[alt text: a screenshot of a tweet by @delaney_nolan, which says, “Biden/Harris saw this polling and decided to keep unconditionally arming Israel”. Below the tweet is a screenshot from an article, which states: “In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they’d be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less likely.”]
And Trump will be better for Palestinians how exactly? Anyone who prefers inane grandstanding instead of picking the lesser evil (no matter the topic) is a moron. That’s how politics work. The ideal candidate doesn’t exist and will never exist. If you ever come across one who 100% mirrors every single one of your opinions, get your head examined.
It was high enough on their list to cause her to lose.
And taking people’s votes for granted worked how exactly?
Voter turn out was much lower than 2020 and 2016 just like this poll predicted.
Say what? Voter turnout in 2016 was 60%, in 2020 it was 67%, and in 2024 it was 65%.
you don’t have to convince me, friend. The fact is, winning a national election involves building a coalition with people that you don’t see eye-to-eye with 100%. The Dems don’t have a great coalition to begin with - if they win their highly-educated base and nobody else, they lose the election 100% of the time. They have to win over other people, mostly the very few groups of undecided voters. And in this election, it was clear that one of the few undecided groups available were Arab-Americans that cared a whole lot about what has been happening on the West Bank. And Harris did fuck-all to court those voters, so they decided to stay home.
0.639% of the US population. This is a tiny minority of no relevance to American politics. Trump has 51% of popular votes already, not that this matters, because the districts that carry Trump to victory have few voters with this kind of background. Arab Americans could not have changed the outcome of this election, even if 100% had voted for Harris.
Okay, how about the 34% of voters in PA as mentioned in the OP? Or the black Americans who said Gaza was important to them?
The quote is deliberately misleading by leaving out that they were only asking Democrats and independents. It also doesn’t mention that it (leading questions and all) was commissioned by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding Policy Project, which is a self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian group that opposed protections of Jewish Americans from antisemitism. Hardly an unbiased entity.
The war against Hamas ranks 15th among all issues to American voters. It’s not entirely unimportant, but don’t kid yourself by making the unfounded claim that it had any significant influence on this election.
How does the IMEU oppose protection against antisemitism, specifically
Here’s the initiative:
https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism
Here’s how the organization reacted to it:
https://imeu.org/article/imeu-policy-analysis-9-ihra-definition-silences-speech-for-palestinian-righ
That 0.639% of the population actually has a lot of them in a critical swing state that helped Biden win 2020. Harris lost Michigan by less than 85K votes, they could have made the difference.
2.1% of Michigan, and Harris could really use an extra 2.1% in Michigan right now.
Not really, without Pennsylvania Michigan doesn’t matter unless nearly every other swing state goes for her, and they don’t look like that’s even a possibility.
126k Arab-Americans living in PA. As of reporting right now, Harris is losing PA by 152k votes. Obviously this doesn’t clearly indicate that this single issue would swing the election in her favor, but I wouldn’t call that “a tiny minority of no relevance to American politics”.
And the Jewish voting population of PA is more than three times that. Now, that hardly means that they’ll all vote for Isreal, but it does mean that how that group breaks has a far more outsized impact and why Haris was focused so much on things that both sides can generally agree with like conditional aid.
I would have much preferred an actual hardline leftist stance of course, but at the end of the day Gaza does not seem to have played a significant part in this election.
Sure, but I would argue a much larger chunk of that Jewish voting population is firmly in the Democratic base, and may have voted for her either way. Only one party is supporting antisemitism, after all.
Given how entrenched support for Isreal is parts of the base and moreover how conflicted much of the middle ground of the community is, I expect a lot of them would have sat the election out. Of course I think playing both sides of the street did lead to a lot of them sitting it out, but I think the hope was that an week intermediate position would allow for unity and coalition building around issues that didn’t have your party primarily fighting itself.
This exactly
Especially considering trump’s opinion on them and Israel’s stance on the election (wanting a trump victory) those should have been major red flags about a trump victory if you cared about Palestinians.
Voting the lesser evil is often how politics works. You pick the candidate you yu hate the least and try to mobilize more people in the future to get the policies you want.
Some background on why exactly Israelis were unhappy with Biden/Harris:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-shows-israelis-massively-favor-trump-over-harris-in-us-election/
The Israeli public should have realized that Biden actually helped them by not agreeing to every one of Netanyahu’s whims, yet here we are.
I’ve seen far too many people parrot uneducated talking points like “America is arming Israel unconditionally”, which has been very much not the case under Biden. Why are people ignoring that he, just to name one example, withheld arms deliveries and threatened more restrictions unless more aid shipments were allowed into Gaza and the humanitarian situation there improved? I’m generally pro-Israel, even though I detest Netanyahu, I believe that the wars against Iran’s proxies are justified (Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis all attacked first without provocation and none of them are anything other than murderous terrorist groups), but I have no issues with these kinds of demands.
I fear that without Biden/Harris, the sparring match between Israel and Iran might get much more heated than it is already, potentially even escalating into an all-out war. Trump has the potential to cause a great deal of instability in the entire region (which would impact the rest of the world as well) and dramatically increase the suffering of ordinary Palestinians, Lebanese and Israelis (as well as potentially Iranian civilians as well) by antagonizing Iran, by removing demands from the Israeli government to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, by performing stupid stunts similar to his administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli territory (which will only inspire terrorist attacks and hostile acts from Iran), pulling back on pressure on the Houthis (because Putin might demand it), etc. pp.
World politics are messy, but at least under Biden, one could always assume that there was a reasonable, experienced politician surrounded by knowledgeable experts trying their best. They didn’t always succeed and even where they did, the results were often imperfect, because we are not living in a perfect world, but there was a certain amount of reliability that one could count on. The second Trump term on the other hand will be a severely cognitively declining Trump surrounded by sycophant yes-men stumbling his way through and creating a new idiotic crisis every week, this time without the kind of “old-school” Republicans in key positions that prevented Trump from following his worst instincts the last time around. This applies to both the current wars in the Middle East and every other aspect of foreign and domestic policy.