In summary
Vote blue no matter who:
Pro - Democrats more likely to win. Things won’t immediately get worse.
Con - Democrats have no incentive to do anything other than what their wealthy donors want.
Result - Things don’t get worse now, but eventual rightward drift is guaranteed because the democrats will do nothing good and the republicans will win eventually.
Vote blue only if X:
Pro - Democrats have an incentive to do something other than what their wealthy donors what, in theory.
Con - Democrats less likely to win.
Result - Democrats might do something good if they win. Rightward lurch is possible if they lose.
Can we please stop litigating this now?
You’re blaming the one independent when there’s 80k red voters?
This sub is still in denial from last year I see, I guess none of you braindeads learned your lesson huh
Even funnier now that the DNC approved candidate is running as a 3rd party in NYC after losing his own primary. Suddenly no issue voting for an independent candidate there.
Well, at least they voted and did their duty as a citizen of democratic nation. Some people didn’t even bother to do that much, so for these people they don’t get to complain.
I’m getting tired of this back and forth. This bickering is childish and our time would be better spent drumming up positive interest for ranked choice voting.
That’s a huge uphill battle, it’s outright banned in 17 states. Yes, we absolutely should be doing everything within our power to drum up positive interest, but absolute best case scenario it’s going to take several election cycles. We still need to make viable plans for the interim.
who banned it 🤔
Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho
That’s an awful lot of southern states. Iowa surprises me because that legalized same sex marriage before a lot of other states
Fancy that, it’s like the post was right.
If it doesn’t happen now, many self-proclaimed ‘leftists’ aren’t interested.
Apparently the 60+ years of groundwork leading up the Russian Revolution just aren’t interesting enough for them.
Agreed, but how do we get it implemented?
Don’t forget the protest and ignorant voters! Literally happened on election Day: “I don’t like how Biden/Harris is and will be handling Palestine so I’m gonna vote Trump” and “What happened to Biden? I don’t know who Harris is, but I saw Trump on TV so I guess I’ll vote for him.”
Oh boy, is the midterm bullshit already starting?
It started a month ago, actually.
If democrat politicians weren’t so shit it wouldn’t be so close in the first place
Vote in primaries, run for office.
So true, the Democrats had a fucking easy ass win all lined up and threw it so hard. 1.6B in campaign funds and they ran on, “We are changing nothing, but at least we aren’t republicans.”
Everyone below the upper middle class knows the government is not working for the people. People voted for trump because he ran on change. We know he is a liar and using politically uneducated people to push the right wing agenda, but the primary message of his campaign was what people wanted. And he won.
3rd party/non-voters didn’t help, but the loss is primarily on the Democrats.
I remember having arguments with these Blue MAGA muppets during the election. I kept trying to explain to them why it was insanity to pretend the economy was fine. But they were morons with a 1984 streak that would make Orwell blush, and thought they could just manifest their way to an election victory. They kept citing CPI data, saying, “but inflation adjusted wages have never been higher!” When you pointed out that inflation purposefully leaves out a lot of the volatility in prices people were reeling from, and how not all income groups experience inflation equally? They didn’t want to hear it.
Remember the absolutely insulting, just disgustingly condescending term “vibession?” I do. That term alone probably cost Kamala the election. The only thing that makes people angrier than having to deal with a rotten economy is to have their leaders gaslight them and pretend nothing is wrong.
These morons didn’t want to hear it. They have a three monkeys belief system. Just ignore all problems, pretend everything is fine, and just try to bluff your way to victory on election day. You point out the suicidally stupid policies that were killing the Kamala campaign, and they just acted like three year olds saying, “harumf, I guess you want Trump to win!”
This is exactly what people are referring to when they describe liberal arrogance. Criticism is unacceptable. Shut up and tow the line. Vote Blue No Matter Who (unless there’s a progressive on the ticket.)
Anyone who says blue maga is a fucking moron
If you don’t realize MAGA can be blue, then you are likely blue MAGA. At the heart of MAGA is a rejection of reality, a willingness to embrace magical thinking over objective facts, and a loyalty to the party leaders at all cost. Trying to manifest their way to an election victory, gaslighting the electorate by claiming the economy was fine, and lying through their teeth about Biden’s condition? That is textbook MAGA behavior. Biden’s people might as well have been up there claiming he aced an intelligence exam like Trump’s people are always doing.
Anyone who can’t grok the concept of blue MAGA, or think that the blue team is immune to this intellectual sickness…is a fucking moron.
I realize you want fascism
Found the blue MAGA.
deleted by creator
Proud moron I see
we need to be honest with ourselves.
