So you’re basically telling me to not believe my own eyes and that the leftist spreading FUD about Biden/Kamala leading up to the election and afterwards don’t exists.
Don’t mistake criticism for spreading fear, leftists did commonly and openly agree that Trump would be far worse. Dems had time to change their messaging in accordance with that critique and they didn’t. Claiming that their campaign that leftists critiqued for being ineffective failed because leftists pleaded for Dems to change it is trying to have the cake and eat it. Again, if leftists proposing different campaign direction could possibly have enough political momentum to actually discourage 14% of voters from voting, then it would absolutely be a critical error from the Harris side not to listen to them. As “the left” isn’t unified block that speaks in unified voice, while the DMC is, the fault in that case would lie on the Dems side. And again again, assuming that was the case would be very naive. The wide consensus on the left was that voting for Harris was absolutely the only option to stop fascism from taking hold. People who failed to show up were people that didn’t care about politics enough and partialy believed Trump lies, or assumed “he wouldn’t be so bad”, or didn’t care which of those 2 parties would win because they assumed nothing would have changed. Trump agenda is extremely conservative, and vast majority of people on the left recognised that as a threat. Claiming they didn’t show up to vote despite all the clamour about Trump being Hitler from the left is a weak attempt at scapegoating them.
Don’t mistake FUD for criticism. The difference is timing.
Propaganda is at its peak right before an election. At that point in the election cycle it is too late to change most things. “Criticism” only serves to discourage people from voting in order to tip the scales.
No one is saying that the difference in voters in 2020 (largest turnout ever) and 2024 is entirely because of leftists.
If anything, most leftists tuned down their criticism of the Biden/Harris administration in the few past months leading to the election, especially since Harris was announced as replacement. Critique of USA letting the Gaza genocide happen was absolutely going on strong all the way since Israel started bombing hospitals in retaliation for October 7, and critique of Biden’s capitulation to the right on the border issue was going strong ever since Texas started putting barbed wire in water crossings and Biden decided he’d rather double down on xenophobia and “strong border” instead of dismantling the lies from the right. I would say the critique got strongest when those protests on campuses happened and the government started to crack down on dissidents and banning people for being against Israel. To be fair, with the critique also came some praise, since Biden’s administration did some neat things for working class, and when Minnesota democrats won the slim majority and started voting as united block to put in place progressive legislation they were celebrated by the internet left as the example to follow… Which also was a critique of the federal dems, who failed to act that way.
I’d wager you just tuned that out and it only started to be an issue to you, once the elections got closer. The left got ignored for the entire 4 years, despite ceaselessly clamoring about changes that need to happen, and now they got singled out as the reason why dems lost. Also, what was mostly critiqued wasn’t the government to be, but the campaign messaging, which absolutely could have been changed for more persuasive instead of borderline threatening and legitimizing the lies of the GOP. It was a shitty campaign, and Dems should have course corrected instead of, well, losing.
Your original point was that it was somehow the left that failed to show up for elections, and you put blame on them for dems losing. Now you switched gear to claiming that there was some conspiracy from the left to spread anti-harris propaganda, to get Trump to win, which is completely nonsensical keeping in mind what goals the left in USA has. Unless that’s what you’re suggesting, that the left united with the right to bring down the center, or something like that? I’d love to hear how you think that came down. And following that logic, I guess you’d want Dems to “cut ties” with the left even further and look for allies on the right? Because if so, it would be picture perfect example of what the post depicts, and it would be very funny if not for being very tragic.
There is also the issue of Jill Stein and her army of bots, but I feel like it would be too much of an undeserved insult to you to assume you think those people were from the left and not from the right. She was an obvious spoiler candidate put forward by GOP, I’ve never heard any praise of her in the leftist media bubble. Trump did praise her, Cornell West and RFK though, and she did pop up relatively recently, as she does every 4 years when it’s time to promote a book and fall of democracy. It would be a failure of basic political literacy to consider her as anything else than a right wing spoiler candidate, especially after almost 4 years of silence from her side, so I’m just getting that out of the way unless you want to challenge that point in some way for some reason.
