I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
I will never look down on someone who voted or refused to vote because of thier conscience. Obviously for this specific question, that excludes people claiming to care about gaza, but still voting for trump. There was no illusion that trump was going to do anything positive for gaza.
They can’t answer since they were bots
You give them something real to vote for. Give them a reason to turn out. And there’s a reliable way to do that. Hard policy. Universal Healthcare. Free education. Raising wages. Stuff that actually improves people’s living conditions in their daily lives.
Because believe it or not, The World’s Most Powerful Military and genocide do not excite any democrats that aren’t members of the DNC Services Corp.
People do not understand the significance of BRICS at all and BRICS currency. There is a concerted, sophisticated effort to get as many precious metals, gold, and oil claimed by BRICS countries as fast as possible before the BRICS currency comes out (backed by those same materials).
Look at a list of the countries with the most gold (that they admit to having). The ones that aren’t BRICS include Canada and US for example. Look in Africa - the countries with precious minerals are the ones being fought over. Even Ukraine is being fought over partially due to minerals.
Putin owns Trump. https://lemmy.world/comment/13431373
And Trump even helped out China when he withdrew from the UN Special Counsel - now China is the president. Trump is also helping out China’s claims to the South China Sea by renaming the Gulf of Mexico and trying to lay claims to it.
Hamas imo kidnapped those people due to KGB or other encouragement, then Israel/Netanyahu refused to rescue them and used them as proxy hostages gainst Biden to secute money because they had a deal with Trump and Putin. See Reagan and the Iran hostages that won him the elections - same thing. Otherwise the ceasefire in May 24 would have been agreed to (because Netanyahu thought Trump was going to lose and got cold feet, and maybe in a better timeline he did). I doubt Israel realizes that Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and all the other Islamic BRICS countries are going to backstab them for that space which is pretty sacred to them.
Russia needs the US to become Nazis because that’s what they justified the Ukraine War on and that’s what they will use to invade us and Canada and Greenland for our resources. They need us to have a civil war and to be dying and poor etc before they invade.
Trump will also be starting massive drug trafficking and human trafficking organizations. He also expanded the death penalty.
Wow, I haven’t had Philip DeFranco on my mind in a minute, bro. I grew out of him quite fast. He was talking a load of gossip and I just wasn’t interested anymore. Must be 10 years since I watched a video.
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.
It’s also to appeal to candidates , which doesn’t get talked about enough in the case of Gaza
Joe and Kamala did nothing to appeal to those voters, going so far as to cancel a Palestinian speaker at the DNC who agreed to have her entire speech vetted
so why arent we pointing the finger at them?
I keep ruminating on this argument, and it gives me deeply split feelings.
On one hand I keep thinking, voters need to grow up. Voting is how the populace gets to engage in self governance, i.e. politics, and as the aphorism goes, Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. Things that are easy aren’t solved by politics, and the voters need to accept that you’re often not going to get what you want and in governance you often have to settle for choosing the thing you hate the least.
On the other hand, I keep thinking I’m making the classic leftist mistake of demanding everyone should do what I think is right, because I am right, and then being frustrated when my rightness isn’t blindingly obvious to everyone.
Like the lady says, It’s like rain on your wedding day…
Americans are impoverished and uneducated, Democrats are not, but they should be fucking smart enough to know you can’t use big words or complicated ideas with poor, distrqcted, and uneducated people.
You force through policies that put money in their pockets, that tangibly improve their lives, or you piss them off even more and give them a minority to attack as a distraction from your lack of policy.
The Republicans understand this.
This is how you appeal to the impoverished and uneducated, and that will be the majority of the American voting population until a couple decades after we offer free education
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: You don’t run for office with the electorate you want, you run for office with the electorate you have.
Well then, our troubles are deeper than we know.
On the right as long as you talk a good game on lowering taxes they’ll put aside any and all espoused convictions. See how quiet the Libertarians got when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Turns out any time I spent debating the preeminence of personal liberty and the NAP was a big fat waste of my time. Alas.
On the left we have an electorate that “…would rather be right than president,” and it turns out they get to be neither.
