fuck this

I swallowed my misgivings and voted Democrat, just like I've done at each election since I turned 18, but handwaving away valid criticisms is not how you get people to side with you. Pressure needs to be put on the democrats to be better, too.

I'm 100% for valid criticisms—I don't even consider myself a Democrat and I have no compunctions about criticizing them when I think they are wrong. But I'm pretty sure that meme is directed at those who withheld their vote.
- It would be in theory, but mostly it's just spread around as how any protest against Israel cost the democrats the US election (despite how it was considered widely unpopular to support Israel's genocide by most democrats).
  
  Unfortunately it may have.
  A lot of voters are stupid. They see Israel=Bad, Biden/Kamala = pro-Israel, they stay home.
  
  Then maybe Harris and her team should have listened to some feedback about their widely unpopular stance that seemed to somewhat equate them with the Republicans during an election which they absolutely couldn't afford to be seen as remotely similar to republicans.
  
  Democrats are pragmatically there for the money. They aren't comically evil, but they are corrupt. They will throw an election before they ever give up AIPAC money and count on the next election swinging back to them. They get to sit back and watch the republicans be the bad guys and stir shit up for a few years. Then, when they get back in power, they fix the things that's don't make them money and look like he good guys but conveniently leave the unpopular policy the republicans enacted that makes them money and they don't have to look like the bad guys. They just look incompetent. But they aren't. This is all very purposeful. They love this dynamic. They benifit from it.
  The democrats as they are for sure need to go. But we need to be more pragmatic ourselves about removing them instead of throwing elections to the republicans hoping it will teach the Democrats a lesson. Because it won't. We need to focus on getting a foothold and changing the party. And that means turning out to vote in every election no matter what. Vote third party. Vote write in. Vote whatever. But sitting out of elections to teach democrats a lesson just isn't going to do anything. It's just throwing away the small amount of political capital most people have. If we don't vote now its either corporate feudalism or civil war in the future.
  
  Yeah I think they've realized over the decades that the needle swings like a metronome whether they try or not, especially thanks to obstructionists like Mitch McConnell ensuring trying won't go anywhere.
  So they cash their paycheck, occasionally show up for votes, and play the stock market with knowledge they gain from privileged information.
  
  I don't think so. Not that I have anything better to offer. My wife thinks Biden would've won because too many people stayed home, refusing to vote for a black woman. I, frankly, think the election was about the economy. If you look back over the elections, they are almost always about how people are doing financially. If they are scared or hurting, they will vote for change. If they are happy, they vote for the incumbent. My honest opinion is that there wasn't a scenario or candidate that would've changed Trump's victory.
  What I am sure of is that in all of the states where Trump won (even Michigan), if every single person who withheld their vote due to Israel/Gaza had voted for Kamala, that wouldn't have been enough by itself to change the outcome. Certainly, that issue had an effect, but it didn't change the outcome by itself. We have to look beyond that.
  But, still, if you did withhold your vote thinking you were fighting for Gaza, yeah I think you deserve to have your nose rubbed in that shit.
- The problem is that those people (leftist prostest not-voters) most likely wouldn't have changed the results.
  
  No, I agree. There weren't enough single-issue Gaza voters to have changed the outcome. It's still an idiotic position to have taken.
Not voting for them has never once, in the history of history, gotten them to change. It actually causes them to pull further right.
- Yeah, they probably think, well the right is doing so well so that's probably what the country wants. We need to move further right!
  
  Yep. Every time they've pulled farther right and lost, they've blamed the leftists for it for being too extremist in their policy demands or claiming that their issues aren't as important, like in the case with Millennials and housing costs, student debt, climate change, etc. Despite trying to make some headway on those issues, they've always refused to campaign on them.
  
  Exactly.
Shielding the Democrats from the pressure to adopt more popular positions lost this election.
- No, they were never going to do that. They've already said that they learned their lesson, and in 2026, they're gonna double down on the losing strategy that they've been running since Clinton was in office and run on building the wall on the Mexican border and deporting immigrants to court the moderate Republican vote that doesn't exist and never would vote for them even if it did.
  By the Presidential election, it's already years too late to force them to actually do good things. Protest votes and withholding your vote have done nothing to stop the slide that led to Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in tow in the 16 years that I've been voting. If you want change, it's only going to come by threatening the position of the people in charge of the party and replacing the old guard with people like AOC. Whoever gets elected President does neither of those things. Unless Krasnov declares the Democratic Party a terrorist organization and has them all arrested as political prisoners. But then we won't have to worry about voting ever again, just like he promised.
  
