seems simple to me. either the pro-palestine voters didn't matter, or they did matter and the democrats decided it was more important to side with israel than get their votes. you could even say the democrats stood on principle with israel rather than win votes, like some sort of uhh clear test, - ThreadSky

leyawn.bsky.social • 17 days ago

seems simple to me. either the pro-palestine voters didn't matter, or they did matter and the democrats decided it was more important to side with israel than get their votes. you could even say the democrats stood on principle with israel rather than win votes, like some sort of uhh clear test,

Reposted from Alex Winter

The Palestinians and their supporters didn't create our current predicament. It's a convenient, counterproductive deflection to lay the blame at their feet, and given the degree of destruction and suffering they've endured, it's also sadistic.

Comments

bartham-brody.bsky.social•17 days ago

when are people going to understand that "supporting palestine" or whatever you want to call it loses way more votes than it would ever gain. you cannot achieve the pro palestinian vote regardless, they are not interested in engaging with the democrats, they will just move the goalposts. ie tim walz

penfoldsfiv.bsky.social•16 days ago

>you cannot achieve the pro palestinian vote regardless, they are not interested in engaging with the democrats, they will just move the goalposts.

"those grapes were probably sour anyway"

bartham-brody.bsky.social•15 days ago

that's a cute thought but i already gave my reasoning as to why their vote isn't achievable, so a fable doesn't exactly debunk it, you have to give actual reasoning and evidence. so close!!

penfoldsfiv.bsky.social•15 days ago

lmao it’s very funny you say that, seeing as how you guys pretty much muzzled Tim Walz within a week of picking him.

the calling republicans weird thing was, no joke, a brilliant bit that actually worked, but the consultants got upset and told him to stop that. so they never did it again.

penfoldsfiv.bsky.social•15 days ago

in short, your moves to “appeal to the left” don’t work because you keep sabotaging yourselves. you are the reason why you fail! hence, the reference to the fable.

bartham-brody.bsky.social•15 days ago

its a nice story but we just disagree. incumbent parties lost regardless of party around the world due to economic anxiety, i find this a much more likely explanation than the social media narrative that "there's a huge faction of hyperinformed progessives that haven't been appealed to yet!"

recombobulating.bsky.social•17 days ago

No. It's the fascists who can never be satisfied. Not the people asking for basic human rights.

bartham-brody.bsky.social•17 days ago

I've seen how pro palestine people act, you guys are protesting AOC for being genocidal, you're so fucking cooked. conservatives love voting red more than progressives even love living. you guys wouldn't vote for fucking AOC. this is what i mean when i say you cannot be satisfied. goalposts moved!

recombobulating.bsky.social•17 days ago

You can't be satisfied with anything other than absolute dominance and control. All disobedience is unacceptable and offensive.

bartham-brody.bsky.social•17 days ago

what? is "absolute dominance" when the most progressive candidate in the country is considered the most progressive instead of "genocidal"? it doesn't sound like "dominance" it sounds like fucking reality. get a grip.

recombobulating.bsky.social•17 days ago

It is when you demand that all criticism and dissent must be silenced because you want to impose your ideology as if it is objective fact. Rather than a political ideology.

tunaghost.bsky.social•16 days ago

maybe they should have tried not dropping bombs on tens of thousands of children. doesn’t seem like much of an ask, but here you are complaining about it

bartham-brody.bsky.social•15 days ago

thank you for your completely uninformed opinion that is sourced from social media. you're clearly an expert in how urban warfare is conducted, and have concluded that causalities are impossible unless entirely intended by the opponent. do you have any evidence to support this?

tunaghost.bsky.social•15 days ago

I’m sorry, do you need evidence to understand why killing tens of thousands of children is bad? or that the bombs that killed them came from the US? or that an easy way to not kill children with bombs is to not drop bombs on them

bartham-brody.bsky.social•15 days ago

an easy way for civilians not to die is to not start a fucking war and then hide behind civilians, why are you dying on this hill? should israel just allow hamas to not only govern the gaza strip, which they did for 20 years, but they ALSO have to allow them to commit terrorist attacks on israel?

stormgodhater.bsky.social•15 days ago

History didn't begin on Oct 7th...

tunaghost.bsky.social•15 days ago

Israel is the aggressor and has been guilty of ethnic cleansing and human rights violations for the last half century, an apartheid state that should not exist. Every Zionist should be shunned from polite society

cppilgram.bsky.social•17 days ago

Why do you assume they would only have gained votes if they had changed their stance on Israel? Is it possible that they could have lost more than they gained?

concordski-andy.bsky.social•17 days ago

Most polls before and since the election showed that conditioning or cutting off weapons shipments to Israel would have helped the Democrats in swing states.

cppilgram.bsky.social•17 days ago

That's one issue in a vacuum. A lot of people would like Israel to GTFO of Gaza, myself included. But elections are about many different issues, and those polls don't account for how important people think Gaza is among all other issues. Plenty of them voted for Trump. Plenty of them didn't vote.

ouroboredom.bsky.social•17 days ago

Doubtful, doesn't matter though. What happened was they chose Israel's preference for genocide over the humanitarian factions in the US electorate & lost 14M votes they'd had in the bag. Safe to assume single issue pro-Israel voters would've voted Trump either way, as he was Israel's preference.

