Trump's latest idea has renewed Democratic criticism of pro-Palestinian activists who encouraged voters not to back Biden or Harris in the presidential election.
a smart campaign would have at least tracked this data.
even if the campaign steadfastly maintains their “we are entitled to your vote either way, so shut the fuck up and stop complaining” stance, you would want to gather the data about how many people on these contact lists responded and mentioned Gaza.
Thank you! It’s one thing to philosophically not view what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide or not want to upset the Israel lobby, but you have to know where the people are at. The amount of people in this world who cannot reflect on their failures and grow from them is astonishing. I have people on my team that I tell them that it’s OK to make mistakes, just please make new mistakes each time.
It leads me to think the Democratic Party, those in charge, either are fine with what’s happening now or are too stupid to reflect on why they lost, and neither of those are good options.
In my interpretation, the Democrats chose supporting genocide and therefore maintaining the funding for all elections in the future in our quid pro quo system rather than to end the genocide and win the presidency but have most of the plutocracy yank their funding for future elections. Ultimately, it was the result of a long term strategy by our Capitalist class to capture the government for financial purposes which culminated in 2010 with the Citizen’s United decision. Since then, the behavior of our elected leaders correlates directly with funder interests and not at all with polling data from constituents.
The amount of people in this world who cannot reflect on their failures and grow from them is astonishing.
This is a pretty ironic thing to write underneath this article.
Blame can be shared. We can blame Biden for continuing half a century of support for genocide as long as it’s a close US ally that’s doing it. We can blame the media for creating an environment where more Americans support Israel than Palestine, in one of the most morally unambiguous situations that has ever existed on the planet. We can also blame short-sighted political operatives who were unmoved by warnings that their efforts to “help” in Gaza by advocating against Democrats in this election were going to accelerate the genocide tenfold, if they accomplished anything at all. Now that the warnings are working out precisely as envisioned, I have very little sympathy for “Arabs for Trump” or anything resembling it.
I’m actually not sure how much we can blame Harris, since she was handed a totally impossible situation where attempting to change course on Gaza would have lost her significant support from Israel-supporters, and I strongly suspect gained her pretty minimal support from Palestinian supporters. We may disagree about that. But regardless, I think the pretty reasonable claim “the Democrats have their heads up their ass as far as Gaza” is in no way a counter argument for the claim “and the uncommitted movement was, in retrospect, a big mistake.”
I think it’s fair to say that those “with power” are the ones that ought to be blamed, so I lay that on Harris and the DNC vs. the voters. I don’t think anyone had illusions that Trump would be good for Gaza and the Palestinians, but neither party was willing to show a difference of opinion except to the speed of Gaza getting leveled.
I would also argue that Gaza was an important point, but not the whole point (or a symptom, not the cause). Democrats continue to think that if they just run the same playbook, clearly the “evil” of Donald Trump will speak for itself and they’ll win. It clearly doesn’t when he’s not in power. The Democrats are spending this time hemming and hawing about bipartisanship. I couldn’t find the article I saw recently on Hakeem Jeffries basically saying they have all three branches so we’re going to find middle ground between us and them, but I think this from CNN is a great encapsulation. “Don’t shut it down, we might get blamed. Don’t make a big fuss over everything.”
It’s the toothlessness that gets to me. Why play nice with the Trump administration? Why not just go for the throat if the Democratic party believes that Trump is the existential threat to democracy they say? The Republicans sure love to whenever there’s some opportunistic grift for them and maintain that the Democrats either haven’t figured it out or are willingly choosing to ignore it. If there’s a strategy to their approach, I cannot wrap my head around it.
So w/r/t the uncommitted movement (and others who looked at Harris v. Trump and just didn’t bother turning out), I don’t know how else you force the DNC to listen and doubly so if they choose not to collect the necessary data. You shouldn’t back a candidate because the party says this is the person we’re running or because the other candidate is so much worse. The candidate should listen to the voters and run a campaign that brings people in. If a key voting group isn’t on board, it’s on the candidate/party to figure out WHY and HOW to include them.
Harris deserves astronomical amounts of blame. If you want to be portrayed as a good guy facing an evil man, don’t support genocide. Otherwise people will look at the two options and say “what’s the difference”.