Being angry at republicans for blowing up the government is reasonable.
It’s also reasonable to be angry at the democrats, who sat around watching them work towards blowing up the government for fifty years and being like “hurrdurr FAIRNESS!” while doing nothing to stop it.
Good thing the republican ones are so much better, them being in power, right?
I cast my vote and played your stupid game. What have you done besides lick blue boot?
You’re right. Republicans are awful. Trump is awful. The Republicans handed the election to Democrats on a silver platter, and the DNC still managed to fuck it up.
Sure, all the DNC and not, you know, millions of nonvoters and such who decided it didn’t matter.
Sounds like the Democrats absolutely fucked themselves if they made millions of voters decide to sit the election out. They told voters they weren’t going to change anything, so those voters saw no point in voting
“Blue Circus wasn’t entertaining enough, so letting minorities get murdered is aktshually a completely legitimate choice beyond criticism, shitlib!”
That’s how elections work. People see their material conditions degrade and watch the powers that be do nothing, so they vote against those powers or decide that elections are a farce.
“It’s okay to let minorities be murdered if Blue Circus was REALLY unentertaining”
Fuck’s sake, you don’t even both denying it. You have fun with simping for the aestheticization of politics, one of the core components of literal fascism. It goes well with your full-throated support of Nazis taking power.
The election was drastically skewed to the right due to tiktok and youtube propoganda.thats whT created the entire move,ent to stay home to protest Gaza. Proor to 6 months before the election, I didnt heard Jack ahit about Gaza.
If we’re ever going to fix our elections, we need to do something about influencer astrofurfing. Influencer need regulation and to be held responsible for the ahit they spew.
You want to hand the president even more power? Are you insane?
what about the former statement makes yours occur?
deleted by creator
I too like punching down at people with no power. It would be too much for democratic leadership to learn the lessons of 2016 and 2024. Just blame progressives and people who want better things!
No I take this back. Harris was right to push for a fascist border bill and Biden was right to flood cops with money. Oh and we can’t forget enthusiastically funding genocides!
The dems really need to try to out fasc the fascists. That way they can persuade the moderate fascists! After all, progressives have no where else to go! I’m so glad Dems have so many big brained think tankers leading these extremely good strategies that always seems to work out well for us.
I too like punching down at people with no power.
People used their power to support literal Nazis, but I guess it’s okay because Blue Circus was REALLY not entertaining enough for you this cycle.
I voted for Harris and the like. But the reason she lost is because she failed to inspire her base. It is bullshit that anyone would blame voters for their leader’s failures.
The power differential between a random non voter and the people to blame, establishment dems, is vast. The dems who made unpopular and stupid decisions are mostly to blame for this situation. Attacking voters is just scapegoating bullshit
Sorry that you think that we need to rely on our Aristocratic Overlords and that democracy has no meaning.
I’m sorry you think that leaders shouldn’t lead? Stand for something? Like say that the genocide in Palestine is bad? Actually try to reform the cops? Don’t pull a fascism at the border?
Harris was a dogshit candidate with a dogshit message. Everything is great! Let me tie myself to Biden, a historically unpopular incumbent that had to drop from the race late!
I’m sorry you think that leaders shouldn’t lead? Stand for something? Like say that the genocide in Palestine is bad? Actually try to reform the cops? Don’t pull a fascism at the border?
I’m sure you can quote where I said any of that.
Harris was a dogshit candidate with a dogshit message.
Yes.
A dogshit candidate doesn’t absolve people of their duty to vote against LITERAL FUCKING NAZIS
I’m not saying it does. My personal morality forced me to vote for the Dems even though my vote doesn’t matter and I fucking loath genocidiers.
I’m just saying the vast majority of the blame lies at the feet of the people who had power to stop this. Merrick Garland, Joe Biden, and Harris. We put them in office in 2020 to fucking do something and they say on their fucking hands and did nothing. They had power. They squandered it on bullshit.
Direct your anger somewhere productive. Being angry at voters is going to get you nowhere, whereas elected leaders might notice when big cities start electing people with actual decent non neoliberal policies?
Direct your anger somewhere productive. Being angry at voters is going to get you nowhere, whereas elected leaders might notice when big cities start electing people with actual decent non neoliberal policies?
“Sorry, the progressive wasn’t pure enough. We’re going to boycott him, and criticizing us isn’t allowed (but you have to be nice to us, or else our feewings will be hurt 🥺)”
Normalizing purity politics will sink all left candidates, not just the ones who aren’t radical enough for your tastes
Y’all are still doing this? It was moderates who lost you the election, now stop crying about it.
