I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
The fact that there’s a stairway to heaven and a highway to hell explains life well.
“We don’t need you! We never needed you! Every one of you is a paid Russian actor! We will win with Chaney and Romney!”
“GOD PLEASE WE NEEDED YOU! WHY DIDN’T YOU TRUST US?! WE CHASED AFTER THE REPUBLICANS TO MAKE YOU LOVE US!”
The more I think about it, the more this sort of gaslighting reminds me of Eve Online shenanigans. Which is fair, after all, users like Jibrish moderate r/eve like they do r/conservative.
Part of me wishes I could have a computer good enough to run Eve, but I don’t think I could handle the game and community lore in one whole thing.
I’ve spent 2200 hours in a game with next to zero good updates in 9 years, my brain can handle focusing on stupid bullshit.
But man Eve seems… Weird. In a good and bad way.
I was excited about eve for maybe a month or two, it’s not worth it. They present this grand game where everything is possible, only to realize it’s only possible if you spend 200$ a month and give up your personal life for it. Just way too many systems designed around a game that exists for monthly subscriptions and micro transactions (nice ship, would be a shame if you couldn’t fly it because you didn’t pay us this month, oh but you can still log in and fly our less efficient ship…). Definitely impressive, but the financial pull really takes the heart out of the game.
Man you guys have gotten so good at taking down these non-existent people making these non-existent arguments.
It literally happened to me on Reddit, mastodon, and on my previous Lemmy account.
And now even though I voted for Harris while criticizing her, I’m blamed because I used my 1st amendment rights.
To the DNC and right wing Dems, its always someone else’s fault why their candidate failed to appeal to the voters they are trying to represent. No accountability for their failure.
So basically, still in denial about how Trump and Netanyahu are going to absolutely wipe out Gaza from history now while gaslighting’ing as hard as r/conservative. The overlap with the way Trump voters handle politics is astounding.
Trump and Netanyahu are going to absolutely wipe out Gaza
The fact that it’s already been entirely demolished from the Biden admin kindve nullifies this talking point though.
Harrold felt confident that nobody would ever suspect his spy pigeon.
Americans had one vote, and you guys continue to gaslight what it effectively was, for Trump or against Trump. What it wasn’t was an opportunity to change the system by making a political statement, and now all anyone who has fallen for this rhetoric has done is cemented where it’s heading to now. To change it you would have had to work outside the system. Now, even attempting to do so is far more likely to get you locked up. Congrats.
I’m a living furnace.
Don’t worry, the US looks like US voters won’t have to worry about being able to have any effective choice for much longer.
You are over reacting.
No amount of exposure to news will convince people like you of your narrative. But how does your mental lapse even work? First, you gaslight about Democrats, then you claim to be aware of what the GQP is going to do, and now after demonizing or recognizing as bad any of the two choices you have you now try to argue that you have a choice? Consistency is not your forté.
if a political party wants a group of people’s votes, they should court those people. If they fail to do so, and those people choose not to vote for them, the political party only has itself to blame
You seem to understand this, yet apparently cannot accept that you are not the only group that the party wants (read: needs) to court.
As shitty as it is, the Israel lobby has a stranglehold on politics in the US. Both major parties are beholden to them, and need to bend over backwards to try to keep these groups happy, otherwise their campaign is dead in the water. That is facts.
The reality is, in this case, those two groups are mutually exclusive. You cannot appease both (you will just end up alienating them all). One of those groups is much larger and far more influential than the other, and has the power and will to destroy your chances of winning.
They courted the second group because its literally the only possible way they can win.
Despite what lemmy might have you believe, leftist thought is not the default in most of the US.
Become big enough and influential enough that you need to be courted, otherwise they have no reason to give a shit what you think.
The opportunity of a lifetime passed before him as he tried to decide between a cone or a cup.
Gaza had been getting wiped out by Biden supplied bombs for over a year. Trump wouldn’t be able to talking about “rebuilding” gaza now if Biden hadn’t already helped demolish it.
