Progressives acknowledging the fact of genocide is a good first step, and it’s useful that Ocasio-Cortez and others have done so — “I think [unconditional aid to Israel] enabled a genocide in Gaza,” she said in Munich — but it is not in and of itself sufficient. Before anyone in the party can move on to selling a post-Biden vision of human-rights-first foreign policy, they must address what accountability for the war criminals in the Biden administration — those who aided, armed, and funded genocide — should look like.
If it’s a choice between republicans and democrats I will vote for democrats every time.
I will vet during primaries but mid-terms aren’t the time for that with what’s happening at home in the states and aboard with the current administration.
Democrats who support genocide can’t win, and candidates aren’t static.
If at any point you are supporting a Democratic candidate who holds unelectable policies, you are doing work to support the opposition. Your only option is to move the candidate when they hold a policy which will prevent them from winning the election.
When you say something like “Any Blue will do” in the face of a genocide, you are doing work to get the Republican in the race elected.
If you read my entire comment you’ll see I’m not advocating for ‘any blue will do.’
Not voting for the only other viable option is actually doing the work to vote in the republican.
Please, address the issue on its merits: If you advocate for a candidate who has a policy which will prevent them winning a race, you are doing work for their opposition.
This is what happened with Biden/ Harris. By supporting them (ABWD) instead of being critical, you set up the permission structure necessary for them to recognize they’ve got your vote without having to change policy positions. The permission structure you and I do me you because you are maybe the most clear and consistent Blue MAGA voter on lemmy, that permission structure allowed Harris to maintain a pro-genocide stance into November. Since holding that stance would prevent her from winning the election, shifting the responsibility from a candidate who is one person, of one mind, running one campaign to change their policy, you shifted that responsibility to the millions of unwashed masses, whom have no great track record for making good decisions when it comes to November, and for which there is no credible mechanism to move the minds of millions of people in the period of a few months or weeks. There is no tool a campaign can operate which changes millions of minds from “I will not support a genocide” to “I will support a genocide”, and I’m glad that this is the case.
Framing elections as if its a matter of individual choice shows an explicit and intentional illiteracy when it comes to how campaigns, electoral-ism, and electorates work. One voter is like a grain of sand. It acts and behaves like a solid, and has other properties we would liken to “its a tiny rock”. But when millions of grans of sand are moving together, their behavior is nothing like an individual grain. When we take individual votes and scale them to millions of voters, their properties and behaviors are different. What and how an individual voters should act is fundamentally irrelevant. We’re not talking nor are we ever talking about what individual voters do. That’s what oil companies in the 90’s did with recycling: they convinced you that your individual choice was what mattered, when they controlled the levers of power to determine what choices were available to you.
The candidates and campaigns have all the power to change their polcies or approaches in this system. Voters as individuals have practically 0 power in this system. There is no practical mechanism to get millions of voters to do whatever it is you would have them do (at least not over the course of months and weeks, like an election). There is an abundance of tools to operate on individual politicians to get them to change.
If you allow a politician who is competing for your vote to maintain an unelectable position, you are doing work to support their opposition.
What you’re describing is a strategy for primaries, not the general.
The vote in the general election comes at the end of the race. Any response to the input of your vote or lack thereof is irrelevant at that point. We just have to live under the policies of the winner. Even if Kamala changed her stance on Gaza as a result of you and other 1-issue voters withholding your votes, it doesn’t matter; it’s too late and now we have Trump.
If your plan is to let MAGA run roughshod over the world until Democrats share your stance on the issue, then you are as responsible as Trump voters for what is happening.
No, I am not talking about primaries. If a candidate holds a position which will prevent them from winning a general, in the context of election like the previous election, you have the responsibility to take whatever actions are necessary to move that candidate, including withholding your vote if they don’t change their position.
You need to look at the modifier here: the candidate holds a policy that will prevent them from winning the general. If they maintain the policy, the lose the election. Period. How you vote is utterly irrelevant, because the millions of people who won’t vote for them aren’t going to vote. Voting or advocating or a candidate who is running on a losing set of policies isn’t harm reduction or strategic.
FTFY.
Hell, even do it in secret and claim even after voting, that you didn’t vote for the Dem because they wouldn’t take a stand against Genocide in Israel. You can even still claim today to have withheld your vote, for all I care. If you didn’t actually vote, or voted 3rd party, or even (God forbid) voted Trump, even though your vote is private, then you are a piece of shit, and the criticism being levelled at you is appropriate.
Jesus fucking christ. You get that this is the exact fucking strategy that Democrats ran on in 2024? What you are outlining, how you want to approach convincing people to the blue lever: Its exactly what the Democrats did in 2024.