Paragraph 1: regarding Gaza, leading up to these election “leftists” on lemmy, especially from lemmy.ml we’re promoting this as a reason to not vote or vote 3rd party. Both options lead to a win for Trump.
Same situation for the border response. With both topics things are worse under Trump proving they were bad faith arguments.
“Dismantling lies”? You realize the people spreading these lies don’t believe in things like climate change, vaccines, etc (ie reality).
Paragraph 2: I didn’t tune it out. You’re pretending that the verbiage didn’t change to ‘don’t vote/vote 3rd party because of this’. Which is a winning situation for Trump. Proving they were said in bad faith.
For you to blame a “shitty campaign” on the loss is to ignore billionaires buying votes, foreign bots campaigning in favor of Trump and a republican propaganda machine that can convince half the population that reality is fake news.
Not to mention it is no different than someone watching a professional sporting event. Waiting till a team wins and then giving their armchair analysis based on the results even though they could never compete at that level. AKA Confirmation bias
Paragraph 3: the anti Harris talking points leading up to the election were posted the primarily in lemmy.ml. Rather than get into a debate about what that signifies I will let the consensus about who populates lemmy.ml speak for itself. Pointing out again that not voting for Harris or voting 3rd party benefits Trump and anyone who prefers him as president.
My brother in Christ, I’ve just explained in detail how those points were critique so Dems could fix their campaign and convince the populace to vote for them, and you answered to that as if I told you those were reasons leftists didn’t go to vote. I know the Trump would be worse. That’s precisely why the left tried to persuade Dems to change their direction. I don’t know if you’re answering just on reaction, without any thought going that, or are you wearing some blinds not allowing you to hear my arguments. The original point was that you claimed the left didn’t show up for the elections, and to my detailed argument about how that doesn’t make any sense seeing how desperate the left was for Harris victory, you replied with basically “yes it does”. Yes, Harris should have dismantled lies of the right about illegal immigration, instead of legitimizing it and allowing the right to change it from just the “border issue” to “economy issue based on the unsafe border”. Since Dems instead went with “yes the border is a problem but we will fix it” the average voter had no reason not to believe that the border was the pressing issue GOP made it up to be. Why would you or I care about the fact that people spreading those lies are insane? They shouldn’t have tried to placate the GOP decision makers who spread this propaganda, but dismantle their lies so general populace had opposing viewpoint.
“You’re pretending that the verbiage didn’t change to ‘don’t vote/vote 3rd party because of this’”
Yeah, it absolutely didn’t change to that. None of the major leftist political media creators suggested voting for 3rd party instead of Harris, especially in the swing states. What happened on lemmy.ml was Russian bots posting bullshit. And I won’t deny those posts were posted and comments commented, but you yourself know fully well those were bots, so what the hell are you talking about and why are you blaming that on the left? Not to mention that ml ideologically represents only a small subset of the “left” and most folks don’t consider tankies leftists due to their authoritarian bent, that’s beside the point. It was absolutely against the best interests of the left to not vote for Harris, which is why the left canvased and campaigned for her, despite not agreeing with her message.
If Dems shitty campaign was 100% the reason Trump won, then he’d have won 100% of the votes. There were many reasons that helped him, including the fact that USA is racist and sexist and many people probably just didn’t want to vote for black woman. Leftists helped Dems get a bit more %, though in current political landscape the left doesn’t have nearly enough power to influence decisions of major politicians, and unfortunately Harris decided to ignore them.