Most Americans align closer with progressives than any other group when it comes to policy. But messaging has been coopted by the Republicans to make people instinctively hate “socialism” because of the Red Scare Propaganda.
But Democrats block progressive policy because it makes their donors angry.
So really there’s nobody willing to represent the majority
I’ve become pretty skeptical we know where the majority is. The question determines the outcome of the survey. The measuring stick is flawed and error bars are many times larger than the difference being measured. Frankly, the thing being measured has more dimensions than are being measured.
And it’s worth remembering how the party got here. The left and labor coalition failed to beat Nixon twice, Ford’s losing had little to do with the left, and it utterly fell apart against Reagan. The Democrats only started to get traction at the national level by going to the center, using the DLC playbook. I’m as angry about the abandonment of labor by the Democratic party as anyone, but the reason for it is not a mystery. By the same token if the left doesn’t build the structure for a more left leaning Democratic party to operate no one should expect the party to move.
The hard thing is, I don’t know what that structure looks like, but it’s not enough to be “correct”.
YOU’RE skeptical.
Stop projecting because you are too lazy to go learn about the world around you.
Saving. That survey is hard to find if you don’t search the right terms.
I’ve read it. Many times from many outlets reporting on more than one survey. The first time I found it comforting.
However it’s not hard to find conflicting data. Methodology determines outcomes of these surveys, every time.
Today I’m less comforted. But ultimately, for what it’s worth, I don’t think we’re that far apart.
And yet they would not turn out to nominate Bernie… Talk about lazy.
Well that’s a lie, with voter suppression and gerrymandering you can have your dream electorate!
Despite all the emotions in this comment section, this is still my conclusion as well.
If you can’t do that, the people don’t want you.
If you can’t do that, it’s not democracy. It’s a charade to pacify to public and manufacture legitimacy for the current regime.
Thanks Kamala
We had a choice between voting in a system that allows us some power to dissent and have a voice versus… this. The frustrating thing is this situation was just as advertised in Project 25, and then some.
We did not have an ideal choice, but we still had one. Now, here we find ourselves.
I’m stayin’ in the race!
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?
Trump wouldn’t be able to talk about “rebuilding” Gaza now if Biden/Harris hadn’t already helped demolish it
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!
I have a (conspiracy) theory that those “genocide Joe” and “killer Kamala” folk are astroturfing for MAGA.
Yup that is a conspiracy theory and super not cool of you.
It’s mostly information warfare from the various social media. There have already been a few analyses showing that pro-Republican anti-Democrat sentiment was algorithmically pushed on tiktok, Facebook, X(obviously), Instagram, YouTube, etc. I do believe a lot of people even here on lemmy were Russian/Chinese just stoking the flames because a divided america is good for them.
All the .ml crap that is suddenly silent was often revealed to be pro-ccp accounts doing exactly that.
Source?
Go read old posts, I’m not here to spoon feed you out of your ignorance.
So that’s a no on giving a source on that claim like Republicans…
Why would I save links to ML clowns getting called out or shown to be shills? What an absurd thing to request. Source: Lemmy. Dig deeper on your own, it’s not my job.
Of course there’s absolutely evidence of pro-Republican, anti-Democrat manipulation. But find me evidence algorithm manipulation of pro-Palestine anti-Democrat sentiment. Otherwise you are doing some pretty hateful fearmongering.
The “everyone on here is a Russian bot” narrative here is so embarrassing. Get real.
I certainly didn’t say everyone just that they’re here and they enjoy stoking the flames. Propaganda is everywhere from all sides.
The “sides” are not even remotely the same
I think there are significantly more “useful idiots” than actual state actors trying to sow division. Most of them probably had good intentions, they just refused to listen to reason.
It’s a funny and depressing situation that Lemmy users are so adamant that no one could possibly have a different perspective than them and if they do they must be Russian assets.
Despite those exact positions being reflected in real human American/western political voices–when it shows up in our special little space suddenly it’s spoooooky foreign astroturfing. I believe the kids call that behavior “cope.” XD
Oh there’s certainly real belief too but the “loudness” is certainly amplified beyond what it would usually be. A lot of those accounts have been entirely silent on the conflict since the election which is suspicious to me.