And it fucking lost. Get it through you FUCKING skull. You will LOSE the election AGAIN, just like the Democrats did in 2016, and 2024.
You can’t move voters to a candidate. Period. Its not functional strategy. It doesn’t fucking matter if you don’t like it. It doesn’t fucking work. It loses fucking elections.
You can’t be yelling at me, lol. I most likely agree entirely with your position on all of this except for what non-shitstain human beings do once they are alone in the voting booth on election day. You probably need a little more care and nuance in figuring out who essentially agrees with you for the most part and who is actually a shill for the DNC.
But many politicians who hold a position you claim makes them unelectable won in 2024, including the president. How do you square this with your theory?
Like, its so tedious to have to be your tutor for a basic understanding of elections and electoralism. You really do have a responsibility to study these things yourself instead of expecting the world to feed decades of study and work into your mouth like a baby bird.
What gets a Republican elected has nothing whatsoever to do with what will get a Democrat elected. Voters do not exist along a one dimensional continuum centered on a normal distribution. Voters who would vote to get a Democrat elected are not voters who would vote to get a Republican elected. If you run a campaign, as a Democrat, focused on appealing to Republican voters: you will lose the election.
What percentage of Democratic congresspersons who won in 2024 share your position on Gaza/Israel?
So Trump 2.0 was a better option than Harris because she wouldn’t/didn’t say the words you wanted to hear?
For the 9000th time, we’re having a conversation about what voters do, not what any one individual does. And no matter how long you keep your head in the sand about the matter, voting isn’t a binary. Any one voter has a range of choices about what to do with their time available to them.
I don’t know if you are fully aware of this, but: SHE LOST THE FUCKING ELECTION!
I don’t really believe any of you blue maga fascists are actually operating in good faith at this point, but I’ll at least offer you the grace of addressing the following issue.
We’re going to run two experiments, @SinningStromgald@lemmy.world , which will both start with the following premise:
It’s August 2024, the night before the convention, and you are Kamala Harris’s campaign manager. You are just coming off the big bump in polling you got from naming Tim Walz your vp. So far, your polling has been meteoric. You managed to got from the low forties/high thirties to high forties in a few weeks. Its one of the most dramatic and staggering increases in polling in history.
You’ve got 1.5 billion dollars to spend, and a week of captured media going into the convention. You have three months.
The experiment (0, 1) is conducted by you answering the following questions follows:
0 You are not allowed to change the candidates policy positions. Explain how you would use 1.5 billion dollars and 3 months to win an election.
1 You are allowed to change the candidates policy positions. Explain how you would use 1.5 billion dollars and 3 months to win an election.
If you can’t identify a coherent strategy that creates a path to victory under premise (0), we have to conclude that the only way Harris could win the election was to change their policies.
Yes it is. Will I vote in the next election? Binary choice. Will I vote Democrat or Republican? Also binary choice.
Only if you include options that are not related to voting does it become a non-binary choice. Since we are talking about voting, which is a binary choice, the other options are either irrelevant or still boil down to yes I will vote or no I will not vote.
As a news service your timeliness is horrible.
People who don’t agree with your opinions are fascists. Got it!
Now, allow me to reword my previous point:
Stop making excuses for the people who didn’t vote in 2024 and therefore allowed Trump to win the election. Every Dem KNOWS Harris and the DNC screwed the pooch and blame them for their loss. But, and this really important, we also blame those Dems who didn’t vote. What percentage of blame is assigned to Harris, DNC, and non-voters gets probably differs greatly between individuals. Personally, 40-40-20.
Voting is binary in the sense that once of two people is going to win. It’s not like TropicalDipshit staying home is going to somehow really in a do-over election.
Then how did the millions of vote difference between Harris 24 and Biden 20 not end up in the Republican column. Voters always have another choice and its the one they are making by default because its where all voters begin: to stay on the couch.
So not voting isn’t related to voting? The whole point here is that the game theoretical strategy of “strategic voting” or “voting for the lessor of two evils” falls apart when it meets reality. It doesn’t work, as in, it doesn’t give you the strategic outcomes you want it to because you didn’t represent the game correctly. Voting isn’t a binary, no matter how much so you insist that it is. A voter can simply not vote, or not even register. Or vote third party, or write in the name of their cat. You approving of or not approving of those things doesn’t mean they aren’t available as options to a voter.
If you want to blame voters, then you need to offer a mechanism to move them. I know how we can move individual politicians and campaigns because we’ve done it before. I don’t think we disagree about that. But there is no credible mechanism for changing the inarticulate mass which is the “electorate” to adopt your perspective that they should have just voted to support genocide. There is no tool which performs that operation. You can’t move voters in this manner. A single voter is a grain of sand. It behaves like a solid, like a tiny rock. A mass of voters is a river of sand. They have fundamentally different properties.