It’s not armchair analysis, the critique from the left was constructive and included how to change the messaging to improve the odds. I won’t be able to tell you that Dems would have had amazing victory if they did everything or anything the left tried to persuade them to do, since they didn’t and I don’t know how the future would have looked then, or how the right would have responded, but you can’t also claim they wouldn’t or go into the territory of claiming that they actually harmed Harris chances. You could have claimed that if the left was silent, it doesn’t make much sense even with the point you’ve initially made (that they didn’t show up because Harris wasn’t left-leaning enough), since even if the left was complicit in spreading anti-Harris propaganda - opposite of which happened - they would have still applied pressure on Dems to address their issues. I never claimed that Dems would have definitely won if they listened to the left; it was you, who claimed that Dems lost because of some apparent actions from the left, to support of which you only have a handful of posts on a platform you’re aware have been heavily botted, as it was repeatedly discussed topic. Out of us two I’d definitely see you more leaning into having a confirmation bias in this case, especially since you’re ignoring just how absurd the idea of the left boycotting Harris is. Trump literally said he wants to take care of the “radical left” in the country “using army if that’s required”, USA citizens with a leftist footprint in social media were threatened with death by a president candidate, and you think anyone from the left wanted that to happen? Unlike centrists the left campaigned for Harris as if their lives depended on that, because their lives did depend on that! You are delusional if you believe it was leftists that failed to show up on the elections day. They were very active in attempts to make Harris more electable, and Dems lost despite that, not thanks to it.
All you’ve explained is your opinions. Your “arguments” are just opinions. But you are stating them as if they are facts.
Polling showed that border control is important to more than just republicans. So dems did their job and said they would address it.
You came up with some conspiracy theory that no one cared about border control until dems said they would address it.
“You’re pretending that the verbiage didn’t change to ‘don’t vote/vote 3rd party because of this’” Yeah, it absolutely didn’t change to that.
What happened on lemmy.ml was Russian bots posting bullshit. And I won’t deny those posts were posted and comments commented
You deny the verbiage changed to “don’t vote/vote 3rd party” then you admit that it happened, claiming it was only bots.
The reason bot farms exist is to change public opinion. They claim to be someone they are not and repeat talking points until other who are not bots start repeating what they say. In this case other leftists.
the critique from the left was constructive and included how to change the messaging to improve the odds
You claim that it is just critique. In reality it is a tactic called FUD used to discourage voters.
How could leftists, who are such a small part of the voting populous possibly know how to run an effective campaign better than a team of strategists that have been doing it as a career?
I don’t know how reliable those numbers are, but that was exactly my point - Dems lost votes on alienating arab and genocide disliking voters and leftists attempted many times to persuade Harris to change her stance on support for Israel. Unless you believe all arabs and anti-genocide voters are leftists I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make with that link.
So you’re basically telling me to not believe my own eyes and that the leftist spreading FUD about Biden/Kamala leading up to the election and afterwards don’t exists.
Don’t mistake criticism for spreading fear, leftists did commonly and openly agree that Trump would be far worse. Dems had time to change their messaging in accordance with that critique and they didn’t. Claiming that their campaign that leftists critiqued for being ineffective failed because leftists pleaded for Dems to change it is trying to have the cake and eat it. Again, if leftists proposing different campaign direction could possibly have enough political momentum to actually discourage 14% of voters from voting, then it would absolutely be a critical error from the Harris side not to listen to them. As “the left” isn’t unified block that speaks in unified voice, while the DMC is, the fault in that case would lie on the Dems side. And again again, assuming that was the case would be very naive. The wide consensus on the left was that voting for Harris was absolutely the only option to stop fascism from taking hold. People who failed to show up were people that didn’t care about politics enough and partialy believed Trump lies, or assumed “he wouldn’t be so bad”, or didn’t care which of those 2 parties would win because they assumed nothing would have changed. Trump agenda is extremely conservative, and vast majority of people on the left recognised that as a threat. Claiming they didn’t show up to vote despite all the clamour about Trump being Hitler from the left is a weak attempt at scapegoating them.
Don’t mistake FUD for criticism. The difference is timing.
Propaganda is at its peak right before an election. At that point in the election cycle it is too late to change most things. “Criticism” only serves to discourage people from voting in order to tip the scales.
No one is saying that the difference in voters in 2020 (largest turnout ever) and 2024 is entirely because of leftists.
If anything, most leftists tuned down their criticism of the Biden/Harris administration in the few past months leading to the election, especially since Harris was announced as replacement. Critique of USA letting the Gaza genocide happen was absolutely going on strong all the way since Israel started bombing hospitals in retaliation for October 7, and critique of Biden’s capitulation to the right on the border issue was going strong ever since Texas started putting barbed wire in water crossings and Biden decided he’d rather double down on xenophobia and “strong border” instead of dismantling the lies from the right. I would say the critique got strongest when those protests on campuses happened and the government started to crack down on dissidents and banning people for being against Israel. To be fair, with the critique also came some praise, since Biden’s administration did some neat things for working class, and when Minnesota democrats won the slim majority and started voting as united block to put in place progressive legislation they were celebrated by the internet left as the example to follow… Which also was a critique of the federal dems, who failed to act that way.
