it's good to look in the mirror and understand the material outcomes of voter behavior
it's good to look in the mirror and understand the material outcomes of voter behavior
I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
Democrats decided genocide is more important than winning elections. Also, the ethnic cleansing of all Palastinians from Gaza was always what everyone in Israel and the US governments wanted. We will see if Trump's stated intention do do more intervention gives enough of a push to meaningfully accelerate this process. The break with the Democrats is just admitting this out loud, rather than some vague discussion of "two state solution" ignoring that Israel would never allow that, and that would require the US at some point turning against Israel.
Thanks Kamala
Democracy is being dismantled as we speak. Agency by agency, loyalist by loyalist, executive order by executive order. And instead of building community, helping each other and organizing with those around you, I see people, who supposedly care about democracy, about human rights, about those they accuse; and what are they doing? They are blaming people who are powerless and desparing. Thereby further dividing the populace and making the takeover easier for the fascists in power. Be careful: You are telling on yourselves and your values. And we can see you.
Y'know what this thread has made me realize? All the dumb memes of "the left fighting the left" are bullshit. I can respectfully debate other people on the left with me. I can change their minds about some things, they can change my mind on some things, we can come to compromises. I don't agree with the communist 100%, but I agree with them at least 70-80%, and would happily work alongside them to accomplish that 70-80%.
You know who loves infighting though? Centrists who have deluded themselves into thinking they are leftists. You can find comment after comment in this thread from right-leaning centrists, gleefully demanding that they were "right all along" and how everything is our fault for just not being as smart as them. There is no political group that loves infighting as much as them, even more than the fascists. They want to spend the next four years trying to find out all the ways they can assign blame to the left, instead of organizing and doing anything.
I advocated for voting for Harris, and did so when the time came. I also don't think this blame game gets us anywhere, and I'm already a little sick of talking about it.
I'm also done defending the Democratic Party as a whole. Individuals, yes, but not the party. I'm realizing through this that I have a certain reflexive need to correct misinformation about Democrats, but I'm clamping down on it.
I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
I didn't abstain. I voted for a candidate that didn't support genocide while living in a solidly oligarch controlled state. What you would probably call "throwing my vote away."
But no voter had a say in this past election. It was a struggle between the corporatist and oligarch branches of the capitalist class, and the oligarchs threw more money at buying the election.
That's it. No need to vote shame, regardless of if someone did or did not vote. It should be blatantly obvious by now that the Office of the President is (well, was) a rental. Now the oligarchs bought it from the corporatist landlords and plan to remodel and reside in it forever.
There is no war but class war. Nobody is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves. Organize. Let's make voting useful again.
From my perspective, as someone who didn't have a vote in US politics and wanted you guys to vote to kick the can down the road until next time, but also understood the sentiment of those who didn't bother, it wasn't a belief that Trump would do any better so much as a loss in faith that the Democrats were who they claimed to be.
When hope dies, it might be replaced by despair, anger, and desperation, or it might be replaced by apathy.
And while that was going on, there was also propaganda going on where people were trying to push the idea that Trump would be any better. I don't believe that there were a significant number of voters who voted for Trump or stayed home because they believed that to be true.
Right now, it looks like the main conflicts about this I'm seeing on this platform are those with hope trying to rally the troops, while those with anger are mainly upset at those with apathy.
Ultimately yes, its the fault of the voters (and non voters) who let their emotions cloud their judgement. Thats true whether you like it or not. Especially if Gaza was your main issue; if you saw both candidates and thought Trump was better for the situation, you need to seriously look inward and consider your reasoning abilities.
That being said, the opposition party does not get off the hook so easily here. The fact that Trump could win despite everything he said is a total and utter failure. Their strategy is bad, and they refuse to acknoledge it because to do so means that they need to upend their internal heirarchy. They have buried their heads in the sand when it comes to accepting the playing field of politics right now, and quite frankly as a party they look incredibly weak.
In other words, to not acknoledge that the election was theirs to lose is also denying reality
Portraying abstaining, third party, and trump voters in the same group is pretty lazy, if not intentional.
The electoral college exists: Every person I knew in swing states voted Harris in exchange for someone in CA or WA voting Claudia de la Cruz or otherwise.
But I guess even Harris voters can be made into Trump supporters with enough effort at this stage.
I just don't understand people railing at the non voters and the people who voted for Trump. It seems as backward as a rocket scientist raging at drag and wind breaking their rocket. "How dare the wind do this! Don't they know this will progress humanity!?!"