  A few things.
  Firstly, we can dismiss the notion that the candidate can't be moved. The citation for that is Biden in 2020, who effectively campaigned during the primary as a moderate Republican, and until the southern states which we're never going to go blue anyways weighed in, was getting his ass handed to him. The Sunday before Super Tuesday, the rat-fuckening, Oblivious Warren. All that old history.
  And then something remarkable happened. Biden opened the doors to the tent and invited the progressive wing of the party in. He handed the Bernie-crats the platform and said "have at it hoss". And it worked. Instead of disenfranchising the activist base, he embraced them, or at least, extended an olive branch by giving them the platform, without which he assuredly would have lost.
  So: Candidates can be moved.
  Second:
  By the Presidential election, it’s already years too late to force them to actually do good things. Protest votes and withholding your vote have done nothing to stop the slide that led to Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in tow in the 16 years that I’ve been voting.
  Again. And I'm singling you out because you responded and well, here we are. This is an obtuse, bordering on bad faith interpretation of the argument being made. You aren't arguing with me. You are arguing with the millions of voters who stayed home for Kamala but showed up for Biden. And you moralizing about an objectively misguided application of strategic voting didn't/ doesn't/ won't/ change their votes. When your "strategic voting" strategy results in losing you the election, explain to me how and why its strategic?
  You don't/ can't move millions of voters to a new position. Or at least it hasn't been shown to be possible (2016, 2024). Asking voters to "vote against" instead of "voting for" doesn't work and we now have so many receipts, that they will write text books on the matter. What can be done, is that the candidate can be moved. Its also been shown through an evidentiary process to work.
  To summarize, candidates can be moved. Biden moved and won an election because of it. When you moralize about your own, demonstrated-to-be-wrong conception of strategic voting, you aren't arguing with me, you are arguing with the literally millions of people left on the table by the Democrats. A strategy that when examined before hand will clearly lose, the insistence of then implementing it becomes a "burn the world down" moralization to wash your own hands: Democratic voters who reliably show up, but did not, because the DNC got a hall pass from those making the exact arguments you are making here. They did not need to respond to criticism because this argument you are making shielded them. And it cost us all, practically everything.
  
  Further evidence that the democrats can be moved if we don't let them maintain the delusion they can win while trying to be republicans: The entire party told Biden to drop out when it was clear he had no path to victory.
  Sadly Kamala was allowed to believe she could win while embracing the same policies and messaging that killed the Biden campaign. Instead of screaming at the party to campaign on overwhelmingly popular left policy necessary to win the election and use every power at the democrat's disposal to accomplish it, blue MAGA told anyone pointing out that we're headed back towards the waterfall to shut up and paddle harder.
  
  Are you actually trying to argue Biden would have won? Extra large oof.
  
  If this is what you got from reading that, maybe have another at-bat.
Yep, I voted D like I always did...
But I spent a lot of time ringing any alarm bell I could find that all of Joe and Kamal's moves to the right was gonna cost us the election, and that the victory fund would lose the House and Senate.
I was right on all counts, but the people I was trying to explain it won't admit that reality proved them wrong.
There's no criticism for what the party did wrong, only anger at anyone with higher standards than the letter by the name.
Neoliberals want nothing as much as they want blindly loyal Dem voters, it's the only way most people ever hold their noses and vote for one. But rather than have a candidate dem voters want, they'd rather risk trump.
When they shut on voters like in that meme, they're telling us they have zero problem watching the country burn. They'd rather have trump than a Dem who agrees with Dem voters.
handwaving away valid criticisms
If you look carefully, you'll find statements about how "neither option affects [this particular thing] but we have the best chance of fixing it after the election if we still have a country".
It was never handwaved. It was the least-worse option with some kind of hope given that issue and a thousand others. How many times this has fucking been fucking explained and not fucking understood.
- Uh yes it was definitely hand-waved away by some "if you look carefully". It was only the "least-worse option" because so many were successfully manipulated by the system into being placated with crumbs so they wouldn't revolt at the thousands of other reasons we've had for years to fight back against this shit, pushing the Overton window to the right in increments and leading folks to not use or even possess or be taught in the first place the critical thinking skills required to inform oneself and take steps to make positive change, in this system designed to intentionally misinform and mislead us and pit us against each other so we vote for the same rich white men responsible for perpetuating this system and the harm it brings to all of us, especially marginalized communities.
  I would recommend to you (and anyone who is interested in informing themselves on what is being done to us) to read "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein. It details this process of incremental change, and some of the strategies and parties previously and currently involved in taking control of our government (or at this point more like what's left of it).
  (For clarity: I'm not saying both parties are the same, although their goals, tactics, and policies seem less different to me as time passes; I'm not making any general statement passing blame to any group of voters or non-voters in this comment, because I believe the bulk of the responsibility lies on the system and those who hold sway over large parts of it in the form of currency or legislation, for example; I'm not denying or invalidating that you may feel this way and/or believe it is true, I'm taking issue with your statement that "it was never handwaved", because I most certainly saw that happen and know people who to this day are clinging to that sentiment; I'm not saying harm reduction isn't the move or good policy, it is but there has to simultaneously be work being done on reducing or removing the source of that harm)
  Edit: sorry for run-on sentences. working on it gradually and open to feedback
No one is hand waving away anything by asking people to vote
Pressure needs to be put on the democrats to be better, too.
They're already 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x better than Republicans. So someone would have to be pretty goddamn stupid not to vote for them when the options are them or Republicans.
The majority of the fault isn't on Democrats. It's on goddamn stupid braindead asshole American voters for being goddamn stupid braindead assholes.
- They're already 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x better than Republicans. So
  how can this be quantified?
The argument, was the least bad between two bads. This is way worse than the alternative would ever get

