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.
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, @[email protected] , 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.
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.
And as an aside, even within your 2x2 matrix you acnwledge voting isn’t a binary. There are 4 outcomes possible in what you outlined. Likely Democrat, Vote; Likely Democrat, Don’t vote; Likely Republican, Vote; Likely Republican, Don’t vote. 4 possibilities.
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.
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.