That would require investigating the underlying reasons for election failure instead of the smug vibes-based ‘analysis’ that centrists prefer
the character in the comic is not a nonvoting democrat (the subject of your linked article).
I did not vote democrat because I am not a democrat and therefore not a nonvoting-democrat. The democrat party did not convince me to cast my vote for their candidate. Just like now I am not a republican either. I did not vote republican.
Democrats lost because they neglected to consider just how important it could have been for their candidate to fucking come out against israel. It’s all she had to do: promise to not send a single dime to genocidal fascists. she had years of opportunity to fight her own president for that kind of change too.
Look what we got “instead.” A fascist who supports genocide.
Both parties are very much the same: capitalist.
It’s all she had to do: promise to not send a single dime to genocidal fascists. she had years of opportunity to fight her own president for that kind of change too.
Even just staying silent on the issue would be enough to differentiate her from Biden for many. She couldn’t even avoid talking about how much she hated college students, but yet people act surprised those demographics didn’t go out to vote. Weird how insulting potential voters and explicitly telling them you don’t care about their vote leads to not getting their vote.
Given she avoided taking positions on most issues until the week of the election (other than to oppose healthcare and support fracking), I have a hard time believing someone in the campaign wasn’t intentionally trying to throw the election…
And it worked out great for Gaza!
I’ve been told by nonvoters on here that they’d rather remain ‘pure’ than reduce Gazan deaths. So holsum! Such brave opponents of genocide!
It’s entirely true. They’re so high on their own
fartssense of self righteousness that it doesn’t matter. At least they didn’t betray Gaza. /sHey, happy cake day :)
And thank you for all you do and postThanks!
That poll says nothing about non-voters
But also:
The Democratic Party needs to come to terms with the real reasons it lost the presidency in November, including that after over a year of unprecedented protests and calls for Biden to stop sending weapons to Israel, party leadership failed to listen to its own voters who overwhelmingly want their government to end its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
That poll says nothing about non-voters
It literally fucking does, at the top, in big fucking letters.
But also:
Yes, there are multiple culprits, and the party is one of them. No one fucking here on Lemmy is questioning whether the Dem party is at fault, but half the fucking place seems to think that voters allowing fascism is just Fine, Actually, because it teaches the shitlibs a lesson at the expense of the lives of marginalized groups, whom they apparently don’t give a flying fuck about when it’s not Virtue Signaling Hour.
It literally fucking does, at the top, in big fucking letters.
This is what I see:
No one fucking here on Lemmy is questioning whether the Dem party is at fault
To use one of your own phrases, “fucking what”
“Biden 2020 Voters Who Did Not Vote For Harris”
It’s literally in your fucking screenshot.
To use one of your own phrases, “fucking what”
I’m sorry, is there some secret cabal of “Harris/the DNC did nothing wrong” posters that doesn’t come around here, or are you just extrapolating that position to anyone who dares say voters share some fucking blame for literally allowing fascism because it gave them good feelies?
“Biden 2020 Voters Who Did Not Vote For Harris”
Which could mean a bunch of things, including the thing right next to it that I highlighted: “who cast a ballot for someone besides harris”
I’m sorry, is there some secret cabal of “Harris/the DNC did nothing wrong” poster
This is some next-level denial.
Okay and? When you have numbers nearly reaching 40%, what you’re looking at isn’t hyper-radical moral purity leftists; the majority of these people are almost certainly everyday people who also happen to have something resembling a conscience. There’s still no evidence to support a crusade against radical commies who ruined everything, which are clearly the people being addressed/mocked here. Unless you think 40% of Biden-voting non-voters in Arizona are Very Serious Leftists, in which case, uh… yeah.
-
The idea that ‘everyday people’ in the US are that interested in foreign affairs is not realistic. Foreign affairs are, unfortunately, almost purely the domain of the already-deeply politically involved, who tend not to be moderate ‘everyday people’.
-
Peddling narratives has consequences, yes, even online! Christ, I wish I still believed that online circlejerks didn’t affect REAL politics, but this is the post 2016 world we have the misfortune of living in, and especially the post-COVID world where traditional news media regurgitates whatever is loudest and latest in online media. The people saying things like “The Dems are just as bad as the GOP on Gaza! Don’t vote for KAMALACAUST!” were absolutely contributors to nonvoters, and especially nonvoters who had previously voted for Joe fucking Biden, of all people, but suddenly decided that HIS well-known and lifelong Zionism was a disqualifier for his V fucking P
-
If your view is that any anti-Israel policy in the US is moderate, you have a lot to learn about the US - unfortunately, all of it bad. Simply conditioning aid in the Democratic party was still a distinctly minority view as late as September in 2024, even though favorability of Israel had dropped lower than it’s ever been before.