I feel a lot of people do a lot to justify stupid behaviour. "Saving is too hard" or "exercise is too hard". There's legit reasons to not be able to save, or exercise or being able to vote 🤨.

However there's a lot of bullshit that people were spouting. It's either a coordinated campaign or just dumb shit. What annoys me is everyone piling on Joe and then they did what people wanted and swapped to Kamala and they're still upset that the Dems "don't listen". Whatever, they're all full of it.

I fucking hate the Democrats but you have to be completely psycho to justify not-voting for them.

To be clear, I'm Canadian and I'm directly impacted by this now. So fuck all of those people.

I'm not American so nobody got my vote, but seems to me like the issue is with the swathes of people choosing facism rather than progressives who chose not to vote.

Choosing how to act in a world like ours is tricky, anyone following a sense of right and wrong (even if I disagree with their judgement) instead of fear, hate, greed or whatever gets a gold star in my book.

Inaction is still a choice, though. I totally understand the sentiment behind that choice and even agree that we shouldn't be forced to choose genocide, but the alternative that we got is a man who not only wants the same genocide, but wants to accelerate it, put American boots on the ground to assist in it, and then turn the bloodied ground into resorts while also wanting to worsen life across the globe. So, by refusing to act, they didn't oppose that man getting into power. They cared so much about genocide that, ironically, they enabled making that genocide worse by not acting against that possibility.
The biggest issue, though, is with the people who couldn't be bothered enough to vote. Some, what, 40% of Americans never vote? Of course, there's plenty there who can't due to things like gerrymandering, but there's a huge swathe of white suburbanites who simply prefer the status quo to actually improving things.
- by refusing to act, they didn't oppose that man getting into power.
  you can refuse to vote for a Democrat and still oppose the man getting into power.

Your comment's downvotes = how many profoundly stupid people who STILL haven't learned from their mistake there are out there.

Refusal to hold themselves accountable for their own actions/inactions is a trait they share with mainline MAGA.
- I can't be accountable for other people's votes.
At the time I read your comment.

Biden also surpressed student protests. This isn't the gotcha you think it is

Putting Genocide Joe in scare quotes. Libs are going fully mask-off in this thread.

If the Democrats wanted me to vote for their candidate they should have picked one that didn't suck balls

Why are we still talking about this? It's over, and we can't undo the results.

Nobody pushing genocide is worthy of votes or support.

It was incumbent on Dems to EARN votes, and they failed spectacularly. You’re wrong to try blaming voters for failings of our corrupt politicians.

Will you still be saying that when Trump puts a resort in Gaza?
Trump has made it crystal clear: He plans for the complete and total ethnuc cleansing of Gaza. All Palestinians will be killed or removed
That's what Arab and Palestinian Americans chose when they voted for Trump

Ahh. This bullshit trope from the class of people basically responsible for Trump winning the 2024 election.

Sorry, did you just blame the people who didn’t vote for Trump for being responsible for Trump being president? Interesting mental gymnastics there…
- did you just blame the people who didn’t vote for Trump for being responsible for Trump being president
  That's what this meme does.
- It's a very popular sentiment on Reddit and Lemmy, in my experience, to blame non voters as much as or even more than Trump voters.
  
  That’s because the people who voted for Trump wanted Trump to win. The people who stayed at home who might not have wanted Trump to win assisted his win by not voting.
  
  But you don't know who non voters would have voted for. A study of non voters in 2020 showed a near even split, so it's nothing but pointless speculation to blame people who didn't vote. And I say this as someone who actually supports compulsory voting. I just find it much more productive, and accurate, to lay blame on those who we do know, for sure, actually voted for this result.
  
  Wait, this seems silly. You are in effect saying that it's wrong to blame those who stayed home because some of them would have voted for trump? Like, we'd still blame those people too had they actually voted trumo.
  The blame isn't just because you voted for trump it is because you didn't try to stop him, which applies both to those who voted for him and those who didn't vote.
  