ouroboredom.bsky.social•17 days ago

It really cannot be stressed enough that Dems job was not to gain votes, all they had to do was maintain the margin they'd previously beaten Trump by. He still didn't get as many votes as Biden 2020. Instead, Dems went out of their way to convince *their own constituents* to stay home.

geno.avoids.work•17 days ago

As much as the republican party is often accused of being the ones who can't keep their religious beliefs out of the government, imo Democrats often share that failing with regard to Israel. Support for Israel has a little extra something in it.

vanoreo.bsky.social•17 days ago

"if they sided against israel they'd lose votes!"

ok cool i kinda doubt you'd be yelling at zionists right now if they had

afivegantenna.bsky.social•17 days ago

what drives me nuts is she didn’t need to take a position anywhere close to “against israel” or even “pro palestinian”, having a ceasefire in place over election day probably would have been sufficient.

theblackadonis.bsky.social•17 days ago

Iirc the Harris campaign's own polling showed that keeping up the genocide would cost a lot more votes than it would gain.

sporkyreeve.bsky.social•17 days ago

I feel like it's obvious that they did matter because that was the whole point of the pressure campaign? They had the power to impact the result and they threatened to impact the result if their issues weren't addressed and then they made good on the threat and impacted the result.

sporkyreeve.bsky.social•17 days ago

I'm not super interested in finger pointing or litigating whether it was justified to make good on the threat or whatever, I just find it kind of silly to pretend they had no impact when they definitely did and that was the whole point in the first place.

lamentablyawake.bsky.social•17 days ago

So in which case the question becomes why did Harris choose to alienate voters that were essential to her winning?

sporkyreeve.bsky.social•17 days ago

I tend to think this is more of a "yes both" problem than an "either-or" problem. I don't think it's terribly useful to put 100% of the blame on Harris or the protesters.

lamentablyawake.bsky.social•17 days ago

Respectfully, the Vice President running a campaign that raised ~$1.5bn has a lot more power, influence and expertise and thus responsibility than random citizens desperately trying to convince the government to stop enabling genocide.

sporkyreeve.bsky.social•17 days ago

I think the lion's share of the blame does belong on Biden/Harris and the Democratic party more broadly, yes.

winterpancake.bsky.social•17 days ago

I want to scream

dmboogie.bsky.social•17 days ago

the thing is it's truly impossible to say HOW many people specifically abstained from voting due to the genocide, and of those people, how many of them lived somewhere where their vote would have made any difference, you know?

banneduser.space•17 days ago

This I actually think the vote share lost to genocide protest was not that big compared to the depression of overall turnout because the race was mostly Joe Biden’s doomed re-election campaign. There were no mass movement Dem primary campaigns to consolidate behind the nomination.

banneduser.space•17 days ago

This is why I believe we saw what we did across every state. Bidens campaign was barebones, as all uncontested incumbents are, and Dems just didn’t reach enough voters.

comityoferrors.bsky.social•17 days ago

It's impossible to know but I have wondered about the number of people who were not active genocide protest votes, but who watched a coalition of people ask for a pretty simple action and be shot down and mocked. And who then decided that democracy isn't real, because why wouldn't you? Why try?

comityoferrors.bsky.social•17 days ago

I am not advocating for not trying here, to be clear, but I'm genuinely baffled that so many people seem incapable of empathizing with voters who were told their voice didn't matter and then agreed that their voice didn't matter and stayed home. What did we expect???

sporkyreeve.bsky.social•17 days ago

Yeah, it's impossible to speak in hypotheticals. I've seen some compelling number-crunching that it did make a difference, but we'll probably never really know for sure.

bigpapipopsicle.bsky.social•17 days ago

Yeah I think the only thing we can objectively say moved the needle at all was the entire fiasco of having to shove out Biden and throw someone on stage under 4 months before the election. Only thing that would have saved the result for me was a proper primary all the way through.

sporkyreeve.bsky.social•17 days ago

Even then, who knows. Inflation backlash ousted incumbent parties all over the world, it may have hit the Democrats even if Biden had bowed out in 2023 and we'd gotten a proper primary. I think that was much more of a determining factor than Gaza.

injohnue.bsky.social•17 days ago

They did matter. Except the number of votes to be gained by supporting Palestine is miniscule compared to the votes gained by supporting Israel.

All the protests did was further perceptions that Dems enable a kind of moral/social decay (or enable genocide).

frightfulhobgoblin.bsky.social•17 days ago

Is that true though?

That's a very vague nebulous statement that 'supporting Israel is electorally popular', when we can demonstrate specifically that almost 3 million Biden voters failed to turn out for Harris because of the Dems support of the genocide.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/biden-voters-passed-kamala-harris-because-gaza-new-poll-shows

injohnue.bsky.social•15 days ago

This is a push poll with some of the most leading, intentionally framed questions possible. The key data point pulls from an n size of 210. I agree that Gaza shaped voter behavior, but this is not the supporting evidence you think it is. It doesn't disprove support for Israel either.

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