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That you take the former as given is the whole reason the Democratic party has like a 20% approval rating. People don't vote for parties that just act like bad things are just immutable facts of life, especially when it's blatantly obvious that the bad thing could be changed if the political will existed.
Imo it was a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for Democrats; which is exactly what Republicans, Israel, and bad actors crafted the situation to be.
If the public stance was not Democrats being 100% for Israel, then they believed they would have lost the election because of the political PACs and donors flipping to fund the opposition.
Given how much money the lobbies that were pro-Israel were pushing into the campaign trail, any candidate that didn’t take that stance in a close election was for sure at risk of losing their donor vote.
I still think Democrats should have done more, such as saying they would fully step into the situation to prevent the loss of more lives for both Palestinians and Israelis. It also didn’t help that Biden was pro-Israel and expected Kamala to be lock-step with his stances while on the campaign trail.
They chased the money and they lost. Trump had less funding and he won. Aren't you interested in asking why?
Another question. If it is possible to win with less funding, why do you consider it a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation?
In hindsight it should be easy to see that they were only damned for what they did (backed a genocide), and would not have been otherwise. Too many people can't get past their bitterness towards abstainers to consider how this outcome was an unforced error on the part of the DNC, and are seemingly content to repeat the same mistake.
Functionally that was their gamble. Chasing money is a current issue of our system where money and land matter more than people, power-wise.
Trump specifically had more direct funding than Harris since money was also being spent trying to pick up close Senate seats. I don’t think this includes all of the tactics that went in to drive the vote for Republicans such as Elon’s personal PAC, paying people to register to vote, gerrymandering efforts, added barriers for mail-in ballots, or even the fact that people were allowed to legally gamble on the election.
There was lots of specific issues that factored in, but Democrats being beholden to not pissing off the Israel PACs was a big issue. Some of the same PACs that make very misleading ads against politicians that didn’t say they were specifically pro-Israel. Ads so misleading that you question how it’s legal to make those kinds of claims. And PACs so organized that they can tell their donors who to send their donations to directly and their donors listen repeatedly.
I think it is possible to be a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” if you’re at risk of losing a large enough percentage of voters with either choice you make. I think they could’ve done better if Biden stepped in a year before and demanded America lead operations/prevented Israel from attacking indiscriminately and land grabbing. Well that and if many of the greedy politicians didn’t look at this as an excuse to make an arms deal.
I think they were damned for letting Biden dictate Harris’ Israel/Palestine opinion. Harris wasn’t going to follow in Biden’s footsteps in Israel, so she should have made it clear how she was going to get a resolution brought forward.
Personally, I don’t blame abstainers, I blame the propagandists that preyed upon people. Many of the Democratic and Republican politicians are owned by money. It’s the reason these corporate Democratic leaders are not backing Mamdani, since he’s both progressive and not lock-step pro-Israel. The corporate Dems and Republicans specifically are the ones at risk of their funding/seats to another corporate politician if they were not condemning Mamdani.
All this to say, change needs to happen from both within the Democratic Party and outside of it as well, such as by changing the voting system locally to get more politicians like Mamdani.
Very sound logic.
Probably won't comfort trans people when they're shoved into death camps, but for a brief moment you got to feel superior. So that's gotta count for something right?
I voted for Harris and the people you're losing are the ones who don't care about feeling superior, they just don't feel like voting is very important and dumb statements like "regardless of who is elected, this bad thing won't change" reinforce that idea.
Honestly that's a fair point. I feel like this is a major failure of our civics education.
If we did mandatory voting, made election day a federal holiday, and treated it like a much more important civil duty the results would be wildly different.
None of that will fix a system so broken where there are only two viable parties and both support genocide.