  Those who blame the nonvoters for Trump winning are implying that had they voted, Trump would have lost. We cannot know that and I do not find it productive. Again, I actually am in favour of compulsory voting, so urging people to vote is a good thing that I'm very much for. But I'm not going to blame those who didn't vote for Trump for Trump winning.
  
  Are you an llm? Most humans, instead of restating what they've already said, actually read the comment to which they are replying.
  
  I did and replied in kind. No need to resort to insults. If you're not interested in continuing the conversation you don't have to reply. But it will probably just be in circles anyway, so good day.
  
  If we look at how people tend to lean the independents have a slight left lean t’s typically 55/45%.
  
  Which is a fantastic way to get people to care more about politics
  </s>
  
  Maybe getting rid of social security, freedom of speech, and the national parks will do the job.
- There are no mental gymnastics, and unless you've been absent in the debate since it began in 2023, it's been one conversation regarding the direction of the Democratic party, with effectively two camps.
  The first camp, effectively taking the party line and acting as cheerleaders of the DNC, have taken a "No critisism of the Democratic Party is acceptable; voters need to move to the positions of the DNC" approach.
  The second camp took a "The DNC needs to be better and acknowledge it's shortcomings, and make changes when necessary. The DNC needs to align itself with DNC voters and the party base."
  The first camp, for the first 8 months of 2024, insisted we had to run Joe Biden. That there were no other possibilities, options, or potential outcomes. They defended the approach the DNC took to the primary process, which was by any measure, the least democratic primary they party had ever held.
  The second camp raged at the preposterous farce which was the DNC primary. They pointed out that Bidens poll numbers were so bad he basically had no chance of winning. That by insisting on this losing strategy we were losing critical time.
  Bans were made, here, regarding this debate. And the first camp was wrong. There was another way possible.
  After the candidates were swapped the first camp further insured that people just needed to move to where the DNC was, after taking effectively a pro genocide, Republican lite campaign philosophy as an outcome of the convention.
  The second camp pointed out that this would lose the DNC the election, that we needed our focus to be on moving the candidate to a more popular, more electable position.
  The first camp won the argument and lost us all the war, because their fundamental belief in what is being argued and whom they are arguing with is wrong. The first camp is responsible for the millions of votes difference between Kamala and Biden, because they insisted on this losing strategy.
  
  I'm sure the first camp exists, but you should not imply that everyone who voted Democrat and wanted people to vote Democrat was that. I did that, and I encourage everyone to criticize their horrible decisions and actions, of which there are depressingly many.
  I'd love it if we pressured them to not be quite as horrible, but at the same time I did not want the Republican party to win control because I knew they'd be worse for people in almost every way. And now, as a trans person, I have to worry about what I won't be allowed to do anymore, or how they'll try to make my life worse just for existing. Sending a signal or whatever you think Democrats losing does does not justify the new shit minorities will face now.
  
  Sending a signal or whatever you think Democrats losing does does not justify the new shit minorities will face now.
  I just want to point out, that you are making this about me as the rhetorician, when I haven't even weighed in with my position. Its not me you are arguing with when it comes to the application of strategy; its the millions of voters for whom them sacrificing their ideals to get a milquetoast Democrat, pro-genoicde, draconian border policy, democrat into office doesn't work.
  This is about a basic understanding of how the table is set, and no amount of willing the environment one finds themselves in changes that. Its like '16 Hillary supporters whining about winning the popular vote. The people who were out their using the argument of "strategic voting" to shield the candidates deeply unpopular positions among democratic voters did real significant harm this election cycle. If your strategy doesn't or can't result in a specific outcome, can we really call it strategic?
  My point is that the chiding of voters for not doing the job of the candidate is a way of morally washing ones hands of a strategy that genuinely hurt the candidates ability to get elected.
  
  Makes sense; sow further division in the groups who don’t like Trump so there’s less opposition to him.
  
  That division is much, much older. The beltway is full of people who benefit from corporations or come from wealthy families and are materially aligned against the working class, and their ideology reflects this. These people as a group stand to lose more from the democrats moving to the left and hurting the bourgeoisie than winning than staying in the middle and losing.
  This is a common dynamic historically; liberals in power need the people to maintain power, but their interests aren't aligned with the people, so they pass policies that marginalize their own base of support, and so the conservatives take power and then do counterrevolution.

Imagine thinking 5 people on the internet caused Trump to win.

zuck, Elon, bezos.... those three are on the internet. got 2 more?
They only had $1,500,000,00 to spend on Biden/Harris....
How is that supposed to counter the majority of Dem voters not wanting the Dem candidate?
What are they supposed to do?
Run a fair primary, back the winning candidate in the general, and stop bankrupting state parties?!
George Clooney doesn't eat dinner for free ya know....