I’d wager you just tuned that out and it only started to be an issue to you, once the elections got closer. The left got ignored for the entire 4 years, despite ceaselessly clamoring about changes that need to happen, and now they got singled out as the reason why dems lost. Also, what was mostly critiqued wasn’t the government to be, but the campaign messaging, which absolutely could have been changed for more persuasive instead of borderline threatening and legitimizing the lies of the GOP. It was a shitty campaign, and Dems should have course corrected instead of, well, losing.
Your original point was that it was somehow the left that failed to show up for elections, and you put blame on them for dems losing. Now you switched gear to claiming that there was some conspiracy from the left to spread anti-harris propaganda, to get Trump to win, which is completely nonsensical keeping in mind what goals the left in USA has. Unless that’s what you’re suggesting, that the left united with the right to bring down the center, or something like that? I’d love to hear how you think that came down. And following that logic, I guess you’d want Dems to “cut ties” with the left even further and look for allies on the right? Because if so, it would be picture perfect example of what the post depicts, and it would be very funny if not for being very tragic.
There is also the issue of Jill Stein and her army of bots, but I feel like it would be too much of an undeserved insult to you to assume you think those people were from the left and not from the right. She was an obvious spoiler candidate put forward by GOP, I’ve never heard any praise of her in the leftist media bubble. Trump did praise her, Cornell West and RFK though, and she did pop up relatively recently, as she does every 4 years when it’s time to promote a book and fall of democracy. It would be a failure of basic political literacy to consider her as anything else than a right wing spoiler candidate, especially after almost 4 years of silence from her side, so I’m just getting that out of the way unless you want to challenge that point in some way for some reason.
Paragraph 1: regarding Gaza, leading up to these election “leftists” on lemmy, especially from lemmy.ml we’re promoting this as a reason to not vote or vote 3rd party. Both options lead to a win for Trump.
Same situation for the border response. With both topics things are worse under Trump proving they were bad faith arguments.
“Dismantling lies”? You realize the people spreading these lies don’t believe in things like climate change, vaccines, etc (ie reality).
Paragraph 2: I didn’t tune it out. You’re pretending that the verbiage didn’t change to ‘don’t vote/vote 3rd party because of this’. Which is a winning situation for Trump. Proving they were said in bad faith.
For you to blame a “shitty campaign” on the loss is to ignore billionaires buying votes, foreign bots campaigning in favor of Trump and a republican propaganda machine that can convince half the population that reality is fake news.
Not to mention it is no different than someone watching a professional sporting event. Waiting till a team wins and then giving their armchair analysis based on the results even though they could never compete at that level. AKA Confirmation bias
Paragraph 3: the anti Harris talking points leading up to the election were posted the primarily in lemmy.ml. Rather than get into a debate about what that signifies I will let the consensus about who populates lemmy.ml speak for itself. Pointing out again that not voting for Harris or voting 3rd party benefits Trump and anyone who prefers him as president.
Paragraph 4: see my response to paragraph 3
My brother in Christ, I’ve just explained in detail how those points were critique so Dems could fix their campaign and convince the populace to vote for them, and you answered to that as if I told you those were reasons leftists didn’t go to vote. I know the Trump would be worse. That’s precisely why the left tried to persuade Dems to change their direction. I don’t know if you’re answering just on reaction, without any thought going that, or are you wearing some blinds not allowing you to hear my arguments. The original point was that you claimed the left didn’t show up for the elections, and to my detailed argument about how that doesn’t make any sense seeing how desperate the left was for Harris victory, you replied with basically “yes it does”. Yes, Harris should have dismantled lies of the right about illegal immigration, instead of legitimizing it and allowing the right to change it from just the “border issue” to “economy issue based on the unsafe border”. Since Dems instead went with “yes the border is a problem but we will fix it” the average voter had no reason not to believe that the border was the pressing issue GOP made it up to be. Why would you or I care about the fact that people spreading those lies are insane? They shouldn’t have tried to placate the GOP decision makers who spread this propaganda, but dismantle their lies so general populace had opposing viewpoint.