It's your job to build a rocket that can withstand the air at those speeds. The air is always a problem you have to deal with, and no, you can't shame the air into doing what you want.
Genuinely the democratic campaign seemed more like they were pushing a trolley problem than a future. So why is everyone so shocked it failed?
Okay I'm getting sick of the whole "the dems failed us" bullshit.
WE failed. WE let this happen. WE had the choice between an obvious dictator or continued democracy.
You can shift the blame all you want but at the end of the day it was an obvious choice. You can come up with any other excuse you want. If you didn't vote for Harris you are to blame. Period. End of fucking story.
Edit: The dems should've been able to run a wet paper bag against Trump and win. The fuck is wrong with people to not see that?
He's just saying the quiet part out loud. Same thing as what Biden and Harris were doing but without the polite facade.
At least the better part of them are now posting under the hashtag
#DonaldOfDeath.The genocide(and poor national level performance) was the last straw for many people who have been lifelong democrat voters. After 30+ years of seeing dems bring ferocity and strategy and boldness to primaries only to sit in office, renege and fail on many of those promises even in times when they have a
supermajoritymajority. Then to see only a few dems actually screaming on the floors of congress. As well biden refusing to use the bully pulpit.I don't believe any of them wanted this outcome. I do believe they felt their vote was only going to promote a regime that would continue the trend of genocide and protecting wall street over the needs of desparate citizens. Billions to kill and profit then pennies to the people.
I believe the fault lies entirely on the DNC and not the voters who saw no benefit in promoting the party over the other.
It's wrong, a dem in power is worlds better, but i understand seeing it as pointless in the moment. There is no good answer, only a less wrong one...
To answer the question, pass useful legislation and don't promote genocide. Legislation like universal healthcare, constitutional abortion(and other women's healthcare), raising minimum wage, universal pre-k, Union support, decriminalize drugs(esp. Weed), and to reverse inflation to name only just a tiny few..
TLDR: 30yrs of "lesser of two evils" kills voter motivation. Blame the party not the people.
Edit: technically not a supermajority...
"We offered nothing and lost to a liar who said they would get something if he came back into office. Why did we lose?"
"We said everything was going great when the public was facing hardships and being targeted by systemic and economic inequality, and the dude lied and said he'd solve it. Why did we lose?"
"The last guy was unpopular and didn't push back on Trump to get him jail. And then we said we'd do nothing different as Americans are facing homeless and their bodily autonomy being ripped away from them. How did we lose?"
"We courted Republicans who openly hate our voter base, alienated them by saying we don't need you, and Republicans are too brainwashed to vote for anyone but Republicans. Why did we lose?"
Democrats then: "We'll win without appealing to Arabs in Michigan or anyone who demands we stop funding Israel. Shut them out of the DNC and scold them at every turn. Who cares how they react or that they're forming PACs like 'Arabs for Trump.' We don't need their votes."
Democrats now: "We lost because you STUPID Palestine-lovers wouldn't vote for us. Your country needed your votes, Gaza needed your votes. It's actually your fault that we didn't bother appealing to you."
I wrote the comment below on a thread that got locked while I was writing. TL;DR: Any bonehead who thinks that every single voter is politically-engaged and fully-informed, and that 6 MILLION of them all made a rational, reasoned decision to sit out the election is dumber than they look.
Oh, well, 18 months, what a slog! /s
Look, I've spent close to 30 years now detailing that this fucking insane "lesser evil" slide-to-the-right thing that Democrats were doing was going to end in evil. (That is, fascism.) Either the Democrats themselves would become what we feared, or the greater evil would happen to win.
Guess what? I was fucking wrong. I admit it now. I didn't guess that BOTH would happen simultaneously. It was bad enough more than 20 years ago when my Senator was the only vote against the PATRIOT ACT. It got worse when Obama decided to abolish due process and the rule of law. But by 2024, Democrats were straight up aiding and abetting the biggest war crime of all. Jesus jumpin' Christ on a pogo stick, how did we get to a place where that is the lesser evil?
Y'all couldn't vote for Nader in 1996, because "he can't win." Well, guess what, bucko, we had to change course somehow. He, or a spiritual successor, had to win, or we'd get... well, look around. It was clear even back then. We had to at least try something different, other than the lesser evil every time.
