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.
You can’t argue against my first point. We literally have the numbers. This isn’t speculative. We measured this.
Stein (G): 862,049 votes,
Kennedy (I): 756,393
Oliver (L): 650,126
De La Cruz (): 166,175
West (I): 82,664
In no state election would the greens have even come close to moving the results of that race. And if you argue that the green votes actually belong to the Democrats, you’d have to concede that both Kennedy’s and Oliver’s would belong to the Republicans. In which case Trumps victory would have been even more secure.
In the most charitable interpretation, third party votes in 2024 helped Democrats and hurt Trump. If we make some demographic assumptions and treat it like an instant run-off, reassigning third party votes would put Trump even further into the lead. And I don’t think we should make those assumptions, but I’m at least entertaining them.
You must take lessons in how to miss the point and dodge the question while responding to something that no one said, to argue against something no one claimed.
It’s not just about third-party voters, it’s also about non-voters. Not people who can’t vote, and only partly about people who aren’t registered to vote. It’s about registered voters who didn’t vote, either because they were lazy, busy, didn’t have transportation, or because they were deliberately boycotting the vote. More registered voters abstained in 2024 than there were voters for either candidate.
Laziness can only be addressed with civics education. Busyness can be addressed by making election day a federal holiday and making it illegal for employers to schedule double-shifts that day for businesses that are open. Transportation can be addressed by bolstering public transit infrastructure and adding state-funded shuttle services on election day.
The boycotters can only be addressed by convincing people to ignore all the anti-election propaganda which is being peddled on social media. If leftists actually believe in harm reduction, they would understand why voting for Kamala Harris would have been magnitudes better than allowing trump to win…
Please, spare me with your pedantic, pedagogical narcissism. The only ones in this room who need lessons are the ones who insist on an approach to electoralism which has consistently, repeatedly failed to actually win elections.
Lets just take your institutionally ignorant approaches as an example:
Its August of 2024. You have 3 months until election day. NOTHING you outline could be accomplished on that timeline, so its UTTERLY FUCKING MEANINGLESS.
That’s not why people don’t vote you fucking moron. They didn’t vote because the candidate was pro-genocide. They TOLD You why. YOU didn’t think it was important that Democrats provide an option that people WANTED to vote for, so people didn’t vote. They told you why they didn’t vote. Stop making up reasons that aren’t borne out by reality.
How does your point in any way refute that voting for Democrats is the most beneficial thing for Palestine? Unless you’re trying to say that by voting for a third party you actually helped democrats win more than you would have by voting for them?? Your point was a non sequitur which is what the person you’re replying to was trying to point out.
So I responded by broadening the scope and looking at all third party voters. Its a classic trope for apologist Dems to blame third party, and the point is that third party voters were utterly meaningless, and if anything, actually helped Dems in 2024.
We are not, at all, nor ever have we been, nor ever will we be, talking about what any of us as individuals do. Neither your vote or my vote decided an election. The 6 million votes that Harris left on the table lost the election. You are arguing against a strawman of your own creation, and what you think my personal choice would have been is utterly fucking irrelevant.
What we are discussing is how elections and electorates respond to candidates and the strategies those candidates use. The point is that its now conclusive there was one functional path to Harris winning the election: She needed to oppose the genocide in Gaza. There was no other way for her to win.
Nope. They were talking about an individual vote, their own. Again, you’re changing the subject.
And the point is: No, they’re not.
The most beneficial thing they could have done would have been to make it clear to the campaign that they were going to lose if they didn’t change their policy on Gaza, because their individual vote doesn’t matter.
Why would the campaign care about their threat to withhold their single useless vote?