I voted for Harris but I was screaming the whole election that she was going to lose because she needed to distance herself from Biden quickly. She started well by picking Walz but then Velcroed herself to Biden after that. It sapped all the energy out of her campaign. Just fucking idiotic.
Thank you! It’s one thing to philosophically not view what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide or not want to upset the Israel lobby, but you have to know where the people are at. The amount of people in this world who cannot reflect on their failures and grow from them is astonishing. I have people on my team that I tell them that it’s OK to make mistakes, just please make new mistakes each time.
It leads me to think the Democratic Party, those in charge, either are fine with what’s happening now or are too stupid to reflect on why they lost, and neither of those are good options.
In my interpretation, the Democrats chose supporting genocide and therefore maintaining the funding for all elections in the future in our quid pro quo system rather than to end the genocide and win the presidency but have most of the plutocracy yank their funding for future elections. Ultimately, it was the result of a long term strategy by our Capitalist class to capture the government for financial purposes which culminated in 2010 with the Citizen’s United decision. Since then, the behavior of our elected leaders correlates directly with funder interests and not at all with polling data from constituents.
This is a pretty ironic thing to write underneath this article.
Blame can be shared. We can blame Biden for continuing half a century of support for genocide as long as it’s a close US ally that’s doing it. We can blame the media for creating an environment where more Americans support Israel than Palestine, in one of the most morally unambiguous situations that has ever existed on the planet. We can also blame short-sighted political operatives who were unmoved by warnings that their efforts to “help” in Gaza by advocating against Democrats in this election were going to accelerate the genocide tenfold, if they accomplished anything at all. Now that the warnings are working out precisely as envisioned, I have very little sympathy for “Arabs for Trump” or anything resembling it.
I’m actually not sure how much we can blame Harris, since she was handed a totally impossible situation where attempting to change course on Gaza would have lost her significant support from Israel-supporters, and I strongly suspect gained her pretty minimal support from Palestinian supporters. We may disagree about that. But regardless, I think the pretty reasonable claim “the Democrats have their heads up their ass as far as Gaza” is in no way a counter argument for the claim “and the uncommitted movement was, in retrospect, a big mistake.”
Edit: Typos
I think it’s fair to say that those “with power” are the ones that ought to be blamed, so I lay that on Harris and the DNC vs. the voters. I don’t think anyone had illusions that Trump would be good for Gaza and the Palestinians, but neither party was willing to show a difference of opinion except to the speed of Gaza getting leveled.
I would also argue that Gaza was an important point, but not the whole point (or a symptom, not the cause). Democrats continue to think that if they just run the same playbook, clearly the “evil” of Donald Trump will speak for itself and they’ll win. It clearly doesn’t when he’s not in power. The Democrats are spending this time hemming and hawing about bipartisanship. I couldn’t find the article I saw recently on Hakeem Jeffries basically saying they have all three branches so we’re going to find middle ground between us and them, but I think this from CNN is a great encapsulation. “Don’t shut it down, we might get blamed. Don’t make a big fuss over everything.”
It’s the toothlessness that gets to me. Why play nice with the Trump administration? Why not just go for the throat if the Democratic party believes that Trump is the existential threat to democracy they say? The Republicans sure love to whenever there’s some opportunistic grift for them and maintain that the Democrats either haven’t figured it out or are willingly choosing to ignore it. If there’s a strategy to their approach, I cannot wrap my head around it.
So w/r/t the uncommitted movement (and others who looked at Harris v. Trump and just didn’t bother turning out), I don’t know how else you force the DNC to listen and doubly so if they choose not to collect the necessary data. You shouldn’t back a candidate because the party says this is the person we’re running or because the other candidate is so much worse. The candidate should listen to the voters and run a campaign that brings people in. If a key voting group isn’t on board, it’s on the candidate/party to figure out WHY and HOW to include them.
Harris deserves astronomical amounts of blame. If you want to be portrayed as a good guy facing an evil man, don’t support genocide. Otherwise people will look at the two options and say “what’s the difference”.
I voted for Harris but I was screaming the whole election that she was going to lose because she needed to distance herself from Biden quickly. She started well by picking Walz but then Velcroed herself to Biden after that. It sapped all the energy out of her campaign. Just fucking idiotic.
I can show you some difference.
I can quote you messages where I was pointing out the difference.
As were some other people, yes.