You’ve promoted trump as being the rebuilder of Gaza enough that all doubt regarding your motives here have been removed.
You’ve purposefully left out the fact that he has recently agreed to send Israel $1BN and a fleet of bulldozers, (something even his **allies** are condemning as an attempt to “_ethnic cleanse_.” Palestine) as part of an ultimatum where he told the Palestinians to either leave their homes forever, or become one with the craters their homes will become if they don’t.
The Olympic-level athletics it takes to side-step this fact and twist current events around to still make what is currently happening as being Biden’s fault while trying to posture trump as the one to fix things- can only be performed by someone…. let’s say, ”loyal”, enough to still believe his bullshit
I put “rebuilding” in quotations because I know he doesn’t have good intentions. You don’t have to be a trump fan to hate genocide regardless of the perpetrator
The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
Give them something to vote for. You can write articles of many paragraphs to analyze the course of the election, but in the end it boils down to this: The DNC pissed off too many of their voters and offered nothing in return.
Exactly this! You can’t just “lesser of two evils” your way through life as you slide towards hell. “Lesser of two evils” isn’t a choice, it’s a hostage situation.
The lesser of the two evils didn’t go after the bigger evil, offered nothing, said the economy was doing great as people suffered higher rent and groceries, and then wondered why people listened to the lying devil saying that they would fix their problems.
They don’t want to offer solutions, they want votes.
Choosing the bigger evil ain’t the way out of it though. Unless you are an accelerationist that believes things have to get worse before it can get better.
You can’t get out of a hostage situation by making out with either of the two bank robbers.
no one is making out, but you if it’s life or death you would listen to their demands until help arrives/opportunities arise.
This ‘logic’ (and metaphors are not logic) is why help isn’t coming.
then are people actually punching the robbers themselves?
The reality right now is the bigger robbers are now taking things even more brazenly.
By not voting, you are telling both robbers “both of you are free to do whatever you want”
God I hate the stupidity of blue MAGA.
I did vote. You don’t know me.
Your stupidity, and the reason you can justifiably be called blue MAGA, is that you don’t understand what the primary responsibility of the politician is, and instead blame the political parties failures on the voters. Because the Democratic Party can never fail. They can only be failed, right?
There is one group that can and should be blamed for identifying, and then happily handing power over to fascists. Hint: it isn’t the voters.
Blaming the voters is some Stockholm syndrome level bullshit to protect the campaign consultants and other unelected assholes that got rich off of this loss. That is who you are protecting.
This isn’t a good way of looking at it. You can only vote for the difference.
Say both sides want to genocide Gaza, you’re against that, I’m against that, we’re all against that but it’s not on the ballot. By not voting you’re agreeing that Gaza is something you’ll have to manage outside of the electoral system BDS, protests, direct action… Whatever… We both agree we have to do something about genocide other than vote.
However other things WERE on the ballot, immigrant rights, trans rights. By not voting or wasting your vote you let down those groups. You broke your promise to be in solidarity with them and now they’re suffering.
Hey back in solidarity and act on all fronts including voting every time in the most effective way to support eachother.
What’s Left by anarchist Malcolm Harris explains exactly this (and a whole lot more about how we beat the climate crisis through solidarity with various leftist factions).
I had some vote blue no matter who nitwit yelling at me the other day about this. i asked them what are we supposed to do when 2028 is Mitt Romney (D) vs Trump ®. They said you vote Romney.
People who voter shame others when both parties have crossed their personal morals are the reason the Democats don’t ever run on anything substative. They have forgotten they have to earn votes. They’re not owed.
And they have forgotten that when they lose, real people suffer deeply for it. The democrats sin of apathy is often worse than the republican sin of cruelty. At least the republicans are honest about how they want to screw over the country.
Here is Chomsky explaining why yes, that is the more logical choice
https://chomsky.info/an-eight-point-brief-for-lev-lesser-evil-voting/
I had some nitwit self-described Chomsky-anarchist the other day who sounded a lot like you, went real quite after I shared that.