“You’re pretending that the verbiage didn’t change to ‘don’t vote/vote 3rd party because of this’” Yeah, it absolutely didn’t change to that. None of the major leftist political media creators suggested voting for 3rd party instead of Harris, especially in the swing states. What happened on lemmy.ml was Russian bots posting bullshit. And I won’t deny those posts were posted and comments commented, but you yourself know fully well those were bots, so what the hell are you talking about and why are you blaming that on the left? Not to mention that ml ideologically represents only a small subset of the “left” and most folks don’t consider tankies leftists due to their authoritarian bent, that’s beside the point. It was absolutely against the best interests of the left to not vote for Harris, which is why the left canvased and campaigned for her, despite not agreeing with her message.
If Dems shitty campaign was 100% the reason Trump won, then he’d have won 100% of the votes. There were many reasons that helped him, including the fact that USA is racist and sexist and many people probably just didn’t want to vote for black woman. Leftists helped Dems get a bit more %, though in current political landscape the left doesn’t have nearly enough power to influence decisions of major politicians, and unfortunately Harris decided to ignore them.
It’s not armchair analysis, the critique from the left was constructive and included how to change the messaging to improve the odds. I won’t be able to tell you that Dems would have had amazing victory if they did everything or anything the left tried to persuade them to do, since they didn’t and I don’t know how the future would have looked then, or how the right would have responded, but you can’t also claim they wouldn’t or go into the territory of claiming that they actually harmed Harris chances. You could have claimed that if the left was silent, it doesn’t make much sense even with the point you’ve initially made (that they didn’t show up because Harris wasn’t left-leaning enough), since even if the left was complicit in spreading anti-Harris propaganda - opposite of which happened - they would have still applied pressure on Dems to address their issues. I never claimed that Dems would have definitely won if they listened to the left; it was you, who claimed that Dems lost because of some apparent actions from the left, to support of which you only have a handful of posts on a platform you’re aware have been heavily botted, as it was repeatedly discussed topic. Out of us two I’d definitely see you more leaning into having a confirmation bias in this case, especially since you’re ignoring just how absurd the idea of the left boycotting Harris is. Trump literally said he wants to take care of the “radical left” in the country “using army if that’s required”, USA citizens with a leftist footprint in social media were threatened with death by a president candidate, and you think anyone from the left wanted that to happen? Unlike centrists the left campaigned for Harris as if their lives depended on that, because their lives did depend on that! You are delusional if you believe it was leftists that failed to show up on the elections day. They were very active in attempts to make Harris more electable, and Dems lost despite that, not thanks to it.
All you’ve explained is your opinions. Your “arguments” are just opinions. But you are stating them as if they are facts.
Polling showed that border control is important to more than just republicans. So dems did their job and said they would address it.
You came up with some conspiracy theory that no one cared about border control until dems said they would address it.
You deny the verbiage changed to “don’t vote/vote 3rd party” then you admit that it happened, claiming it was only bots.
The reason bot farms exist is to change public opinion. They claim to be someone they are not and repeat talking points until other who are not bots start repeating what they say. In this case other leftists.
You claim that it is just critique. In reality it is a tactic called FUD used to discourage voters.
How could leftists, who are such a small part of the voting populous possibly know how to run an effective campaign better than a team of strategists that have been doing it as a career?
https://lemmy.world/post/22149390
I don’t know how reliable those numbers are, but that was exactly my point - Dems lost votes on alienating arab and genocide disliking voters and leftists attempted many times to persuade Harris to change her stance on support for Israel. Unless you believe all arabs and anti-genocide voters are leftists I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make with that link.
The article said dems lost votes as a result of progressive activism. Progressives are left leaning on the spectrum.
Harris said she would do everything in her power to end the war in Gaza.
Netanyahu celebrated Trumps win.