Can you cite a few of said accounts so I can take a look? For me, I still see a lot of pro-Palestine sentiment. But to me, it makes nothing but sense that after the election people stop talking about… the election, y’know? You’ll notice MAGA voices also stopped talking about the election too, haha.
I got better things to do than go back and find them. Just a trend I noticed. I still see pro Palestinian sentiment (which i agree with) but i don’t see the level of blame assignment Biden and Dems got. I see some outrage about like the golden pager but not about rereleasing 2ton bombs. For people who seemed so single-issue its odd.
I mean yeah why would anyone talk about the election anymore unless they’ve got some new take or perspective on why dems lost.
Can you cite a few of said accounts so I can take a look?
They won’t, it’s a talking point they were always going to deploy and has nothing to do with evidence. Of course, political discourse was always going to die down after the election, and there’s also several accounts they’re not seeing because they got banned (lol). BlueAnon isn’t based on reason.
> Pretending we didn’t see it happen already
Allow me to remind you of Rally Forge’s “America Progress Now” and Jeff Ballabon’s “Jexodus” as two recent examples.
Cite a proven example of pro-Palestine manipulation, and we can discuss it. Otherwise, no.
Both examples you provided are trivial as they don’t interface with literal apartheid or genocide. This is a significant difference being overlooked, and without evidence, I have no reason to believe this conspiracy.
New “Leopards Ate My Face” dropped. In this fun twist, however, after seeing the Leopards Eating Faces party feed people’s faces to leopards multiple times, the user continues to give the party the benefit of the doubt when confronted with the likelyhood that it’s happening again.
So no example, got it. It’s fine for you to engage in fearmongering and unevidenced cynicism. I choose not to. My regards. Free Palestine.
It’s about to be free of Palestinians. GJ protest voters!
There’s a big difference between being realistic and fearmongering. For instance, if there was no history of domestic and foreign entities utilizing astroturfing to undermine democracy and people were saying it’s happening now, that’s fearmongering. Considering that there is, however, and that it seemed to work last time, it’s naive to assume that it wouldn’t happen again, especially when similar patterns of behavior emerge, including the presence of a new hot-button topic that can be utilized. That’s realism.
There was definitely a large amount of foreign influence pushing that narrative.
Everything I don’t like is a psyop
It’s not wrong to say that the right/outside actors made the issue more pervasive, but let’s not exonerate the “adults in the room” who decided it was better policy to unflinchingly support war criminals and a slow motion genocide, instead of defusing the wedge issue and forcing Bibi’s hand. Israel is nothing without US political support and weapons. Recognize “who’s the fucking superpower” and act like it when your client state gets out of line in a way that’ll cost you domestically. China does it with North Korea all the time when they got testy. Russia routinely interferes with domestic politics of CSTO members.
Nor should we pretend that all criticism was astroturfing. Some of us wanted to drop Biden before “we beat Medicare” made him obviously unelectable. And called it that Harris was going to lose swing states like Michigan for maintaining Biden’s posture on Israel. If team blue is all I can realistically vote for, I’m going to call out shitty policy that loses elections and kills voter enthusiasm. It’s up to you to listen and understand that we need to do better
Okay so this may come across as crazy, but myself and many other people didn’t want to vote for a candidate that supported ethnic cleansing, even if they were on “our team”.
I get that; I do. But there was no better alternative. I’m all about changing our electoral system, but at the time of an election is not the time to do it. How is Trump better than Joe of Kamala?
A vote for Kamala is a vote for Kamala.
Any other vote or not voting is one less vote trump needs, and is a vote for trump. (Statistically it would have been a blue votes because they tend to be people that don’t align with conservative views that are pro Palestine)
They will never understand that.
Both are bad on Gaza, so it is irrelevant. One could be talked to and has some sense of empathy and could potentially be swayed, the other is going to destroy Gaza without remorse, ruin lise for the most vulnerable Americans, and make sure the US is a a part of the new Axis powers on the wrong side of the global power struggle. These people chose the second option.
He’s not, don’t get me wrong. But at the end of the day, Kamala Harris still supported genocide. If I voted for her, I’d have been voting for this fundamentally evil policy. Frankly, I’m not interested in doing that, and I stand by that.
