Well, that's the thing: that's just your character and your opinion.

Clearly other people feel and think differently and a "Trump is Evil vote Harris to stop him" message didn't work with them, otherwise the Democrat Party wouldn't have lost 14 million voters with their strategy of being as bad as Trump in some areas and not much less so in others whilst selling themselves as the "Not Trump" option.

I've had these talks well before the election and indeed back them people might have been right (and me wrong) in their expectation that most people would put "Keep Trump out" above pretty much everything else, including their principles, and vote for a no-hope-offered candidate just to stop Trump.

Turns out that 14 million people clearly didn't got convinced to go vote for a party that offered no actual positive policies, only "We're Not Trump" a characteristic which, as I pointed out above, would only convince to vote Democrat solely to stop him those who think Trump is trully the most horrible thing in existence.

I suppose that outside the bubble in places like Lemmy a lot of people either did not fear Trump anywhere as much as a certain well-off middle class that hangs around here does or thought the Democrats were about as evil as he is (which is were the Palestine situation comes in: in my opinion it convinced a lot of people that the Democrats too are Evil, since it's a pretty natural thing to conclude of those who activelly support the mass murder of children).

The impact of the Democrat choices in Gaza wasn't just about concern with Palestinians, it was also about what it told of the character and morals of the Democrats leadership, which in turn impacts the trust in them and in what they say, which is especially bad for a party with a tradition of lying with half-truths and other such forms of deceit using dialetics trickeries (I suspect with would impact less those using the "just saying anything that comes to his mind independently of it being true or not" technique such as Trump).

A platform of "we're the most moral choice" doesn't work all that well when you're activelly supporting and giving weapons to a genocidal regime mass murdering civilians for their race, including tends of thousands of children and thousands of babies.

Certainly the results don't seem to indicate that "More people like Trump", rather they indicate that even in the face of Trump, fewer people could bring themselves to vote Democrat, which is IMHO a horrible indictment of the Democrat Party.

There aren't 2 major sides in the US, there are 3.

The 3rd side never does any formal campaigning (though there is some grassroots self-organised spreading of its message), often wins as it did this time and yet never controls any power because of how the electoral system works.

One might call the 3rd side the Not Voting Party.

The entire Democrats campaign was negative campaigning against the Republican Party, something which did nothing to take "votes" from the Not Voting Party and then specifically on Palestine, their actions, whilst if one judges them relative to the Republican Party were neutral, very strongly helped the Not Voting Party whose appeal on this was that a "vote" for Not Voting is a vote that doesn't support mass murder of children.

So if you look at it as a 3-sided contest, suddently the Democrat result is easilly explainable: they didn't as much lost to the Republicans as they lost to the Not Voting Party, and in that loss Palestine probably weighed heavilly, both because the Democrats broke some pretty strong principles for a lot of people (there aren't much strongers principles than being against the mass murder of children) thus convincing them to go "Not Voting" and because they, while raging about how Trump was a Fascist, were activelly supporting ethno-Fascists in Israel (the worst kind of Fascism there is) in the middle of a Genocide, they looked like evil hypocrites and weakened their only message trying to capture votes from Not Voting - the whole "Not voting at all is like voting for a Fascist" thing: calling the other guy evil and dangerous hardly helps convince the unconvinced when the people saying it are active supporters of an extremelly violent ethno-Fascism that has already killed thousands of babies and tens of thousands of children.

You're participating in the same circle jerk.

You've concluded that Trump is a huge Fascist and a danger beyond all other considerations (but not the Democrats, even though they're giving weapons to an ethno-Fascist regime committing Genocide which is literally "supporting Fascism") and you reached that conclusion from consuming Democrat propaganda in places like Lemmy with no actual use of skepticism, so now you repeat it.

