking the lesser evil (no matter the topic) is a moron. That’s how politics work. The ideal candidate doesn’t exist and will never exist. If you ever come across one who 100% mirrors every single one of your opinions, get your head examined.
Edit: Also, every single credible poll out there indicates that American voters - idiotically - picked Trump due to their dissatisfaction with the economy. Middle Eastern wars were not high on the list of priorities for most voters.
This exactly
Especially considering trump’s opinion on them and Israel’s stance on the election (wanting a trump victory) those should have been major red flags about a trump victory if you cared about Palestinians.
Voting the lesser evil is often how politics works. You pick the candidate you yu hate the least and try to mobilize more people in the future to get the policies you want.
Some background on why exactly Israelis were unhappy with Biden/Harris:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-shows-israelis-massively-favor-trump-over-harris-in-us-election/
The Israeli public should have realized that Biden actually helped them by not agreeing to every one of Netanyahu’s whims, yet here we are.
I’ve seen far too many people parrot uneducated talking points like “America is arming Israel unconditionally”, which has been very much not the case under Biden. Why are people ignoring that he, just to name one example, withheld arms deliveries and threatened more restrictions unless more aid shipments were allowed into Gaza and the humanitarian situation there improved? I’m generally pro-Israel, even though I detest Netanyahu, I believe that the wars against Iran’s proxies are justified (Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis all attacked first without provocation and none of them are anything other than murderous terrorist groups), but I have no issues with these kinds of demands.
I fear that without Biden/Harris, the sparring match between Israel and Iran might get much more heated than it is already, potentially even escalating into an all-out war. Trump has the potential to cause a great deal of instability in the entire region (which would impact the rest of the world as well) and dramatically increase the suffering of ordinary Palestinians, Lebanese and Israelis (as well as potentially Iranian civilians as well) by antagonizing Iran, by removing demands from the Israeli government to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, by performing stupid stunts similar to his administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli territory (which will only inspire terrorist attacks and hostile acts from Iran), pulling back on pressure on the Houthis (because Putin might demand it), etc. pp.
World politics are messy, but at least under Biden, one could always assume that there was a reasonable, experienced politician surrounded by knowledgeable experts trying their best. They didn’t always succeed and even where they did, the results were often imperfect, because we are not living in a perfect world, but there was a certain amount of reliability that one could count on. The second Trump term on the other hand will be a severely cognitively declining Trump surrounded by sycophant yes-men stumbling his way through and creating a new idiotic crisis every week, this time without the kind of “old-school” Republicans in key positions that prevented Trump from following his worst instincts the last time around. This applies to both the current wars in the Middle East and every other aspect of foreign and domestic policy.
And taking people’s votes for granted worked how exactly?
Voter turn out was much lower than 2020 and 2016 just like this poll predicted.
Voter turn out was much lower than 2020 and 2016 just like this poll predicted.
Say what? Voter turnout in 2016 was 60%, in 2020 it was 67%, and in 2024 it was 65%.
you don’t have to convince me, friend. The fact is, winning a national election involves building a coalition with people that you don’t see eye-to-eye with 100%. The Dems don’t have a great coalition to begin with - if they win their highly-educated base and nobody else, they lose the election 100% of the time. They have to win over other people, mostly the very few groups of undecided voters. And in this election, it was clear that one of the few undecided groups available were Arab-Americans that cared a whole lot about what has been happening on the West Bank. And Harris did fuck-all to court those voters, so they decided to stay home.
Arab-Americans
0.639% of the US population. This is a tiny minority of no relevance to American politics. Trump has 51% of popular votes already, not that this matters, because the districts that carry Trump to victory have few voters with this kind of background. Arab Americans could not have changed the outcome of this election, even if 100% had voted for Harris.
2.1% of Michigan, and Harris could really use an extra 2.1% in Michigan right now.
That 0.639% of the population actually has a lot of them in a critical swing state that helped Biden win 2020. Harris lost Michigan by less than 85K votes, they could have made the difference.
Okay, how about the 34% of voters in PA as mentioned in the OP? Or the black Americans who said Gaza was important to them?
The quote is deliberately misleading by leaving out that they were only asking Democrats and independents. It also doesn’t mention that it (leading questions and all) was commissioned by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding Policy Project, which is a self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian group that opposed protections of Jewish Americans from antisemitism. Hardly an unbiased entity.
The war against Hamas ranks 15th among all issues to American voters. It’s not entirely unimportant, but don’t kid yourself by making the unfounded claim that it had any significant influence on this election.
How does the IMEU oppose protection against antisemitism, specifically
Here’s the initiative:
https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism
Here’s how the organization reacted to it:
https://imeu.org/article/imeu-policy-analysis-9-ihra-definition-silences-speech-for-palestinian-righ
That’s what I thought you meant. Sorry, not remotely buying it
It was high enough on their list to cause her to lose.