“We offered nothing and lost to a liar who said they would get something if he came back into office. Why did we lose?”
“We said everything was going great when the public was facing hardships and being targeted by systemic and economic inequality, and the dude lied and said he’d solve it. Why did we lose?”
“The last guy was unpopular and didn’t push back on Trump to get him jail. And then we said we’d do nothing different as Americans are facing homeless and their bodily autonomy being ripped away from them. How did we lose?”
“We courted Republicans who openly hate our voter base, alienated them by saying we don’t need you, and Republicans are too brainwashed to vote for anyone but Republicans. Why did we lose?”
I started having bad feelings about the election when I was watching a progressive podcast and they all cringed when talking about Harris campaigning with Cheney, then shrugged and said “what other choice do we have?”
That is not how you energize your base.
“We let the campaign be run by the same people who already lost against Trump in 2016. Why did we lose?”
Clearly, the dems need to be lying more.
No, I’m serious, they need to actually start hitting back in kind if they want to preserve even a sliver of the country. This moral high road shit sounds great but boy, does not seem to work in practice.
Considering this group you’re pointing out wasn’t big enough to make Harris win maybe Democrats should focus inward on their own failures instead of playing stupid ass finger pointing games with people left of them. Y’all lost despite your stance on genocide, not because of it unfortunately.
Hey look! The liberals are still blaming the left! What compromises were you doing in order to win the leftists votes btw? Maybe that is the question you should ask yourself.
Or maybe the Gaza detractors should have considered cause and effect. Or listened when Trump outright said what he’d do.
The question is specifically about people who refused to support Harris because of Gaza. Since Trump is so far objectively worse than Harris, seems pretty reasonable to wonder if any of them changed their minds now, even if it is too late.
When will you understand that leftists are tired of voting for the lesser evil? Lesser evil is still evil. You may not be aware of it, but the situation was already disastrous for many people. Now is your turn too because you ignored those people suffering for so long.
Regarding Gaza you’re an idiot. The situation is the same with Biden or Trump. Biden did nothing against Israel, and he would have done nothing more.
Trump is the doom of the USA. The whole world will be destabilised because of it. And all of this is because the Democrats didn’t care to even try to give anything to the left, considering their vote for granted.
The failure is the Democrats one only. The sooner you realize it, the sooner you’ll fix it. Or you’ll side with the fascists like liberals so often do.
No fucking shit, I’m tired of it, too. But grown ups deal with the choices in front of them instead of throwing a tantrum and trying to take their toys and go home. If the thing you really care about is Gaza and Palestinians, you have to deal with the immediate issue, which is that four years of active encouragement from Trump is going to do a fuckload of damage that can’t just be undone, even if your protest does encourage some change from Democrats. Now, Democrats don’t seem to have learned a fucking thing, and Trump is trying to make american soldiers active participants. I understand why you’re upset and why you want change, but the tactics you’re using are actively making things worse. And then, when your protest vote ushers in “the doom of the USA”, who do you blame? The people you refused to vote for because somehow, the greater evil was preferable to the lesser evil.
I am not using any tactic. Democrats are. AND YOU NEED TO STOP PRETENDING LEFTISTS VOTED FOR Trump!
Democrats gave a no win scenario to the leftists in order to try to catch some republicans. They thought leftists would vote for them only to save the country from fascism.
But what did the Democrats do to save the country from fascism? Absolutely nothing. In fact, Democrats went into supporting fascism!
There is no lesser evil, only two brand of evil that lead to exactly the same thing. That’s not accelerationism, the only accelerationists are the Democrats here.
Democrats had the power. Democrats were in charge. And they failed miserably. Yet you liberals are still blaming the left because you’re fucking children who can’t take responsibility for you failures.
