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
269 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

89 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

102

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.

69

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.

-1

u/Logic411 Nov 08 '24

Complete fantasy. lol republicans are the source of all that pain they have NEVER done ANYTHING for working people. Right now in the newly retaken MI legislature the GOP is attempting to reinstate “right to work laws, which were repealed by DEMOCRATS two years ago. Do try again

9

u/BeardedDragon1917 Nov 08 '24

I’m not saying that Republicans have been good for the working class. Of course they haven’t. But in this election, they were offering people a solution to their problems. A shitty, racist, fascistic solution to their problems, but a solution. When voters told the Harris campaign that they were struggling, the response was that the economy is doing great, and Bidenomics is a massive success. It’s not like Trump won more voters, he lost some! But Harris told the voters loud and clear that nothing they cared about was going to be addressed, and her not being Trump was the only positive thing that she was going to give them in return for their vote. Biden said the exact same thing when he was elected, straight to the face of the head of the NAACP, and he barely won against Trump, during a massive pandemic, where the ballots were mailed directly to peoples houses. 13 million of those voters decided to stay home this year. Democrats wanted to see how far they could take the “barely better than Republicans” platform and now they’ve hit, hard, against the limits of that strategy. Let’s hope that they actually learn the correct lesson from this, because the cynic in me is predicting they won’t.