No, it can be more than one person’s fault. It’s Harris’s fault, and it’s also the fault of the people who decided fascism was an acceptable alternative to capitalist liberalism.
I mean, you could try to understand what led people to that POV, and then build a coalition with those people so we can win next time. Or, we could just sit here and point fingers at each other til the end of time while the GOP continues to court more and more voters to their corner.
I’m all for being angry about this. It’s the day after the election, I’ve been anxious all day. It sucks. But let’s point our ire at the correct people: the Republicans that voted for Trump, and the Harris Campaign that did a piss poor job of courting undecided voters.
so we can win next time
Assuming we get a next time. There’s a non-zero chance we never get anything beyond sham federal elections from now on. They own the supreme court, and the supreme court has shown it doesn’t give a fuck.
There is no next time. Don’t you understand? The people who hated Harris more than they hated fascism, voted in a dictatorship. The goal from here isn’t to win the next election, it’s to get our trans friends out and start a revolution. Trump’s reign will only be ended by violence. We aren’t getting centrists’ and moderates’ help with that. They are the enemy. They are the complicit citizens of a nation we are going to war with. Some of them will try to stop us, and we need to be prepared to kill them.
They made their decisions and you made yours. If you decided that we’d be better off with Trump, that’s on you. Own it.
Putting Trump in office makes Gaza worse. He’s promised us as much. Maybe you proved a point to the Democrats, and maybe you didn’t. Maybe now they’ll lean even harder to the center. Who knows. That’s a gamble you took, and you made steep sacrifices to make that gamble.
Gambling with someone’s life to make a political point does not make you their ally.
I’m sorry, did you personally count my ballot? Or are you just making assumptions about me?
Hard to see people as allies who are willing to let the world burn because the only other option wasn’t perfect. The campaign fucked up, for sure, but every voter that stayed home shares blame in this.
Same. I can’t see you as allies if you throw trans people, immigrants, disabled people and homeless people under the bus to protest a policy that will be even worse under the opposition.
A lot of people (probably the majority) that stayed home didn’t do so because of Gaza. They did so because they are too busy to keep up with the news, and nothing they heard about either candidate was compelling enough to get up off the couch on election night. It was Harris’s job to reach and then convince those people.
I didn’t say Gaza, and it doesnt matter why they couldn’t be bothered. Their share remains the same.
you just have zero empathy for people with busier lives than you? what about people that work a full-time job while caretaking for an ill parent and maybe also raising kids? people that can barely find time to sleep? it was Harris’s job to find a way to reach those people, and convince them to make time to vote. she didn’t.
Goal-post yeeting aside (first “off the couch”, now “no time to sleep”?), barring actual factual voter suppression, there’s little-to-no valid excuse in the US to not vote at all. Only 3 states have zero early-voting or vote-by-mail options (for now). The thing with democracy is that everyone shares responsibility to take part. Shirking that responsibility doesn’t absolve anyone of guilt, more so the opposite. Now democracy very well may not be an option again, so no, I’m not going to spend much time empathizing with the people that enabled that.
I’m sure the trans people whose lives are now in danger will sleep much better tonight knowing that the blood of those Palestinian children who are going to continue dying because Donald Trump has promised not to even try for a ceasefire isn’t on your hands, because you didn’t vote for Kamala Harris.
I hope you’re fucking happy.
I’m sorry, did you personally check my ballot?
Nah. I’m blaming our American people for this shit. Isreal or not, it was absolutely stupid and embarrassing to let that senile dumbass back into the white house. I would have rather had a slice of buttered bread running the country than this embarrassment.
So so so many people keep pointing at Trump and saying “But he’s the worst/we’re all doomed/holy shit you need to vote blue no matter who” and comments about “perfect being the enemy of the good” so we should hold our nose and support Democrats.
I feel like I’m the only person who remembers how hyperbolic we all were about Mitt Romney or John McCain being existential threats to democracy. South Park literally made fun of everybody at the time pointing at how running such a divisive campaign let them distract the public from their real goal of stealing the Hope Diamond (obviously). How many of us would BEG for Romney at the top of the Republican ticket at this point?
So sure, Trump is the threat now. When are we supposed to stop rewarding mediocre neoliberalism then? If it wasn’t 2016 or 2020 or 2024 then when? Trump will eventually die and some new Republican will take his place as the leader of the party. EVERY Republican will be the next existential threat and we’ll be scolded and told to hold our nose yet again and vote for the Democrat. If someone can tell me the “end date” where I don’t have to choose between the lesser of two evils, I’d love to know when that is.
I don’t blame other citizens for voting how they do. Everyone has to decide for themselves their red lines for support and in the privacy of the voting booth who they want to support. I do blame Democratic leadership for not learning a single lesson from 2016 about hand picking candidates and browbeating everyone into thinking that’s OK.