BTW I’m not a US citizen. But don’t worry, liberals of the western world are absolutely all the same, exactly like you. Ruining the world, bringing fascism into it, and blaming the left for all their failures while they cooperate with the fascist.
Honestly, the election was three months ago, and we have bigger fish to fry right now. My default assumption now is that anyone still trying to relitigate the Gaza voters is a Russian troll trying to sew division among the left.
Haha no hate I just think it’s funny you arrive at the same “Russian troll” conclusion as the people trying to relitigate the Gaza voters :Pe: i think i misunderstood your comment, retracted
This push to demonize the strawman protest voters is an ongoing propaganda campaign to cause poor people to infight.
This is a real propaganda campaign
Only speculation, but I believe you are right. This only started 2 days ago after Trump’s Gaza comments. It’s disheartening how easily it is to sway online discourse. Jokes on them, this only motivates me.
It’s also possible to run thousands of parallel chatbots to atroturf sentiment these days.
They will even scour the internet automatically to insert themselves into any slightly relevant conversation
They were mainly upset that we don’t have a choice to not support genocide.
Which just betrays their utter ignorance of US history. Slavery and genocide built this country, of course we’re gonna support it.
From what I have seen they seem pretty aware of the history of white supremacy and genocide. I don’t know that this is particularly good analysis.
Expecting it to change any time soon was their naive mistake.
I will never look down on someone who voted or refused to vote because of thier conscience. Obviously for this specific question, that excludes people claiming to care about gaza, but still voting for trump. There was no illusion that trump was going to do anything positive for gaza.
I will never look down on someone who voted or refused to vote because of thier conscience.
You should. They only bring about worse situations at best. Pretending to be moral when what you’re doing is the opposite is pure hypocrisy.
Remember, the most constructive thing you can do is get mad at other, equally powerless people like yourself! This is how political change happens.
Remember! People aren’t powerless! Voting is a power! Not voting is not how political change happens
It really does baffle me that some people think a lack of an effort will bring about change.
Removing your support from a party you previously supported is an effort to bring about change. Evidenced by the democrats trying to figure out how to get people to vote for them again.
I bet you think divorce is a bad thing too.
How are you enjoying the divorce so far? Got what you wanted out of it?
Well the DNC is now forced to either pull their collective head out their ass or destroy themselves in spite. We’ll see how it goes.
It wasnt a personal reference. The point I’m making is that it tends to be overwhelmingly bad relationships end in divorce, as they should. It would be awful if people were forced to stay in bad situations like that.
The democrats have a horrible relationship with their party members, and so many chose divorce, rightly so.
Divorce isn’t something from nothing, so I’m not too sure what that false equivalency is supposed to do for you.
You cannot expect action from inaction.
Democracy is being dismantled as we speak. Agency by agency, loyalist by loyalist, executive order by executive order. And instead of building community, helping each other and organizing with those around you, I see people, who supposedly care about democracy, about human rights, about those they accuse; and what are they doing? They are blaming people who are powerless and desparing. Thereby further dividing the populace and making the takeover easier for the fascists in power. Be careful: You are telling on yourselves and your values. And we can see you.
They are blaming people who are powerless and desparing.
you reap what you sow, these are the same people that were proclaiming EXACTLY what you’re proclaiming now, just a few months before the election, 6 months prior, a year prior, two years prior. We’ve been saying this the entire time, nobody listened, nobody has started listening, and nobody will continue to listen, what are we to do if not watch the world burn?
This is exactly what I am talking about. Do you care about democracy or not? Do you care about human rights or not? Do you care about Palestinians (Americans), African Americans, Latino Americans or all the others that are being blamed or not?
If you do, you don’t just play the blame game, sit back and ‘watch the world burn’ as you’ve put it. As long as you’re divided, you’re powerless.
Instead of blaming, you unite. Instead of antagonizing, you organize. Instead of resignation, you fight.
Liberals have decided people opposing genocide are the problem rather than politicians willing to lose to even more fascist politicians, rather than accept less genocide.