Meanwhile all those people who don't think like you and all the posters whose posts you read here, had very different levels in the like-hate Trump scale, and the like-dislike Democrats one, and the trust-distrust what the Democrats/Republicans say scales, the politically engaged scale, the thinking that my vote makes a difference to my life scale, the what matters to me most in life scale and other such scales in human belief and behaviour that together add up to make them or not go vote and for whom they vote, which in this election also included things like the flexibility or inflexibility of one's principles thanks to the Democrats activelly breaking a really strong set of principle for lots of people when they supported with weapons the commiting of a Genocide in first Gaza and now also Lebanon.

The "incompetence" was the Democrats with their words and actions targetting a point in all those scales that turned off a lot more people that it turned on. The 14 million less Democrat votes make it undeniable that it wasn't Trump that conviced those votes to flip, it was the Democrats that failed at convincing enough people to vote for them, so clearly their words and actions turned off from voting a lot of people.

The "entitlement" is the idea that everybody is equally politically aware as you, trusting about what the Democrats say of Trump as you, fearful of Trump as you, trusting that voting maters as you and so on. I've been a member of two different political parties over the years (in two different countries) and this blindness is incredibly common amongst party members: such strongly politically active and highly tribalist people just don't get it that most of voters don't think like them, not even close and it gets worse when they end up in circle jerks like the one here in Lemmy during the US Presidentials - they basically just strengthen each other's beliefs in that what's right or wrong, what will work or not work to help their side and what people think or don't think, all with no actual proof being involved just the say so of like minded people, a pretty straighforward "groupthink" situation.

(In fact it was my experience with canvassing and leafletting in those two parties and countries that opened my eyes to the reality that in terms of engagement and trust in politics most people are nowhere like you and me.)

Even more "entitlement" is the idea that your values, forecasts and interpretation of the world are the right ones and those of the ones who didn't vote are wrong, then compounded with the idea that others should just do as you think they should and if they don't they're wrong (all of which on display in this meme and all the type of posts here blaming the 14 millions) - this a pretty straightforward "I know best and others should follow my lead", pure entitlement.

The "stupidity" is that the kind of people that have been engaging in this sort of thinking and posture are unable to, now that it has been shown beyond doubt that is complete total bollocks, review their own beliefs, behaviour and ideas in light of it. Instead they just blame everybody else like self-deluded simpletons.

I'm truly, totally, completely shocked ... that Windows is still being used on the server side.

For avoidance of confusion, I'm talking about New Labour, not traditional Labour.

What would I know, my references are only politics in 4 different countries including being a political party member in two of them, one of which was the UK ...

The only "The Onion" rather than "Not The Onion" part of this is the idea that they would announce it.

Or maybe the words do have reasonably fixed global meaning and only British Exceptionalism and their very propaganda-heavy environment makes Britons think their political landscape redefines those words.

Besides, even in Britain you might want to consider the existence of the Corbyn phenomenon (who, if I remember it correctly, got more votes than Starmer did) as well as the Greenparty (whose 1 million vote count went up to 1.4 million in the latest electing) as proof that there is in fact a Left even in England which is not just "What's in it for me?!" Neoliberals cosplaying as "lefties" by throwing some identity politics slogans and below inflation minimum wage raises once in a while, whilst de facto supporting an ethno-Fascist regime half way around the globe currently working on Holocaust v2.

I would say their support for the Neue Nazis and their pro-Finance politics (which I saw up close and personal having worked in that Industry before, during and after the 2008 Crash) by themselves are more than enough to place them firmly in the full-on Right field, possibly even Hard Right.

People whose guiding principle is "The greatest good for the greatest number" don't do what the New Labour types have done and continue to do, even the "pragmatic"/"moderate"/"center" ones.

Keir won because the UK, like the US, has First Pass The Post and the Even More Far Right Party - Reform - divided the votes on the Far Right hence the Tories came second in lots of electoral circles were they usually come first.

Also I've lived all over Europe including the UK and New Labour is plain Right, not Center-Right - they only seem center by comparison with the Tories who migrated to the Far-Right during the Leave Referendum and subsequent Johnson Government.

Similarly by comparison with most of Europe (not the UK) the US is a country with only a plain Right (maybe even hard) and a Far-Right.