You are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding how elections work, how they function. Effectively, you are subject in the same kind of propaganda that the petroleum industry used to convince consumers that individual actions, specifically recycling plastics, was going to save the world. This is a bad faith approach because it shifts the responsibility for the outcomes or consequences of elections from those who actually have power in the system, like parties, political campaigns, and candidates, to those who effectively have the least power in the system: voters. That perspective you hold, is the result of a long effort on the parties to dismiss the responsibility they hold for actually appealing to voters and their demands.
There is one path to winning elections: understand the electorate, and then move candidates into adopting those positions. You can’t shame, badger, or otherwise abuse voters into voting how you want them to. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like that. Trying to do so is counterproductive.
Blame percentage (Harris, DNC, and non-voters): 100, 0, 0
All Harris had to do was change her policy on Gaza and she wins the election. One person could have made a different choice and we would have a different outcome.
Putting the responsibility of a failed campaign on the backs of voters just shows more electoral illiteracy on your part. If you can’t offer a credible mechanism for how you get 6 million people to do what you want them to do, its fucking irrelevant.
Just wanted to check: how has not voting gone for y’all, so far?
Huh. Wonder what the losing strategy is.
You created a second “No” option for choosing whether or not to vote just to be right.
Not voting is not voting is not voting. If you want to add in other qualifiers to whether or not someone votes so you can be right okay.
It does but I’ll address this as we go on.
Again, it does but I’ll address this as we go on.
Not voting. Option one.
Voting. Option two.
Yes, there are two options,: vote or do not vote. Glad we cleared that up, again.
No idea if there are studies to support this but I would bet my bottom teeth that something close to a majority of those who did vote for Harris were not supporting genocide or even the DNC. We, they, were voting against Trump 2.0 and Project 2025. The fact that some voters decided to cut off their nose to spite their face and not vote at all because, again, Harris wouldn’t say the words to make them happy? Yeah, I am going to assign blame to them for where we are now.
Can’t tell what exactly you are talking about here. Third party candidates? Or just insulting me because I don’t agree with your apologism.
Good idea! Got a few billion dollars I can borrow?
If America survives the remainder of Trump’s term hopefully those who didn’t vote and helped Trump get back in the White House and realize how stupid they were then the shame, badgering etc will have been worth it.
The failed campaign that is on Harris and the DNC. Trump winning the election I already gave my breakdown.
I’ll be honest I read your comment until you started ranting about Blue MAGA and I decided that that point that reading further would be a waste of my time.
No one should take someone as disingenuous as yourself seriously. You wanted the country to stay pro-genocide and you got what you wanted.
Lol. Your comments are getting increasingly desperate. You know you’re losing this argument.
Says the one resorting to ad-hominems and trying to flip the table over instead of addressing the issues.
Nothing about my rhetoric has changed on this issue in 3 years. A Democratic candidate for president who supports genocide would lose.
I was right then, I’m right now, and I’ll be right as the historians put this section in the books. You’ll be remembered as the functional contingent that kept the Democratic party pro-genocide and lost the election for the country.
The guy accusative anyone who disagrees with him off being pro genocide is going to complain about ad-hominem attacks? That’s cute.
You’ll be remembered as the guy who stood on the sidelines with his thumb up his ass while fascism took hold. You’re not the hero you think you are.
I think the word you’re looking for is genius not disingenuous.
Nahh I think its fascist.
I think this is well past the point of having a reasonable discussion.
I’m not gonna lie. I also tend to ignore posts using the term “Blue MAGA”, because it was frequently used to harass black and brown people for being scared about Trump.
You should work on that then. Its a useful term and a clear demographic, and has been for almost 10 years, and I can’t think of any example in history of it being used to harass black and brown people. You’re more than welcome to provide one.
It’s used to equate normie Democratic voters with MAGA. It’s especially cruel and disingenuous coming from someone who helped the MAGAs defeat Democrats and put us where we are now.
I understand partly what @tropicaldingdong@lemmy.world is trying to say. White men in particular won’t participate in protective voting. It doesn’t matter how much you try to convince them. Some will, but as a demographic, no.
What bugs me the most with leftists like this is they don’t understand how unsafe people feel under Trump. I used to watch Vaush. I thought he was safe. But then he went on a rant on how he “couldn’t understand why people cling to the Democrats.” He doesn’t understand that people cling to them out of fear.
A lot of us want better, but how do they expect us to leave the only thing keeping us somewhat safe, when they don’t even see our fear?
Yes, in other words, Democratic voting fascists.