“liberals” have decided that people who make their only personality trait being opposed to one specific event of genocide are quite annoying and probably not very productive to be around. Especially in the off chance that the one thing they care about turns out to be wrong. (this is the problem with issues voters, and this is why nobody likes them)
This push to demonize the strawman protest voters is an ongoing propaganda campaign to cause poor people to infight.
Strawman?
6.27 Million more people voted for Biden in 2020 than Harris in 2024. That’s not strawmanning, those fuckers stayed home and that is exactly why we are in the current situation.
Cool. Neither party was palatable for a huge amount of people, wonder why.
If I’m offered a plate of tomatoes, which I hate, and a pile of shit as choices to eat, both are not palatable to me. But that doesn’t make them the same.
Yes but if the person handing you the tomatoes had been handing you tomatoes your entire life while promising chocolate cake you’d be a lot less happy about it. Especially if they also said “We’re not going to change anything and if you have a problem with tomatoes you need to take Econ 203 to understand why you’re wrong for being upset.”
Democrats need to get people enthusiastic to vote. Not getting shit on a plate is not enough to get people to vote.
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I don’t wanna beat the analogy into the ground so I’ll let it go. But the point is, ones of them was going to be president. You will HAVE to deal with one of them. Refusing to vote is making the statement that you’re ok with the worst outcome, because of you weren’t ok with it you would have taken action to prevent that worst outcome. This is the general “you”, not you specifically obviously, since you voted.
I feel like a lot of people thought “I don’t like either, so I won’t vote” ignoring that they will be impacted either way, so it’s not a matter of who you like, it’s a matter of effecting the outcome to get the best result possible. Even if that isn’t perfect for you.
I voted and I’m still impacted. It was a fruitless effort.
Ok. So your take away is never do anything that might fail?
Let’s say you’re completely right. How does insulting people’s poor choices 4 months ago help us in the present? We can’t create resistance and solidarity if we hold grievances from the past.
Because some people, mostly just tankies and anarchists pretending to be moral abstainers, are unapologetic about helping elect fascism. By exposing and shaming them, onlookers will reconsider their own stance.
There are actual Nazis in this administration, and you’re worried about “tankies?” Get it together man.
The Tankies are promoting abstaining to help elect the actual Nazis and it fucking worked, so yes I’m worried about the fucking Tankies.
Tankies want 1 thing: “the end of US Imperialism” which is to say for us to all off ourselves so that NATO stops getting in China’s way.
Are the Tankies in office? Prioritize and Organize.
Well…
2018
“He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great,” Trump said, according to audio of excerpts of Trump’s remarks at a closed-door fundraiser in Florida aired by CNN. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday,” Trump said to cheers and applause from supporters.
2020
Our relationship with China has now probably never, ever been better," Trump said, adding that he gets on well with President Xi Jinping. “He’s for China, I’m for the U.S., but other than that, we love each other.”
2025
U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he has “always had a great relationship” with Chinese President Xi Jinping and that he looks forward to “getting along with China.”
Yeah, fucking looks like it.
One’s enemies can exist on two fronts. It’s happened before.
“We are fighting the wrong enemy.” Allen Dulles expressed this sentiment in 1942, while serving as the Swiss director of the OSS. He had reevaluated the ongoing war with Nazi Germany and decided that the Communist threat was far graver than the National Socialist one.
You’re in good company
They’re literally saying Nazis are also their enemies.
Maybe if some of them would accept responsibility, it would go a long way towards creating that resistance.
I’d actually have a lot of respect for someone someone that could admit they made a huge mistake, because it means they are self aware enough to know that their own behavior has consequences also.
And I can get behind people humble enough to own their mistakes.
But most of these people have the gall to blame people who voted for Harris, or blame Harris herself for not being perfect in every way.
So unless they find some humility, there won’t be any solidarity and I would even go so far as to urge others to refuse to find solidarity with anyone that does not have enough strength of character to own their mistakes.