-
Contrary to what left-wing optimists had hoped, Democratic nonvoters in 2024 appear to have been less progressive than Democrats who voted. For instance, Democratic nonvoters were 14 points less likely to support banning assault rifles, 20 points less likely to support sending aid to Gaza, 17 points less likely to report believing that slavery and discrimination make it hard for Black Americans, 17 points more likely to support building a border wall with Mexico, 20 points more likely to support the expansion of fossil fuel production, and, sadly for economic populists, 16 points less likely to support corporate tax hikes (though this group still favored corporate tax hikes by a three to one margin). Overall, nonvoting Democrats were 18 points less likely to self-identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.”
But my punching bag!!
Only 39 percent of Democratic nonvoters identified as white, while 28 percent identified as Black, and 20 percent as Latino. This means that, compositionally, the more conservative profile of nonvoting Democrats (compared to voting Democrats) cannot be attributed to a whiter electorate.
My, uh, totally not racist punching bag!
Democratic nonvoters were nearly twice as likely (60 percent vs. 32 percent) to have a household income of less than $50,000 per year, they were nearly three times less likely to hold a four-year college degree (47 percent vs. 17 percent), twice as likely to be gig workers (31 percent vs. 15 percent), and only half as likely to be union members (27 percent vs. 14 percent). Further, nonvoting Democrats were more than twice as likely as voting Democrats to report feeling the economy is worse now than a year ago (46 percent vs. 22 percent) or that their incomes had recently decreased. And, perhaps not surprisingly given their economic precarity, Democratic nonvoters were substantially more likely than voters to support increased state welfare spending (61 percent vs. 52 percent).
My not racist, not classist punching bag…!
Granted anyone who either didn’t vote but would have voted Dem, voted for trump because they were “on the fence” somehow, or chose to vote 3rd party but otherwise would’ve voted Dem contributed to this outcome.
That said, yeah the terminally online leftist vote is not what swung this election. I say that as a terminally online leftist who voted for killmala harmus anyway
ITT: Lots of people who don’t understand that US presidential elections are a binary choice, and one of them is going to be president.
Primary with your heart. General with your brain.
Well if it is a matter of life and death vote democrats yes but then just dont sit on your butt the next for years (same goes for the maker of this meme), support alternative movements, spread the word, volunteer if you can. Yes republicans and democrats are not the same but I am convinced that more than %50 of the democrat senators will have no qualms about completely changing their supposed ideologies if it is required to keep their seats.
Plus the republicans cheated. They did it legally through gerrymandering and voter suppression, but they also said they did it illegally. I believe them.
Holy shit is this a braindead take.
I am European, so, an outsider perspective, but…
I’d love to know actual numbers, because I get the feeling “commies who voted third party” are too small a group to swing elections. Just a quick look at the numbers on Wikipedia give 0.11% for the Socialism and Liberation candidate. Jill Stein got more, as did RFK even after he had withdrawn already, but I doubt they were the popular choice of the communists arguing here on Lemmy during the election campaign. (Where I, personally, argued for voting for first Biden, then Harris, because I did not see the left in the US as organised enough to react to the kind of oppression Trump would bring early, whereas I’d wager a Democrat would not have escalated like this. Just to root my own bias for context.)
I am not saying it is impossible that they could have swung a very close state, but I admit, I do think it is very improbable.
So, this feels very much like impotent rage to me, directed at the annoying but ultimately equally impotent agitprop people on here. They are loud on here, but do you really think they were that influential during the election?
Gaza nonvoters alone managed to put Trump in office, and that’s excluding the other ‘left’ issues
At the least, protest voters and nonvoters like the very loud folk on here were part of amplifying the propaganda which led people to, bizarrely, believe that letting the more Zionist candidate win was Good, Actually, for Palestine.
Ah, thank you, my search-fu did not provide me good numbers like that.
However, unless I am misreading them heavily, those numbers don’t seem to lay out what you mention. They are exclusively about “Biden 2020 Voters Who Cast A Ballot For Someone Besides Harris”. Again - I don’t think that group is large enough, because even combined, all the left-of-Democrats third party votes seem to be negligible. That is “29% of voters nationally who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Kamala Harris in 2024”. So, again, if I combine Jill Stein, Cornell West, and Claudia De la Cruz, that is 0.72% of the popular vote. Even with a naive calculation of taking all 29% of those that would then be commies like that, that seems like not enough to put Trump into office, unless highly concentrated in very embattled swing states.
