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People who sat out on voting for Kamela over the Biden handling of Gaza voted for this.
They never gave a shit about Palestine. It was just another example of "The Issue" for them to base their entire personality around to pose online.
I'm married to a Palestinian and so I'm hyper-aware about lip service, and I think you're right. My perception is that they are weak-minded people too naive or stupid to realize they've been conned into sitting out the election by a right-wing psyop. And they also have this mentality that a candidate has to be perfect in every way (by their standards) or they won't sully their purity by voting for them. They're the same sort of people who shop at Whole Foods because anything less than perfect should never pass their lips, and don't notice or care that it's just funnelling their money to Bezos.
Hmm... not sure if its just those people who swayed the election. I think you are overestimating just how little the average American care about brown kids dying in the middle east.
If you look at the inflation, its correlated with Biden's presidency, but voters don't understand the idea of
Correlation =/= Causation
They forgot the whole Covid thing caused it, it was trump fucking up covid that exacerbaed the inflation.
And voters immediately thought its Biden's fault, so those who voted democratic in 2020, decided to not vote because "prices didn't go down so why bother voting"
It was death by 1000 cuts, but let's not pretend Gaza wasn't a major contributing factor on top of a feels-over-reals vibecession due to pandemic inflation.
No, the problem is that Democrats were saying "Old Man Bad."
Then when he stepped aside and Harris was the only other option because there was no time for a primary, Dems largely said "No, Black Woman Worse! Hey, How about we vote for the even older white guy instead? Can I have a puppy?"
And when they didn't get a puppy, they pulled a temper tantrum and stayed home.
No it wasn't racial. At least not at that scale on the Dem side. It's even simpler.
The candidates this round were all terrible options, from beginning to end. Trump was always going to be the Republican nominee, and Biden/Harris for the Dems. No one else was ever going to even be considered.
The Rep messaging was "shit is fucked, we'll fix it". That's a lie of course, they have no plan to actually fix anything, their plans are to make it all and help the oligarchs as usual. But their messaging at least acknowledged the issues most people were feeling.
The Dem messaging boiled down to "it's not that bad". Which is objectively correct, but not what 90% of people felt. They ignored what real people were feeling entirely, so why should they vote for a party that won't even acknowledge that fundamental issues exist?
I have to disagree.
Even if you are right on the Dem messaging (and I'm willing to concede that point to some degree), then your conclusion would make sense against a more traditional Republican candidate. But the problem is that this is Trump, who was campaigning on actively making everything worse. Like he and Musk were outright telling people they were going to "inflict hardship". Staying home knowing you're de-facto allowing Trump to return to power after that campaign is a case of knowing that you are about to shoot yourself in the foot, pulling the trigger anyway, then reloading the shotgun when you realize you missed some toes.
And I do believe that it was almost entirely racially motivated. First, much like I said above, the other excuses given don't make sense because Trump was an objectively worse option on every subject. Not just status quo. Worse. By far. You're against Biden and Harris's support for Israel, so you're gonna vote for the guy who wants to basically glass Gaza for funzies? You think the economy sucks, so you're going to vote for the guy randomly slinging around tariffs and telling you to expect years of hardship? None of it makes sense.
But think of how many cultures that exist in our society that are incredibly patriarchal. Some people from the middle east, for example. I know a lot of bigoted Latino people who would never consider a woman his equal, and many in the Latino community are distrustful of cops. No chance in hell you're going to get them to vote for a former prosecutor at all, let alone a black and/or female one. You have some of these religious sects where the man is the head of the family and makes all the decisions. And there are plenty of racist Democrats. They just don't wear it as a badge of honor like Republicans do these days. Look at it this way. Diversity initiatives across the country are basically being treated like battery acid right now, and I don't exactly see a whole hell of a lot of Democrats standing up to defend them. Why did nobody care when literally dozens of prominent Republicans endorsed Harris, but suddenly lost their collective shit when Liz Cheney did? Gee, I wonder what makes her different from all of the other prominent Republicans. Why is it that after screaming for months about "Old man bad" and demanding that Democrats don't put up another old white guy, the first thing they did was immediately forget about age and throw their support behind an even older white guy as soon as Harris was at the top of the ticket?
I stand firm in my belief that it was racially motivated. Age wasn't the problem; they were OK with Bernie Sanders. The messaging wasn't the problem. Again, she and Bernie Sanders support the same policies even if Sanders is more ambitious about getting there. The people had no problems with the message. They just didn't like the messenger. I wonder what separates her from the other two guys......ohhhh.
