Tim Walz says he and Harris were too ‘safe’ during 2024 presidential campaign
Former vice-presidential candidate claims pair should have held more in-person events around the US
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They supported genocide. No amount of handshakes would have overcome that.
Phew! Good thing we avoided them getting into office then.
I love how people were convinced to avoid the party that didn't stop genocide, and vote in the party that actively promoted genocide. Pat on the back! You earned it.
Blaming voters for not being enthused about picking between two genocidal options is a one of the greatest losing strategies of all time. Nobody should be surprised at all that a chunk of the Democrats' base didn't have it in them to hold their noses tight enough for something that utterly vile — least of all Biden & Harris's campaigns.
They should have known. They were given opportunities to learn before the election even hit. They ignored them.
It was a massively idiotic move that either campaign could have avoided with a stupid level of ease, and they chose not to. Voters that didn't vote did so because they believe mass-murder is bad; whereas the best-case scenario for the Democrat's campaign is legendary incompetence, and the worst is outright genocidal malice and greed. If you're going to get mad at one, I recommend the latter.
It was a massively idiotic move that either campaign could have avoided with a stupid level of ease, and they chose not to.
I think you're vastly overestimating the level of humanity of the average American voter.
More Americans support Israel in the "war" than support Palestine. The same messaging that convinced them that Trump was better on the economy could easily have convinced them that Harris was in bed with "terrorists," if she started coming out swinging to stop the genocide, and betrayed our good partner Israel. She probably would have lost the election even harder.
If the election was held on Lemmy? Sure, it would have been a winning move. Everyone Lemmy knows it's a genocide. That's not what the American people think. It would have gotten her a tiny handful of votes from activists and lost her a ton of support from the idiots.
If you think she should have done it anyway, I get that. If you want the Democrats to ditch this whole consultant-operated messaging machine and adopt Bernie Sanders's authenticity instead, which probably would start winning them elections, I definitely get that. Like I said in a different comment, the problems go about a thousand miles deeper than "more town halls." On that I think we can agree. But this whole fantasy-world where the election was hers for the taking if she'd only taken the side of the Palestinians is pure fantasy. Most people thought Trump would be better on the economy, and that's why he won. The messaging which relentlessly connected Harris directly to the genocide in Gaza is only what they deploy against you, because it'll resonate better with you than stuff about the price of eggs and how Biden caused inflation.
So first, you might want to take a look at this. Poll is linked in the article. Gaza was a lot more important than you seem to think.
But this whole fantasy-world where the election was hers for the taking if she'd only taken the side of the Palestinians is pure fantasy.
Yes, but it would've made it a lot easier. She'd have only had to be a halfway decent candidate, instead of an actually good candidate.
I phrased my statement the way I did for a reason: "More Americans support Israel than Palestine." A lot of the polls about this like to zoom in on little subsets, or ask strange questions like "Do you support a ceasefire?" and then draw some kind of conclusion when a lot of people answer "yes."
Want to see something that'll break your heart?
"25% sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians while 15% feel the opposite."
15%.
It's not surprising to me that if you zoom in only on the people who voted for Biden, and then chose not to cast a ballot for Harris, that 29% of them were motivated by the propaganda about how Harris was responsible for Gaza. I'm actually surprised the percentage is that low. What I am saying is that:
"25% sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians while 15% feel the opposite."
True enough, but crucially Republicans are overrepresented in those 25%, and being Republicans they can be disregarded for the sake of Democrat electoral strategy.
For example, more Republicans than Democrats (46% vs. 10%), ... sympathize more with the Israelis than the Palestinians
See also: https://apnorc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Pearson-AP-NORC-2024-Report-Final.pdf page 11.
The numbers are this bad in part because Republicans are morally bankrupt, which isn't really news. Another poll with more focus on partisan politics from the same time period got this result:
That reflects a success of propaganda. Notice that the other strong option for why they might not have voted for Harris was "the economy," even though Trump is an objective catastrophe for the economy and Biden pulled off a minor miracle for working people even having come in during still-pretty-apocalyptic conditions with double normal unemployment and a big chunk of people still dependent on Covid assistance.
Trump economy voters are nuts no questions asked, but it should be stressed that the only reason that propaganda was so effective is because the Biden/Harris campaign, and later Harris/Walz campaign, gave it room to be effective. Biden said he was going to keep doing what he was doing, which simply wasn't enough. He also claimed that the economy was good when it really wasn't and patted himself on the back for it, which was just... no. More people than ever were (and are) living paycheck to paycheck and the dunces in the DNC decided that campaigning on status quo politics was a good idea. GOP propaganda also had a big role, don't get me wrong, but this was an it takes two to tango affair.
The relevant question isn't "did some people decide that Harris was responsible for the war in Gaza and decide not to vote as a result." Of course the answer to that is yes. The question is "did more people decide that, than the people who would have decided that she was supporting terrorism if she took a different position, and made her lose even harder?"
From the data above, I think the answer is a pretty clear no. For example, 67% of Democrats put reaching a permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas as very important, while 25% put supporting Israel in the war as very important. And, perhaps more importantly, pro-Palestinian voters were much better positioned to tank Harris's campaign in crucial swing states compared to pro-Israeli voters, who are more evenly distributed.
