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 Jill Stein got more, as did RFK even after he had withdrawn already, but I doubt they were the popular choice of the communists arguing here on Lemmy during the election campaign.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?
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.
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.
“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?
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):
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.
And then there are questions in the PDF like:
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:
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?