You’re exactly right, and this is my point. I’d bet damn near everyone commenting in this thread voted for Harris. It doesn’t matter, we aren’t the swing voters. And the swing voters are the ones that decided this election. There is nothing we can really do to convince swing voters, unless they are already our friends or family. It was Harris’s job to come out with bold policy proposals and messages that would convince those swing voters. Instead, she peddled the same milquetoast neolib shit that has been losing Dems elections since the 90s.
When are we supposed to stop rewarding mediocre neoliberalism then?
When neoliberalism is consistently beating fascism.
OK, how do we know we’re “beating fascism” and can back off? What stops Democratic leadership from arguing that the most boring ass middle of the road fiscal conservative Republican on the planet is “Trump 2.0” and must be stopped?
I don’t disagree on what you said at all, but so much of this is a war of messaging and marketing. If an amorphous “leadership” just keeps arguing the Republicans are all fascists regardless of what their actions/deeds/etc…actually suggest, how then do we push back on that narrative without being called a Russian plant or Republican sympathizer? In an age of clickbait, outrage manufacturing and people isolating in their own news spheres, it’s super easy for those with power to just lie and stay in power.
It was obvious in 2012 and 2016 that we needed somebody further left than Obama and Clinton. It was obvious in 2020 that Bernie was the best choice of Democratic candidate. We weren’t rewarding neoliberalism then. But when Biden won the primary, we put our feelings aside and rewarded neoliberalism, and we bought our trans comrades 4 more years of life. Then, in 2024, we stopped rewarding neoliberalism.
If Kamala had won yesterday, then you and drag would currently be talking about AOC 2028. We would be able to stop rewarding neoliberalism. Drag would be posting clips of Harris saying that she’s overseen the greatest growth in oil production in history, and calling her a genocidal maniac. It would be clear.
But Trump won, and it’s equally clear what we have to do in this timeline.
It was obvious in 2012 and 2016 that we needed somebody further left than Obama and Clinton.
When Republicans win, the Overton window doesn’t slide to the left. It’s slides to the right. Expecting it to go even further left is a misunderstanding of politics.
Good thing Republicans didn’t control the white house in those years, then.
Trump wasn’t elected in 2016?
He was elected at the end of 2016. Drag is talking about the rest of that year, when America had just had 8 years of Obama. Bernie could have beat Trump in 2016, if we had pushed hard enough. The will to choose a progressive candidate finally came… In 2024 when it was useless. Some people just don’t adapt fast enough, even when the stakes are clear.
So until failed neoliberalism stops failing, we have to keep supporting it? Seems a little backwards. If mediocre neoliberalism was beating fascism, I’d be more okay with getting behind it.
Why keep supporting the losers and thinking they’ll miraculously turn into winners?
After Biden dropped out, I was cheerleading for Harris. I didn’t like her policies, but she had much better chances than Biden, and it seemed like she understood what pitfalls to avoid.
Didn’t matter. The DNC doesn’t understand what is needed to win. They’re still running a playbook from 1996. They think the undecideds are in between them and the GOP, when in actuality they’re to the Left.
Instead, the DNC has now absorbed a bunch of “never Trumper” repubs who clearly aren’t willing to vote for a woman, but will let a geriatric white guy eke out a win if you promise not to do the social justice.
I think the DNC being a “big tent” party has allowed it to accept a large number of very questionable supporters, who for instance won’t vote for women, and who think that Cop City and broken windows policing is totally fine akshually, and whose jaws don’t drop when someone says to “send social workers into the homes” of black parents…
Ultimately, we probably will never know exactly which demo(s) sat out, and everyone will end up just interpreting their own side as the right path forwards. Depressing stuff.
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“Don’t blame your allies.”
Proceeds to blame his allies, picking out the one wedge issue which the opponents used to greatest effect to split the left in this election.
Nothing in particular that would help anyone pick up the pieces, or figure out what happens now or what to do.
Fair point. It’s the day after the election. Anger is a valid emotion. Today, I’m choosing to direct my anger at the Harris campaign for doing fuck-all to court undecided voters. Not the people in this thread; I suspect almost every American here went to the ballot box and voted for Harris/Walz, regardless of their opinions about Israel.
When I say “undecided voters”, I mean the single mothers in Pennsylvania that are so completely underwater because they have two jobs and everything is so expensive now and they probably have medical debt and other bills weighing them down. The people that don’t have time to watch every Harris interview and decide whether or not they are “coconut-pilled”. Those people saw what Harris was selling, and the message they received was “more of Biden, who did fuck all for me”. In the face of that, and when you have to move heaven and earth just to get the time to go vote, why would you bother?
