Kamala Harris Paid the Price for Not Breaking With Biden on Gaza, New Poll Shows
Kamala Harris Paid the Price for Not Breaking With Biden on Gaza, New Poll Shows
Twenty-nine percent of non-voters who supported Biden in 2020 said U.S. support for the genocide was the top reason they sat the 2024 election, according to a survey by YouGov.
Ryan Grim Jan 15, 2025
"From 2020 to 2024, Democrats saw a staggering dropoff in support at the presidential level, with some 19 million people who voted for Joe Biden staying home (or not mailing in their ballots) in 2024. Now, a new survey conducted by YouGov suggests Biden’s support for Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza played a surprisingly large role in the choice of those previous Biden supporters not to vote."
Someone should just run on the platform “let the people decide” and hold popular votes for anything that people care about. Set your personal and party politics aside and be a true representative of the people.
No shit. She basically wishy-washed most of her policies until the last few weeks. Too little, too late.
I'll never get over the fact that searches for "Did Biden Drop Out" increased by a massive amount on election day.
The article shows relative interest for the queried time period. For all they know, a week before the election one person searched for it and on election day 10 people did. The graph as is has no significance at all.
Yet she lost. We lost. It's not insignificant. If there was a non-zero number of people who were unaware that Biden was out, our side failed.
He should have kept his promise to be a one term president. Hubris and bad advice from the inside failed us. Stop making excuses for a failed attempt.
Let's properly fix this. We're destined to lose again if we do not.
As it turns out, genocide is unpopular. Who could have seen that one coming? Oh yeah, the left. Which group does the Democrat party love to shit on the most? Also the left.
And because the turnout drop off was smaller in swing states, Gaza may not have been decisive on its own
Not only was it smaller, in many of the swing states Harris actually received more votes than Biden did. Trump's win comes down to his success in convincing people who supported him to vote, far more than Harris's own failures. Here are the numbers:
(all numbers in thousands)
State 2024 Harris votes compared to 2020 Biden votes Trump vote change Arizona -89 +109 Georgia +74 +201 Michigan -68 +170 Nevada (statewide) +2 +81 North Carolina +31 +140 Pennsylvania -35 +166 Wisconsin +37 +87 Only 3 out of the 7 key states saw a drop in votes for Harris. Which, as the article says, could be attributed to Gaza, but is more likely a combination of factors including Gaza, and even if Harris had promised to put strong measures in place to prevent the genocide, those voters may still not have voted.
Even if October 7 and the resulting genocide had never happened, it’s fair to assume some number of those non-voters still would not have voted, and would have cited a different top reason for not voting. Citing a top reason for not voting is far different than it being the only reason not to vote.
And of those 3 that did see net negatives for Harris, Trump would have won even if Harris's vote had stayed flat in every one of them.
The argument being made in this post works both ways. Liberals love to blame leftists because they "didn't turn out to vote", and in this post we see leftists blaming liberals because they supported genocide so of course some people didn't vote for them. But the reality is far worse than either of those. The American people, in the places that it mattered, voted for Trump. That's a difficult thing to reckon with, but both liberals and leftists need to reckon with it if they hope to avoid the country spiralling into full-on fascism. The blame game and scapegoating among those who didn't vote for Trump might feel satisfying, but it's not actually constructive.
also not having a single broligarch drop $250,000,000.00 on her campaign certainly was a challenge.
I mean, she did have $1.5 billion... which was literally more money than Trump... and the PR execs who rule the DNC stole it to enrich themselves instead of trying to win an election... No amount of money is going to overcome the fact that people like Jen O'Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, DIRECTLY make a cut off blowing the money on ineffective bullshit. The DNC leadership is hopelessly corrupt, another $250,000,000 would be used to buy a yacht for Donna Brazil's yacht, not move a single vote.