this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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I notice that some of them have pivoted to “this was completely the fault of the Democrats, the voters are blameless” messaging, which this would fall under.
Messages of urgent concern about what we need to do for the Palestinians have completely evaporated though, yes. It turns out that it began and ended with not voting for the Democrats, and now there’s nothing particular they want to say about Palestine. Good thing that was all we needed to do, huh? We really squeaked one out there, I guess, with our victory.
I remember in the weeks following the announcement that Biden would step down and endorse Harris people dug into her voting record and revealed that she was one of the furthest left-leaning members of the Senate, up there with Sanders and Warren.
Now that she's lost the election all of a sudden so-called "progressives" are claiming she lost because she was basically a Republican.
The GOP's strategy was clearly to promote voter apathy and drive down turnout for people more likely to vote Harris, and it worked. Trump finally won the popular vote- and he did so with about 6 million fewer votes than what Biden got in 2020.
Far too many progressive, and maybe even moderate Dems and independents, really believed all the nonsense. "Both sides are the same", "you're vote doesn't matter", "there's no way Trump can win", "Bidenomics is totally what caused the global inflation and we are just going to ignore that post-pandemic inflation in the US was the lowest of any developed economy", "she's a cop", etc. Heck, maybe there is even some misogynist or racism on the left that may have hurt Harris. And now instead of just trying to dig out way out of decades of neoliberalism we're just escalating to fascism.
I blame everyone. The GOP and Trump of course. The billionaires (the loud ones like Musk and Bezos, but also the quieter ones like Thiel and the Walton family). Russia of course. The spineless politicians and government officials who refused to put Trump behind bars. The DNC for the shenanigans they've been pulling with primaries for the past several elections and for planning to run a walking corpse in 2024 instead of setting up a real successor to Biden. All of the people who voted for Trump and the other Republicans. All of the left-leaning folk who didn't turn out for Harris. The decades of the GOP undermining democracy (really starting with pardoning Nixon, the whole Regan administration, the hanging chads in 2000, Mitch McConnell taking over the courts, etc).
The only comfort I have is that I know I did my part and voted.
The truth was never part of the issue. They often had contradictory messaging depending on the audience.
Most of it was actually engineered for Biden and based on what he did in office, to the extent that it was even based on anything, and then they just did a search-and-replace to change it to Kamala. It makes no sense, but the effectiveness is not really based on it making sense, just on insistent constant repetition and on it lining up with the reader's general vulnerabilities in terms of what tends to resonate with them. Lemmy gets the second half of each of my examples, but the first half also got plenty of play and had plenty of effectiveness with other audiences.
I did see recently some ads from right-wing PAC's that were shown in different swing states- some portraying Harris as an enemy of Israel in predominantly Jewish areas (I know Judaism =/= Zionism but if you were trying to direct ads to Zionists that's probably the closest you can get) and others portraying Harris as a genocidal supporter of Israel in areas with higher Palestinian populations.
Something that always surprises me is just how effective such dumb advertising is to the average person. I'm not even claiming to be some superhuman immune to propaganda, but political ads always seem particularly low-effort yet seem to control the outcomes of elections.