Not gonna really bother reading past the first couple sentences, it's the same shit people post all the time that relies on flawed assumptions of the average person. It assumes that most people have the time to learn facts and properly weigh them for conclusions. And that's assuming they even want to pay attention to anything remotely related to politics.
Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Many work multiple jobs. They do not have the time to spend educating themselves about these topics. Most people scroll social media and maybe watch an hour of news before bed. They are 100% reliant on messaging from social media, friends, and news organizations to do most of the analysis for them and tell them what the takeaway is for complicated situations.
Now combine that lack of both desire and time to research, with 40+ years of targeted propaganda from the likes of Fox News distorting basic definitions about words like fascism, socialism, etc. and outright lying about the facts to push a narrative with the exact opposite explanation of reality. Right wing media has been saying the exact thing Democrats started warning people about, but they have been doing it for decades and saying it was the Dems. So those words are meaningless to the average person now, because they've been getting disinformation shoved down their throat for so long that the effect has been diluted and defined incorrectly.
Old man was okay until the shit debate job then it was old man bad.
They quickswitched to black woman, which put her behind as no primary or time to build name recognition.
Then guys who worked with Hillary made them stop calling trump and co. weird or saying "we're not going back", which were both effective.
Top that off with trying to peel away R voters, muh egg prices, her refusing to say Biden did a bad job when she was on the view (she could have dodged and said she'd do better, lets be real.) and refusing Rogan entirely and you have a recipe for a bad time wrt undecideds.
We were hearing everything from "he's too old" to "he's got dementia" for months. The debate was just the straw that broke the camel's back. Biden was trending at -5 before the debate.
"We're not going back" was her campaign slogan and there were people chanting it right up until election day.
I think they started backing off on the "weird" thing after the Trump/Harris debate. Trump gave the much-remembered "They're eating the dogs!" line, which itself would have been a campaign-ender for literally any other human being, and everybody started trying to use that against him. Which makes sense. Why stick to something like "weird" when your opponent is giving you such juicy ammo to use against them? I'd have done the same thing, and I think so would anybody else.
The problem is it didn't work. Voters heard that and said "Yes, I'd like to have more of that."
There is never a situation where a candidate is going to say that an incumbent member of their own party is doing a bad job. That's just an unrealistic expectation to have. She would have been playing right into Trump's hands, who would have used that to make the last few months of Biden's presidency even more difficult and miserable. The most you could have expected is something along the lines of "We disagree on the finer points of some things......". But you are never going to hear a candidate basically shit on the leader of their own party like that.
And remember that she was Vice President. Go back and watch Trump during the campaign. When Biden dropped out, Trump essentially just swapped out Biden's name for Harris and continued on with his campaign, acting as if Harris had been President for the past four years. He convinced a whole bunch of those undecideds that the "Harris Administration" was the source of all their problems, even though the VP has little role in day to day administration. To these undecideds, the "Biden Administration" and the "Harris Administration" were one and the same, and her saying that Biden did a bad job would be like saying she did a bad job. Trump would have been beating her over the head with that up and down the campaign trail. She would have sabotaged her own campaign and basically taken a shit on the last 3 months of Biden's presidency in the process.
And this arrogant ignorance is why the Dems lost, and will continue to lose.
It’s a bold strategy let’s see how many votes it costs you the next time around.
So go right ahead and tell me, you great political genius, why did the dems lose? What was so bad about Kamala Harris that allowing Trump to return to power was a viable option? How does allowing Trump to return to power in any way benefit anybody? Name one flaw Kamala Harris had that was so bad that Trump wasn't explicitly campaigning on being exponentially worse?
The reason Dems lost is because Trump promised economic growth ("greatness"), and such a thing is possible through mars colonization. People felt that (maybe). They don't actually care about how poor their living conditions are, they just want an adventure. And they'll get one.
Also lots and lots of backlash against cancel culture.
Actually, Kamala got equal or better vote turnout in all but one, iirc, key swing state than Biden did. So the Dems did turn up for Kamala. It's just that Trump got more votes. Trump 2024 would have beaten Biden 2020.
You must be one of the “Socialists” then?
They're getting exactly what they voted for, but probably not what they wanted. But at least bLuE mAgA lost right guys?