Curiously, both New Labour and the Democrat Party support the ethno-Fascist regime in Israel, something which I feel neatly underlines my point as from what I see elsewhere in Europe (with the notable exception of Germany) no Leftwing party supports them.

For a non-American this thread and other like this are hilarious: the people who spent the last year campaigning "Vote Not Trump" now blame everybody else but themselves for how their strategy of having a candidate who did nothing to appeal to voters and sold fear of the other instead, failed miserably.

So they post tons of such "it's the fault of everybody else" memes as topics were they and other members of the tribe make posts with wild ass reasons for why it really is everybody else's faults and responding to such posts from others by basically saying "yeah, you're so right", like one gigantic circle jerk, pretty much a continuation of what they were doing for a whole fucking year - a big fat circle jerk whilst not paying attention to anybody else - only now they're doing it with sad faces.

Sure, it's the 14 millions who stayed home that are to blame, not the massive incompetence of the DNC and the mindless tribalist muppets trading dumb Trump and Vance memes whilst thinking that their "leaders" deserved a win merelly for wearing the right pin on their jacket and not being Trump, without needing to actually have policies that appealed to their natural voters.

"Bloody natural Democrat voters, not going to polls and doing what they're supposed to do!"

What a heady, heady mix of stupidity and sense of entitlement.

Reminds me of the whole saying: "Only two things are infinite - the Universe and Human Stupidity - and we're not sure about the first"

The point is that willingness to vote, dislike of Trump, the strenght of ones principle, even political awareness and other similar things are scales, not just absolutes.

Some people will always vote, some never, others can be convinced or convince themselves with different levels of inducement (be it fear or enthusiasm).

Ditto for dislike of Trump - people are all over from love him to hate him and everything in between.

As for principles, well, some people are inflexible no mater what, most are somewhere in the middle being capable of breaking certain principles in certain conditions and other have a Groucho Marx take on them ("These are my principles. If you don't like them, well, I have others.")

And ditto for political awareness: just because all you see and hear is the very politically aware types talking about politics because they're loudly political, doesn't mean there aren't a lot people who think, for example, that "it's all a show and my vote makes no difference so why should I care?"

Just because you, being at a specific point of those various scales, are very politically aware and could easily be cowed by fear of Trump whom (I assume) you detest to vote Democrat even if they were actively going against your principles (assuming one of them is "people shouldn't be killed due to their race"), doesn't mean that many others at different points of those scales ended up not voting for Harris when they could otherwise have voted Democrat if it wasn't for her making choices that went against their strongly held principles or her campaign strategy of fear rather than hope didn't work on them because they have mixed feelings about Trump so don't fear him or think their "my vote makes no difference - they're all bullshitters who don't do what they say" so don't see the point in voting for the other guys because Trump is Bad.

Harris' actions and campaign strategy did capture the votes of people like you even if you had to hold your nose (which they couldn't care less about) to vote Harris, but those choices of them stopped from voting Harris plenty of people who sit elsewhere in these scales and would otherwise vote Democrat.

Clealy had she chosen differently she would've captured the votes of people not quite at your end of those various scales but by all indications the positions she assumed and campaign strategy moved the peak appeal points in those various scales in such away that it dropped a lot more votes (mainly on the Left, Highly Principled and Distrusting of Politics sides) than the ones it gained from appealing to the other side (mainly Rightwing, Party fanatics and unprincipled or even supporting of the Israeli Genocide).

The Democrat loss is not the fault of voters for being who they are, it's the fault of the Democrats for chosing a strategy of using the fear of Trump to retain votes whilst breaking some pretty strong principles of many people with their support for mass murderers of children, and not fixing certain things during the years they were in power and then last minute announcing measures for it (which is really not going to convince the people more distrusting of politicians to go out and vote).

If you're a mindless tribalist, the "tribe" it's based on is the thing that maters the most, and for some of those their tribe or at least and important part of its identity is a specific religion (often it's even a specific sect within a major religion).

If you actually use your brain for thinking (instead of just as a cranium filling mass that keep it from collapsing into a vacuum) then it is indeed irrelevant the religion The Handmaid's Tale is based on.