Guess we should give up then, since things didn’t go our way. Right?
You give them something real to vote for. Give them a reason to turn out. And there’s a reliable way to do that. Hard policy. Universal Healthcare. Free education. Raising wages. Stuff that actually improves people’s living conditions in their daily lives.
Because believe it or not, The World’s Most Powerful Military and genocide do not excite any democrats that aren’t members of the DNC Services Corp.
Portraying abstaining, third party, and trump voters in the same group is pretty lazy, if not intentional.
The electoral college exists: Every person I knew in swing states voted Harris in exchange for someone in CA or WA voting Claudia de la Cruz or otherwise.
But I guess even Harris voters can be made into Trump supporters with enough effort at this stage.
How do you change voter behavior?
You don’t. If you want someone to vote for you, you need to provide something that they want. The point of democracy is not to change the people to fit what the rulers want, it’s to change the rules to what the people want. If you can’t do that, the people don’t want you.
I keep ruminating on this argument, and it gives me deeply split feelings.
On one hand I keep thinking, voters need to grow up. Voting is how the populace gets to engage in self governance, i.e. politics, and as the aphorism goes, Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. Things that are easy aren’t solved by politics, and the voters need to accept that you’re often not going to get what you want and in governance you often have to settle for choosing the thing you hate the least.
On the other hand, I keep thinking I’m making the classic leftist mistake of demanding everyone should do what I think is right, because I am right, and then being frustrated when my rightness isn’t blindingly obvious to everyone.
Like the lady says, It’s like rain on your wedding day…
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: You don’t run for office with the electorate you want, you run for office with the electorate you have.
Well then, our troubles are deeper than we know.
On the right as long as you talk a good game on lowering taxes they’ll put aside any and all espoused convictions. See how quiet the Libertarians got when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Turns out any time I spent debating the preeminence of personal liberty and the NAP was a big fat waste of my time. Alas.
On the left we have an electorate that “…would rather be right than president,” and it turns out they get to be neither.
Most Americans align closer with progressives than any other group when it comes to policy. But messaging has been coopted by the Republicans to make people instinctively hate “socialism” because of the Red Scare Propaganda.
But Democrats block progressive policy because it makes their donors angry.
So really there’s nobody willing to represent the majority
I’ve become pretty skeptical we know where the majority is. The question determines the outcome of the survey. The measuring stick is flawed and error bars are many times larger than the difference being measured. Frankly, the thing being measured has more dimensions than are being measured.
And it’s worth remembering how the party got here. The left and labor coalition failed to beat Nixon twice, Ford’s losing had little to do with the left, and it utterly fell apart against Reagan. The Democrats only started to get traction at the national level by going to the center, using the DLC playbook. I’m as angry about the abandonment of labor by the Democratic party as anyone, but the reason for it is not a mystery. By the same token if the left doesn’t build the structure for a more left leaning Democratic party to operate no one should expect the party to move.
The hard thing is, I don’t know what that structure looks like, but it’s not enough to be “correct”.
YOU’RE skeptical.
Stop projecting because you are too lazy to go learn about the world around you.
Saving. That survey is hard to find if you don’t search the right terms.
I find it funny how everyone blames everyone except for the Republicans who voted for Trump.
Who isn’t blaming republican voters? Do you think that people calling this shit out are incapable of holding two simultaneous thoughts?
they’re a lost cause. they might learn when their welfare programs and fema aid are cut, but nothing rational that we can say will convert them.
They would rather continue cheering on genocide and racism even more than under Biden, as the deserved retribution for not giving uncritical loyalty to the Party, rather than saying the Democrats should have prioritized winning elections over full support of genocide.
The democrats tried everything except for actually grappling with the subject. Now blaming the voters completely misses the point … that the dems where supporting Israel and clearly stated they would continue the current path. Trump had the decency to lie to the constituents. And now they cope by convincing themselves it’s part of his plan. The voters where duped… but the Dems did this… not the voters.