Democrats who simultaneously want their perspectives to be the only perspectives catered to in elections, and yet also argue they’ll vote for anyone or anything the party apparatus serves up to them. They support kids in cages. They want better training and body cams for ICE. They have no real issue with Trumps foreign or domestic policies, and are mostly just annoyed that Trump isn’t going through the appropriate permission structures to enact them.
They are why we lost 2024. And its out there now. Everyone whose perspective worth two wiffs of stinky piss gets it.
All I’m doing here is presenting the reality of voter behavior. You want voters to behave differently than they do. But thats not how voters work. You can want them to be smarter, to vote more however you would like them to, but in reality, the world we actually to make decisions around, voters don’t do that. And we knew, then, in 2023, that just telling voters that they had to vote for a candidate whose policies they didn’t support, we knew then it would lose the election.
Blue MAGA is the contingent that maintained the party in un-electable policy positions. In every election, no matter how much you might like to present it to the otherwise, there are three options: your candidate, the opposition, and the couch. And guess what? They’re already at home on the couch. Strategic voting as a game-theoretical principal falls apart when it meets the reality of voter behavior.
You have a distorted view of the average Democrat. Can I ask where you get your news?
Like others I instantly downvote and refuse to read the remainder of any comment that says “Blue MAGA”. It’s too stupid for me to justify wasting my time on.
Blue MAGA fascist who demanded the candidate maintain pro-genocide positions, there-by ensuring a Trump victory.
Voting for the Democrat in the general election helps the Republican win. Got it.
I’m fully convinced that the people who promote that sort of rhetoric are either astroturfers trying to convince people to waste their vote, or just don’t understand how the voting process works in the US.
SatansMaggotyCumFart has the right of it: Push progressive candidates in the primary, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good in the general. If you vote third party in the general because the neither of the two viable candidates perfectly aligns with your desires, it’s every bit as bad as a centrist deciding to vote for the GOP candidate. Vote for whichever of those candidates is better.
You have a fantastical view of voter behavior not based in reality.
sure. on topics that are largely just bullet points and trading cards to collect.
but some topics are themselves so important the choice around them outranks all other topics. genocide being one of them. no?
If the Republicans were better than Democrats on the issue, this would make sense.
This is the crux. It’s not about voting for genocide or not genocide; it’s about voting for genocide, or genocide with a side of fascism. There’s a clearly better choice. If you’re a left-leaning person and you choose to vote third party instead of voting for the less- or non-fascist candidate, you’re not only wasting your vote, but you’re directly contributing to things like we’re experiencing right now. If you think Harris would have been worse for the country, or for Gaza, than Trump is, I think you’re delusional.
Accepting supporters of genocide in any way is the kind of Faustian bargain that guarantees fascism’s rise. You have to understand almost all voters are not applying the game theory you’re holding so tightly to. You can’t convince the mass of voters to do that either. Instead, most people understand that someone who claims to have empathy but simultaneously supports genocide is an untrustworthy snake. That’s enough to kill any sort of enthusiasm the democratic base might have had for any particular candidate. You don’t win that enthusiasm back by saying that a snake is better than a shark. The only real way for democrats to win then if for them to renounce their support for genocide. As the only real opposition to Trump their responsible for the consequences if they choose not to.
why would one vote for genocide at all? because you’re scared of fascism?
note: fascism is here on the dem and rep sides both. dem are just better at hiding it
i’d rather vote for anyone other than rep or dem at this point.
Found the single issue voter that helped put Trump in the Oval Office.
I’d be open about what I think of single issue voters, but that could net me a ban even on Lemmy.
found the pro genocide “just ignore the genocide of brown folks because i care about me more” voter.
You really think your non-vote that enabled Trump, ICE, doge, RFKJr, etc really made the world a better place?
how did it enable anything when the number of 3rd party voters plus harris voters would still not have beaten trump?
try again genocide supporter.
The candidate has a policy which will cause them to lose the election. If you vote or don’t vote is utterly irrelevant, because the electorate won’t vote for them, so long as they maintain that policy.
Many members of Congress you consider insufficiency anti-genocide were elected in 2024. Most of them, in fact. Even our current president won on a pro-genocide platform, along with all the other stuff he’s doing now that still isn’t enough for you to admit that the lesser of two evils is worth voting for. I’m glad the Rupublicans’ policies haven’t touched you or your loved ones personally yet, but consider that they may in the future.
Yes we know, the democratic party is in favor of genocide and they are the only viable opposition to republicans who are also in favor of genocide. The difference is the democrat party’s base of support is generally not in favor of genocide while republican voters are. If democrats choose to lose the support of their base then they will have a hard time winning back the house, senate, or presidency. It’s that simple. All the blame for Trump’s win lies with the party and nobody else.