I’ve spent enough of my arguing about politics energy for today, especially now that the horse has left the barn.
https://ponder.cat/comment/839212
https://ponder.cat/comment/837488
https://ponder.cat/comment/835981
That’s my response. There’s some good stuff in there. I do not require any kind of response on any of it.
Fuck that, I’m blaming every single person that didn’t vote for Harris
I mean, if you’re referring to the people that voted for Trump, I’m right there with you. It’s absolutely mind-boggling that a rapist and convicted felon won the popular vote.
The majority of population aren’t the ones who voted for Trump. The majority of the population didn’t vote at all.
Yeah, they are just as guilty as the ones that voted for Trump (and the ones that voted third party) in my book
I’m blaming those who didn’t vote the most.
You’re going to have a busy day.
No number of additional blue votes in Massachusetts or Hawaii was ever going to matter.
I’ll remember how this was all Kamala’s fault when Trump starts rounding people up. I’m sure it will bring me great comfort. I’m also sure it will bring great comfort to the people of Palesine because Trump DEFINITELY isn’t going to keep arming Israel, and we know he’s way more susceptible to public pressure than Harris would have been.
I’ll also accept cursing Trump voters, as it is obvious that they will never be allies.
I blame the people who voted for trump, personally. I’d be happy to watch the leopards eat their faces, but unfortunately we’re all stuck with them.
Also a fair response. How the hell did a rapist and convicted felon win the popular vote?
People are stupid and value in group solidarity more than anything else.
The only way forward is to make them feel like a member of a better group, or violence.
But they got the Cheneys!
The same thing is looking like it’s going to happen in Canada
Current Liberal government is going to hold out all support for a genocidal country doing genocidal things for no apparent obvious reason and any moderate voter out there will avoid them for them it.
It doesn’t matter what your politics are … if your political party openly and wholeheartedly wants to support something that does no benefit to your country, ruins the lives of others and supports a maniacal regime, and does it at the cost of millions and billions of dollars -> why would you want to vote for them?
I don’t get it … sure Israel is pretty important but why would political leaders obviously tank their entire prospects just to save the support of a country that has very little to do with their own other than to cost everyone money.
I mean, I feel like it is quite fair to blame the people who voted for Trump for Harris’s loss tbh. I don’t really buy the "the dems would win if they didn’t just refuse to try to win over conservatives and instead promised to go all-in on progressive policy that I’ve seen lately. I wish we got more progressive policy too, but it’s not like they don’t have any idea what people want, they have whole teams of people whose job it is to figure out that kind of thing. If promising some more progressive policy was a clear winner, why wouldn’t they do it? The answer I generally see implied or stated is that the dem establishment doesn’t want that policy, but that isn’t really an adequate explanation, because politicians are perfectly familiar with dishonesty. If supporting some progressive policy they didn’t like would win them power, they’d just promise it and then just not do that thing upon getting elected. It’s happened for state and congressional races before, so it’s not like that’s never been thought of.
I don’t think Harris’s loss is down to refusing to say the right words to inspire her base or anything like that, it’s down to the fact that, somehow, Trump is very good at inspiring his. She gave it a decent shot, but it’s very hard to win an election against a massive cult of personality. He, and the people that support him, are the problem here.
If promising some more progressive policy was a clear winner, why wouldn’t they do it? The answer I generally see implied or stated is that the dem establishment doesn’t want that policy, but that isn’t really an adequate explanation, because politicians are perfectly familiar with dishonesty. If supporting some progressive policy they didn’t like would win them power, they’d just promise it and then just not do that thing upon getting elected.
Because their personal motivations are not “maximize the chances for a Democratic win”, but preserve the power of themselves and their allies with money and influence. If these policies become a centerpiece of the election and broadly popularized, it becomes dangerous to ignore it and advances the saliency regardless of the outcome, pushing it closer to someone actually doing it. A campaign that says “the rich are abusing workers to fill their pockets and the government should tax their wealth until there are no billionaires and provide benefits to the workers” is dangerous to the rich people, even if its initially proposed by someone with no intention of following through.
In an election with stakes like this one though, doesnt maximizing their chances for a win also serve that? Like, being rich offers you some protection from the law, especially in a corrupt regime, but when the other side is an actual authoritarian, half-assing it so that they win while also being publicly against them is dangerous to one’s personal safety. Even rich people dont tend to get away with being against authoritarians, when they are in charge. If all you care about is power and influence, and you dont actually have any values beyond that, and one side is an authoritarian, then being on their side serves your interest, and being put in power to stop them serves your interest, but publicly failing to stop them puts a target on your back and gives you no power and influence by which to ward it off.
Gentle reminder: changing her stance on the Gaza genocide was the “damned if you do” side of the trap that she didn’t go for.
Gentle idea: maybe think a few moves ahead. Even the conservatives were.