EDIT: OK, I forgot, that means also people voting Trump, not just third party. So the influence could theoretically be more. But I doubt commie agitprop pushed a lot of people to outright voting Trump.
The data includes nonvoters, as mentioned in the two pdfs.
EDIT: Accidentally posted while still typing and reading, aaah, this is unfinished.
EDIT2: Okay, this is as done as I will do it, I also looked at the clock, and I won`t be awake for long now anyway.
EDIT3: Okay, this one is the last one, I really have to get to bed, because I am also noticing how diving into this is not good for my health. But turns out you can disregard the stuff I wrote below except for the last sentence, and me still thinking the data is more ambivalent narrative-wise. But while I still maintain the language was confusing, I finally noticed an unambivalent line from the survey: “Of the following issues, choose any that played a role in your [vote for presidential candidate/decision to not to vote for president]. Check all that apply.” So, yes, this was indeed also non-voters.
I admit, now that I explicitly checked, that is also how I would interpret (from the PDF):
This survey is based on 604 interviews conducted by YouGov on the internet of registered voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and not Kamala Harris in 2024.
But it is also just ambivalent enough to create questions when combined with the language of the article: Since both the study and the article seem to be by the same institute, I doubt it’s a miscommunication error. The language of the article is repeatedly so specific.
For Biden 2020 Voters Who Cast A Ballot For Someone Besides Harris
29% of voters nationally who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Kamala Harris
When Biden 2020 voters cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024
And then there are questions in the PDF like:
Next, think back to how you voted in 2024. You will see issues that some say may have impacted their vote. For each of those, please say how you feel about that issue.
That seem to indicate that this indeed only targeted people that did vote.
So, colour me genuinely confused, it seems like such a specific and deliberate usage of language. And I have to admit, it feels weird to me, especially considering the IMEU has an interest in making Gaza the most important topic. Note that the same numbers of the survey could also be used to support different narratives, like: 68% said abortion access was important to them and influenced how they voted in 2024, vs 27% saying the same about violence in Gaza. Or Question 12 vs 13, showing that on a policy difference exclusively on Gaza, the people surveyed would still predominately support the Democrat, and only 8% mention not voting if the Democrat supports Israel unconditionally. So, this also does not fit the narrative neatly.
But if this does indeed represent non-voters as well, and one third of those truly did not vote because of Gaza, yes, that is indeed a large enough group to swing close results in battleground states.
CommonDreams reporting on it notes:
“The top reason those non-voters cited, above the economy at 24% and immigration at 11%, was Gaza: a full 29% cited the ongoing onslaught as the top reason they didn’t cast a vote in 2024,” wrote Ryan Grim at Drop Site News, the first outlet to report the news.
EDIT: Love the quoting data is getting downvoted. Guess the truthiness of it isn’t enough for our brave Very Serious Leftists.
i think they were given a big megaphone on platforms like TikTok or X by bad state actors like China, Russia, or Republican billionaires, and were used to sway a larger body that would have ultimately voted for Democrats to simply stay home and not vote because they were repeatedly pushed the idea that Democrats were “just as bad”.
Hmm, maybe, it is always hard to prove an effect like that. Best one could do is exit polling with specific questions of what influenced the decision, and other polls in general. I was interested what polling was available there, most I found was just non-voters as a larger group, which seems to be predominately non-politically engaged and mostly centrist. One article I have found seems to indicate the non-voting Democrats don’t really fit the narrative of being swayed by radical left influencers and agitprop either.
I am also unsure how visible those kind of influencers were on mainstream social media, as I am not active there at all. I always had the feeling they were mostly visible in their own bubbles and by people who got angry at them, thus also getting them served by the algorithms. Their effect on motivating people to stay home, I’d be genuinely interested in seeing in polling numbers, but I sadly could not find any polls with questions like “who influenced your decision to not vote”.
In general, psychology-wise, I think motivating people to stay home that would have voted otherwise is I believe a much lower effect, than the failure in motivating people to get up and vote, who would have stayed home otherwise. Which was not the responsibility of those commie influencers the way I estimate it. However - I admit there may have been an effect: By inducing fatigue in activists that had to argue with them, taking away time and resources for trying to reach and motivate properly undecided non-voters.
We kind of take it for granted that right wing people are hugely influenced by bad faith “news” channels and right wing
jackassesinfluencers.Why couldn’t people be moved to not vote along the same way? Especially by people claiming they’re normal people and totally not people with ulterior motives?
