r/JewsOfConscience • u/richards1052 Jewish Anti-Zionist • Nov 08 '24

Opinion Harris's refusal to condemn Gaza genocide enraged young voters, who sat on their hands and cost her the election

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/opinion/democrats-israel-gaza-war.html
267 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

89 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

108

u/Arestothenes Non-Jewish Ally Nov 08 '24

Eh, if Harris had gotten all the Jill Stein and PAL voters, she still would have lost. Those two groups didn’t even crack a million.

70

u/BeardedDragon1917 Nov 08 '24 edited Nov 08 '24

Presumably, there are a lot of people who wouldn’t consider voting for a third-party, but might just stay home if they have nothing to vote for. A lot of them only voted in 2020 because they had their ballot mailed directly to their house.

A huge percentage of people in our country are living paycheck to paycheck, and I think that it’s very hard to motivate a lot of those people to vote when their personal situation doesn’t look to be getting better anytime soon. The Democrats being marginally better on civil rights issues is only going to motivate people who care deeply about civil rights issues, and even then, it will only motivate them for as long as they still believe that their support will be paid back with actual policy changes. It has been three, arguably four election cycles since Democrats started trying to win on a platform of giving their wealthy donors whatever they want, but not being as awful as Republicans, and hoping that the two party system forces everyone who isn’t a Republican to vote for them.. They are learning the lesson that in a two party system, there are in fact, three options, and one of them is staying home. American culture has not yet reckoned with the idea that there are people who are informed, not stupid or apathetic, but make the decision that voting isn’t worth their time because they don’t see any options that would improve their lives as even being on the table.

57

u/Arestothenes Non-Jewish Ally Nov 08 '24

Yeah, most of the non-voters just felt like it didn’t matter. But admitting that to themselves would make Democrats doubt themselves, so they’re instead blaming Muslims, leftists and trans people.

-8

u/Logic411 Nov 08 '24

Awww they went with their Feelings, instead of the FACTS? And that’s the DEMS fault? Sure

2

u/Different-Bus8023 Nov 09 '24

It is their job to cater to the base if they do a bad job by idk giving their candidate a month to campaign that is on them.