By not voting for her, you enabled even worse for Gaza AND the dismantling of the US government and protections for many folks like transgender people and women. Great work.
And given the shitty system we have, any vote, or non-vote, that wasn’t for Kamala was a vote for trump (by way of it being one less vote he needed to win). Can’t walk into a chess tournament and start putting checkers on the board just because you don’t like chess…gotta change the game first or you just lose and get kicked out.
My crazy idea here is maybe the DNC should run candidates people actually like. There’s no way in hell if they ran a primary Kamala would have won the nomination given how unpopular she was as VP.
Find me one Kamala voter as excited for her candidacy as the average Trump voter was for him, and I’ll find you a dozen who were only supporting her because whe wasn’t the other guy. Same story with the Biden campaign in 2020 and Clinton before that.
They could have run a dead fish didnt matter for this election. “Boohoo, don’t like candidate” isnt a valid excuse this time. Sry, it’s the weakest argument outside “oUr PRoTEsT voTe DiDnT matatTer” (mathematically true I’d you ignore any that may have been swayed by their constant pushing of a single issue instead of of everything at risk).
What? Running a candidate people like is probably the most important thing in an election. And the DNC knew from polling that she was unpopular as a VP. Seriously what on earth are you talking about that having a candidate people like doesn’t matter.
This push to demonize the strawman protest voters is an ongoing propaganda campaign to cause poor people to infight.
Strawman?
6.27 Million more people voted for Biden in 2020 than Harris in 2024. That’s not strawmanning, those fuckers stayed home and that is exactly why we are in the current situation.
Let’s say you’re completely right. How does insulting people’s poor choices 4 months ago help us in the present? We can’t create resistance and solidarity if we hold grievances from the past.
Maybe if some of them would accept responsibility, it would go a long way towards creating that resistance.
I’d actually have a lot of respect for someone someone that could admit they made a huge mistake, because it means they are self aware enough to know that their own behavior has consequences also.
And I can get behind people humble enough to own their mistakes.
But most of these people have the fail to blame people who voted for Harris, or blame Harris herself for not being perfect in every way.
So unless they find some humility, there won’t be any solidarity and I would even go so far as to urge others to refuse to find solidarity with anyone that does not have enough strength of character to own their mistakes.
Cool. Neither party was palatable for a huge amount of people, wonder why.
Or worse, to exacerbate racial tensions, is one possibility I fear.
If you agree with them, then why did you post this?
it’s generating productive discussion
also there’s nothing really to “agree” with or not; it’s a question only and I have been doing my best not to come down with immediate judgement toward those answering the question
Gives some serious “just asking questions” vibes.
The image definitely provides a pretty clear perspective. People seem to be reacting to either agreeing or disagreeing with that perspective. Why is the main focus on those that abstained rather than on those that voted Trump? I don’t really see any productive conversations happening. Just the same people reiterating the same talking points. The data makes it clear that Gaza was not a big issue for voters, and no one is really going to change their mind on either side of that even if it WAS the deciding factor in the election. This seems like a distraction and a great way to sow division.
Yeah. I thought this sort of shit would’ve been cut down after those CIA layoffs trump did or whatever, or, that’s what everyone’s been jokingly saying, at least. Probably it’s more along the lines that social media companies keep selectively propagating this shit because they’re a revolving door with those three letter agencies anyways. Saw a LOT of black liberals posting with starbucks cups and mcdonald’s after the election, and talking about how they want to buy beachfront property in gaza, because the michigan vote didn’t come through for Kamala. Most of those people probably weren’t conforming to the boycott in the first place, and more broadly didn’t give a shit at all, but still, incredibly harrowing stuff, there.
Anyways yeah I agree with the other guy, if you wanted to spurn discussion, you probably would’ve been better off posting some shit that’s not like, immediately just blaming the protest votes? Is in better faith more generally? Probably wouldn’t gain as much traction exclusively because of that, as is the case with the site, but you’d at least not be contributing to that sort of bad faith discussion as much, which I think the initial post is doing.
It isn’t a straw man, it is observation .
Well, no, because I’ve been asking myself the same question for a while now. And I don’t have that agenda. Lol
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.