As they say, the best time to change was then, and the second-best time is now. But, no, Kamala Harris couldn't change her mind on genocide to win. No, sir! We have standards of evil to maintain, you see. Meanwhile, the billionaires weren't going away. The wealth inequality wasn't shrinking. Late-stage capitalism wasn't on track to make the serfs' lives better. The climate crisis would still loom. Charismatic fools like Rogan et al. are still young. So the choice in 2024 was fascism now, or fascism later. 2032, most likely, when the partisan pendulum would predictably swing the other way. 2028, possibly.
Is it any wonder that many voters felt overwhelmed, hopeless, defeated, and declined to participate, through the fabulous power of denial? Politics is depressing, the system is big, my vote is inconsequential... Y'know, denial, that power that we've all honed through a lifetime of practice—knowing the horrors of industrial meat production and still ordering a burger, knowing the role of CO2 in the climate disaster while waiting in the car at the drive-thru window for it, knowing the causes of cardiovascular disease and still eating it?
Knowing that someday, eventually, we have to fix our political system now that radicals have found its cheat codes, but still browbeating those disengaged voters that they are the ones responsible for this calamity. Yeah. Denial.
The same denial as 30 years ago. This election has been a long time coming. A year and a half? Get outta here.
i hate the big d Democratic party. i dont like their platform, i don't like their candidates. i voted for harris in2024. the time to make political statements and form a movement is now. do you know what you are supposed to do during election season? VOTE!
How do you change voter behavior?
You don't. If you want someone to vote for you, you need to provide something that they want. The point of democracy is not to change the people to fit what the rulers want, it's to change the rules to what the people want. If you can't do that, the people don't want you.
I yelled, but voted Kamala, and encouraged others to do the same. I always wanted to try and push the democrats to not be Republican lite and actually taking a meaningful, impactful stand on fucking anything besides being very passionate about not inhabiting Trump's body. I wanted to see the democrats say "you know what? Genocide is wrong, whether it's our allies doing it or not, and this is genocide" instead of "well, we're going to keep handing them bombs, but we promise to wag our fingers at them while we do it". I don't want to hear your goddamn excuses, there's always some fucking excuse why the democrats just had to spill all their spaghetti. I just wanted to do what I could to push them to show some intestinal fortitude and do the right thing, and I honestly believed (and still do believe) that that would have motivated more voters to turn out than purely relying on "less bad than him".
No, I don't regret trying to make the world I want to see; one without genocide. I do resent the democrats for insisting on doing the wrong thing, getting mad at people like me for having the absolute audacity to call them out on it, and still not having the fucking self awareness to be ashamed of doing the wrong thing.
Well here's one Arab American for Trump views.
I will never regret choosing to vote third party no matter what happens. I will not regret my vote even if Trump marches me personally into a gas chamber. The sooner you get that through your heads, the better. You will never be able to "scare me straight" by pointing to the Republicans, no matter what they do.
The reason things have gotten as bad as they are, to where we have to choose between genocide and genocide-lite, is because of a complete unwillingness to have a spine and draw a red line, out of fear of letting the other side win. We have sacrificed every single standard and principle in the name of that fear. This "common sense" strategy of unconditional support of the lesser evil is actually completely insane, and easily falls apart under scrutiny.
However, if you cannot be persuaded that we are correct, then it is better that you see us as stubborn and irrational. Because a stubborn and irrational person will only be persuaded by giving them what they want, and not by words or anything else. If you want to make sure the Democrats actually win next time, the best strategy is to pressure them into conceding to our demands. Which, if you think about that for 5 seconds, it makes our approach seem a lot less stupid and irrational, but what do I know, I'm stupid and irrational.
Imagine believing that Trump's genocidal policy is somehow different from genocide joe and kamalacaust. It's a continuation that they actively enabled and now support.
Do y'all understand how watching these creeps support a genocide for more than a year might have caused them to lose?
And you're still crying about it and blaming voters instead of opposing genocide. Pathetic and gross.
Sure, the material consequences if you, specifically, live in a swing state. I do, so I voted for Kamala. But this take, applied outside of states that were up for grabs, is asinine. But hey, nuance is for people who don't want to just keep trying the same failed approach to presidential elections every 4 years and would rather bitch about anyone less moderate than them.
It becomes more simplified if you just look at the US as a one party state with two divisions that serve the same one party leadership.
I'm stayin' in the race!
It's sxephil! Haven't thought about that guy in like a decade