So only 50% of Democrats think Israel is even "going too far." Yeah, sounds about right.
He also claimed that the economy was good when it really wasn’t and patted himself on the back for it, which was just… no.
Yeah, tell me about it.
https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/heritage-explains/the-truth-about-joe-bidens-economy
Oh shit, sorry. Wrong link.
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
There we go.
I realize that very few people on Lemmy are in that bottom 10th percentile part of the graph that has that huge growth. Most are tech-savvy people, students, relatively privileged as compared with a lot of the people whose Biden's policies most directly impacted, so a bunch of the stuff he did was invisible to them. That doesn't mean it didn't happen.
So only 50% of Democrats think Israel is even "going too far." Yeah, sounds about right.
I mean yes, and more than 35% are "not sure". Less than 15% of democrats felt Israel what Israel was doing in Gaza was appropriate. Therefore, the answer to what you said was the question is "yes".
Yeah here's the thing: Inflation as a statistic is rigged to make things look better than they actually are. Now Biden did good things for low-wage workers don't get me wrong, but the idea that things got better for them is outright wrong, as evidenced by how many of them voted for Trump—the "things are horrible and I'll fix them—candidate. Things just got less bad for them than they did for everyone else, which is a good thing and something he can take credit for but it's not the massive accomplishment that Biden and the DNC seem to think it is. It certainly doesn't allow them to gloat about how good things are, because things simply weren't good. To reiterate, things were simply less bad than they could've been, not good, for all segments of the population other than the ultra-rich. Almost nobody could afford more things in 2023 than in 2019.
And even if we accept the proposition that things did get better for the bottom 10%, there are a whole 80% of the population between the bottom 10% and the top 10%. For those people things undeniably got much worse.
but the idea that things got better for them is outright wrong
You didn't read the link, did you.
I do understand that when you look at vibes, everyone thinks Trump was okay on the economy and Biden was bad. What I am saying is that when you look at the dollars, low-income workers are making a lot more now than they were in 2019. Enough to be comfortably above even absolutely punishing inflation.
It's perfectly sensible to me to say that because things are still pretty bad, even after their wages jumped by 12% more than inflation took away, they might feel like punishing the people in charge. Especially if they saw a whole bunch of messaging that sold them on the idea that Biden had fucked it all up and Trump was a savvy businessman who might be able to set it right.
And even if we accept the proposition that things did get better for the bottom 10%, there are a whole 80% of the population between the bottom 10% and the top 10%. For those people things undeniably got much worse.
How much, in your world, did wages change for people in that 80%? Median or average, it's up to you. I want to know what you think the numbers are. Not the vibes, the numbers.
You didn't read the link, did you.
I did, but it seems you didn't read what I wrote. To quote myself: Inflation as a statistic is rigged to make things look better than they actually are. The link's thesis—the idea that "real" wages increased and therefore low-wage workers' finances materially improved—relies on the false assumption that "real" wages are real, or equivalently that core inflation (which is the method used to calculate inflation in the united states) reflects price changes as experienced by the common person. This assumption is false, because among other things core inflation excludes food and energy, which is... uh... what? Now don't get me wrong, there are things core inflation is good for, but measuring the lived experience of the working class is not one of them.
Here's one example off the top of my head: The retail price of beef rose 33% from 2019 to 2023. More relevant to the election, Energy rose 30% between 2019 and 2024. Get the idea? This is what people actually feel in their day to day lives.
How much, in your world, did wages change for people in that 80%? Median or average, it's up to you. I want to know what you think the numbers are. Not the vibes, the numbers.
Reverse engineering from the article's numbers got me 22% for nominal wages, 3.3% for "real" wages. Sure as hell not keeping up with the price of meat.
lol I voted for her anyway, because I thought she was better than the alternative. If I only knew…
My point is that her timid, business-as-usual stance was a dealbreaker for a lot of people. How many voted 3rd party, or didn’t vote at all, because she refused to explicitly oppose genocide? How many Democrats like me still voted for her, but weren’t nearly as enthusiastic as they could have been?
No, Biden supported genocide. They did messaging you didn’t agree with.
Okay, let’s play infantile, pedantic word games.
I tend not to agree with people who won’t make a clear, strong, ethical stand against genocide. Fuck me, right?
Anyone who didn't vote against Trump refused to make a clear, strong, ethical stand against genocide.
The messaging which hammered constantly, to a certain audience, on Biden's complicity in Gaza, was a big part of the effort to get Trump elected. No one knew that he came out swinging for working people in a way that hasn't been seen since LBJ. No one knew that he took the biggest action on climate change of any American president by almost ten times over. Everyone on Lemmy knew that he was sending Israel weapons, and we heard it every single day.
Is his refusal to break with half a century of American foreign policy which is enabling of genocide, even in the face of an escalation of the genocide and the clear appearance of its finish line on the horizon, a stain on humanity? Sure. Absolutely it is.
Harris didn't do that, though. The messaging which was originally deployed against Biden (to a certain audience on the activist left; to other audiences it was that he wasn't doing enough to support Israel or he caused inflation or something else), switched over to Harris with barely a blip, and for some reason people didn't notice. So no, I am not proud of you for your principled stance, no.
