I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
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.
Trump wouldn’t be able to talk about “rebuilding” Gaza now if Biden/Harris hadn’t already helped demolish it
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?
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.
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?
Based on the top level comments here - yeah, they still think that Harris is exactly the same as Trump, and have zero regrets.
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 supermajority. 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.
“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?”
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.
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.”
“We don’t need you! We never needed you! Every one of you is a paid Russian actor! We will win with Chaney and Romney!”
“GOD PLEASE WE NEEDED YOU! WHY DIDN’T YOU TRUST US?! WE CHASED AFTER THE REPUBLICANS TO MAKE YOU LOVE US!”
The more I think about it, the more this sort of gaslighting reminds me of Eve Online shenanigans. Which is fair, after all, users like Jibrish moderate r/eve like they do r/conservative.
Part of me wishes I could have a computer good enough to run Eve, but I don’t think I could handle the game and community lore in one whole thing.
I’ve spent 2200 hours in a game with next to zero good updates in 9 years, my brain can handle focusing on stupid bullshit.
But man Eve seems… Weird. In a good and bad way.
To the DNC and right wing Dems, its always someone else’s fault why their candidate failed to appeal to the voters they are trying to represent. No accountability for their failure.
Never taking responsibility and always blaming others for your failures is basically baked into conservative DNA
White-men for Kamala :'D
So basically, still in denial about how Trump and Netanyahu are going to absolutely wipe out Gaza from history now while gaslighting’ing as hard as r/conservative. The overlap with the way Trump voters handle politics is astounding.
Gaza had been getting wiped out by Biden supplied bombs for over a year. Trump wouldn’t be able to talking about “rebuilding” gaza now if Biden hadn’t already helped demolish it.
What does any of that have to do with what I said? I’m talking about the strategic decision the Democrats made to not make concessions to the people inflamed by the genocide in Gaza. In no way did I deny that Trump is far worse than Kamala/Biden. Pointing out that Kamala/Biden made a conscious decision to not move left on this issue isn’t gaslighting, not that you’re even using the term correctly
Americans had one vote, and you guys continue to gaslight what it effectively was, for Trump or against Trump. What it wasn’t was an opportunity to change the system by making a political statement, and now all anyone who has fallen for this rhetoric has done is cemented where it’s heading to now. To change it you would have had to work outside the system. Now, even attempting to do so is far more likely to get you locked up. Congrats.
you guys continue to gaslight what it effectively was
You keep using that word but I’m not sure you know what means.
What it wasn’t was an opportunity to change the system by making a political statement
I’m not even advocating for people to vote third party or boycott the election. I’m just making the argument that if a political party wants a group of people’s votes, they should court those people. If they fail to do so, and those people choose not to vote for them, the political party only has itself to blame
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!
Yeah, ive said exactly that countless times right before the election, criticize her all you want after the election but ffs, elect her and the average response was something along the lines of “but genocide Joe!” or just nothing .
Also, all those fuckers are gone now, you’re not hearing anything about it anymore so I’m guessing that a lot of them could also have been right wing trolls just pushing people to ensure trump would be voted in
I want to believe that was a large scale, coordinated influence operation, but the truth is probably a bunch of scattered, uncoordinated young folks tring to make a statement
The democrats tried everything except for actually grappling with the subject. Now blaming the voters completely misses the point … that the dems where supporting Israel and clearly stated they would continue the current path. Trump had the decency to lie to the constituents. And now they cope by convincing themselves it’s part of his plan. The voters where duped… but the Dems did this… not the voters.
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.
Truth
