Multiple groups can be at fault. Obviously a plurality of voters is a huge bar to cross for anti-Democratic voters on the left to be the main cause of Trump. People who like Trump are to blame for supporting Trump by voting for him. People who didn’t like Harris are to blame for supporting Trump by not voting for her.
I’ve had a feeling (and only a feeling, with nothing really to back it up) for some time that in the long run Bill Clinton defeating GHW Bush in 1992, along with Tony Blair’s victory in 1997, did more harm than good to US and UK liberal politics. They gave the impression that the best way to defeat the conservative/reactionary power structure was to become “New Democrat” and “New Labour” —* in other words, conservative lite. While I can’t speak to Labour, for the Democrats this led to a mindset among the party leadership that avoiding defeat is more important than seeking victory, and any idea or position which might be seen as controversial is to be avoided like the plague (never mind that the opposition will spin every Democratic idea or position as sacrilege of the highest order). So they’re reduced to reacting to the opposition rather than advocating anything more than vague generalities; and even when they win, as in 2020, they don’t have much of an agenda to work towards.
As to the OP, it’s true that a certain percentage of the electorate who should have voted Democrat either sat out or voted third party in 2016 and/or 2024 because the candidate was not liberal/progressive enough or “no better than Trump.” But MHO they’re pretty far down the list of reasons for losing elections the Democrats should have won, and in at least some cases they did so because the party made little or no effort to give them a reason to vote for their candidate.
As noted, this is purely speculation. Let the shredding begin.
* Em dash alert!
No they aren’t. People are under no obligation to vote for a candidate they do not support. That is fascism.
They are certainly free to support Trump if they want. That’s their free choice.
I don’t think you can say this about any Democratic administration of the last forty years.
Clinton came in with health care on his agenda - it failed, but it was tried.
Obama also had health care as his agenda, and thanks to some good politicking and a great House Speaker, got that one over the line.
Biden ran on infrastructure and a Green New Deal, and after rebadging it as “inflation reduction” generally delivered, despite some obstreperous elements of the caucus opposed to many of the specifics.
All three had fires to fight as well - economic collapses preceded their terms and needed to be dealt with. But each of them had an agenda to work on as well, and anyone who didn’t think they did simply wasn’t listening when they were running for election.
What other “free choices” would you like to impose upon people by their inaction? How many people did you murder today by not devoting your life to the practice of medicine for free (or some bare subsistence wage that provided you with just enough to get by, but no more)?
When elections boil down to a 51/49 margin, and the presidential elections have been not far from that for quite a while, despite the shenanigans of the Electoral College, that small group is enough to flip the result, so I think it’s worth levying some amount of blame.
There’s an interesting situation developing, and forgive me for I have not done any due diligence on this yet, but it sounds like American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and United Democracy Project (UDP) campaign strongly against candidates who oppose their pro-Israel agenda, decline AIPAC donations, criticize the Israeli government, or support conditioning military aid. Perhaps this is a discussion worthy of a separate thread, but it puts candidates in a tough spot and I’ve seen one local example of an incumbent Democratic representative getting a lot of flack from what might be described as leftist purists because he accepted AIPAC donations. An otherwise much less qualified candidate with (amazingly) MAGA ties ended up getting 1/3 of the primary votes, so it wasn’t a factor in the primary results, but I know a lot of these people will not vote for this candidate specifically because of that one issue, so he could lose out to the Republican in November since his district was further gerrymandered red.
Going back to the 51/49 issue, if Harris had taken a less pro-Israel stance (or one might say a less pro-genocide stance) then that small cohort might have been enough to flip the election.
A good analogy for voting is that it’s like public transportation:
Voting isn’t marriage. It’s public transport. You’re not waiting for “the one”. You’re getting on the bus. And if there isn’t one going exactly to your destination, you don’t stay home and sulk. You take the one that’s going closest to where you want to be. -Mohamad Safa
I would add that taking a different bus or not taking the bus at all isn’t going to “send a message” to the bus that wasn’t close enough to your destination. It also means the bus network suffers due to a lack of patronage, and there’s likely to be fewer buses in the future that will be farther away from where you want to go.
So everyone who sat out the presidential election or voted for Jill Stein because Harris wasn’t anti-genocide enough, even though the only real choice was Harris or Trump, and Trump is even more pro-genocide, do deserve some level of blame for their purism, because the “centrist at best” candidate was still the objectively better choice, and they refused to make the strategic vote to their own detriment and the detriment of their countrymen. No they shouldn’t be compelled to vote a specific way, but that doesn’t absolve them of some responsibility for the situation.
That bus thing is a nice analogy.
Ok. So what if you believe the bus is going completely the opposite direction to what you want to get on? Because those are exactly the optics the Democratic Party created by depicting itself as the party of Liz Cheney and more of the same neoliberalism.
ETA:
For example, it’s not clear that she or Biden were anti-genocide at all. They both seemed quite happy to keep letting Israel do it’s thing, as evidence by the year and change they spent… letting Israel do its thing.
Well, I didn’t see it that way, and I voted for every Democrat I could. And I still blame Trump supporters for what has befallen this imperfect nation.
Hey, same here. So what are we arguing about? Fuck the neoliberals who think anyone to the left of Liz Fucking Cheney is a leftist, amiright?
I don’t know, I’m not arguing with anyone.
I think that’s a case where the analogy breaks down. But read on.
Assuming that’s true, not voting is like eschewing the bus even though the Harris bus takes you to work, school, the grocery store, shopping, the doctor, Aunt Mabel, and the park, but it doesn’t stop near the laundromat. The Trump bus goes nowhere near any of those other destinations, but it shares the one stop with the Harris bus that’s closest to the laundromat. So you’re still a fool for being a single-issue voter and taking either no bus or the Trump bus out of spite, because you lose out on all the other destinations the Harris bus would take you to, and the Trump bus doesn’t get you any closer to the laundromat anyway.
You could perhaps stretch the analogy to say that you have to take one bus or the other because that’s the only transportation available to your daily needs, and sitting out on voting just means you get no say over which bus you take. I dunno, it’s late and my brain is done for the day.
To some people, it really doesn’t. Both sides might not fuck over as many people and as much, but if they are both fucking you or people you care deeply about over to some degree on the most important issues to you then it’s really just more a matter of which bus is going farther and faster in the wrong direction, not checking off some boxes while missing others.
And this really is the fundamental problem: the sort of jackasses who write diatribes like the OP not only cannot conceive of a world in which the democratic party is actively seeking to do harm to people: they refuse to even be exposed to the sort of voices that might broaden their understanding and will instead seek to further “other”, vilify, and marginalize those people so that they don’t ever have to hear their voices or consider the harm their preferred power structure does to them.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I am a successful capitalist. A very successful capitalist. Moreover, I’ve got establishment written all over me. White, male, retired military (even invaded someone else’s country by choice!), and now a lawyer. If there ever is a leftist revolution, I’m at minimum going to have some splainin’ to do. But I do also understand moral injury. I can empathize with the idea that some people on the left—good people whose vision for America is far better than what either party is offering us—simply cannot bring for themselves to vote for evil, even if it is the lesser evil.
And I am going to just keep on coming back to what I think is a much better analogy than the stupid “bus” analogy that gets so lazily trodded out there without considering that, yes, actually buses can go in the wrong direction, just like political parties, and ask how many people you murdered today by choosing to do… whatever it is you are doing with your life that doesn’t involve saving other people’s lives to the maximum extent possible, 24/7?
I think it’s important to differentiate two things: there’s advocating for how people should vote, and criticizing and blaming people for their choice.
I agree with the bus analogy, and for people I knew who could vote but were concerned over gaza, I recommended they vote Democrat, absolutely. It was clear that the situation for Gazans would be worse under Trump.
But I also don’t feel animosity towards those who couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Democrats basically told them to go fk themselves. They are not owed that vote.
My animosity goes to those who support genocide, in both parties.
I’m no fan of the far left and their voting patterns, but that’s not the problem here. There was a huge shift of Latinos from Democratic to Republican, and a smaller but significant shift of Black voters in the same direction. Both Latinos and Blacks saw substantially larger drops among men than women. Make of that what you will.
WHAT HAPPENED IN 2024 | Catalist
I should add, turnout dropped hugely as well.
Doesn’t matter, of course that’s true and there are plenty of fuck yous to round. But it doesn’t change the fact that if you are anywhere on the left or moderate side of the political spectrum and didn’t vote for Harris you voted for fascism so fuck you, fascist.
Then you are are a fascist. Fuck you
It was abundantly clear to anyone with a brain in the last election that there were two choices. Fascism and not Fascism. If you didn’t like where the bus was going that meant you didn’t like the “not fascism” option and preferred fascism. It’s that simple.
Given the literal cult surrounding Trump, people who literally think he’s the messiah, people building golden idols, naming everything after him that they can, festooning themselves, their cars, their houses with Trump garbage, I think this line should be put to bed.