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I'm mean, OK, but less than 1/3 of the registered voters voted Trump. Less than 1/3.
I fully expect 1/3 of our country to be right wing, but for another 1/3 to just sit home and stare at themselves in their precious phones... how can they live with themselves?
I don't directly blame Biden though.
The blame falls first and foremost on the DNC. It's likely that if they hadn't overtly sabotaged Sanders, Trump wouldn't have even had a first term, much less a second.
GOP or DNC, it doesn't matter. Both sides are owned by the oligarchs, rich, and corporations. The masses have a common enemy and political parties are their weapons of division and diversion to keep us in check.
No, it doesn't much matter.
The DNC is more galling though, since serving the interests of the wealthy and empowered few isn't all that far removed from legitimate conservative ideology. All the GOP really has to do to make it a more or less valid expression of their claimed advocacy is to invoke some variation of "trickle-down," so they can claim that what's good for the oligarchs is good for everyone. It's a lie and at some level they know it's a lie, but it's a relatively small one in the grand scheme of things.
For the DNC though, serving the interests of the wealthy and empowered few is diametrically opposed to what the claim to represent, and doing it requires an enormous and complex web of lies and deceit. So even beyond the fact that they're betraying the ideals I prefer, they just offend me more on principle because their deception is so far removed from even vague legitimacy.
It's sort of like the difference between being assaulted by a bouncer and being assaulted by a nurse. You end up the same either way, but at least from the bouncer it's not unexpected. There's an entire additional layer of evil when it comes from someone whose whole identity is wrapped up in not doing precisely what they in fact are doing.
I blame Biden for his administration's unwavering support of Israel's ongoing genocide campaign. That 100% depressed voter turnout.
I saw a couple heavily down voted articles that said that was the largest issue and around 30% of people who voted Biden 2020 but didn't vote 2024 gave that as their reason.
It's fucking insane so many people immediately started denying that was the biggest issue
The stupidity is with these fools thinking Trump would be better for Palestinians.
If it wasn't obvious with Trump moving the embassy to Jeruselum and telling Bibi to, "Finish the job" while privately meeting with Bibi to likely stall a ceasefire agreement pre-election to make Democrats look back, Trump definitely is fully enabling of said Genocide, likely making it worse (eg, you think he would've pressed for a humanitarian aid route into Gaza? FUCK no.)
So then the logical thing to say in an inevitable binary-choice election is: "if Trump and Biden/Harris are equally bad on Israel/Palestine policy (they're not), is Biden/Harris better on other issues, notably domestically, like oh I don't know women's rights and climate change?" You bet your ass.
Hence why couch sitters and Stein voters piss me off far more than Trump supporters, themselves; for they should know better. Yet they fell for the online astroturfing disinfo wars. Drank the Russian vodka.
Edit: The user below keeps curiously deflecting, so I'll just cut to the chase by going above:
Genocide (a) has a spectrum of severity and is not a boolean function, while (b) Gaza isn’t the only place an attempted Genocide is currently being carried out; Ukraine is another place — and it is abundantly clear that both Biden and Harris were better than the Putin-sympathizing puppet that is Trump. So if you didn't vote, worked against Harris, voted Stein, etc. then YOU, too, are complicit with blood on your hands of WORSENING not one but TWO genocides.
Big? Sure. Biggest? No. Biggest was "the economy". It's practically a law of nature that inflation ends governments.
No, it beat the economy.
I'll try to find it
Edit:
According to the poll, 29% of that voter group said "ending Israel's violence in Gaza" was the "most important issue" for them in the election.
Gaza was followed by the economy (24%), medicare and society security (12%), immigration and border security (11%), healthcare (10%) and abortion policy (9%).
I wasn't thinking so specifically about Biden voters who stayed home in 24. I see that's what you were talking about initially.
If you simply ask everyone who voted for Trump, the economy was the top issue. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/13/what-trump-supporters-believe-and-expect/
That's all I was saying. But there are, I think, three groups which it would be interesting to have this answer for. The first is the one you mentioned. The other two are people who voted for Biden and switched to Trump, and people who chose not to vote in 2020 and voted for Trump in '24. I couldn't find those answers readily.
Right, but again, the only reason that was relevant is because the DNC sabotaged Sanders and forced Biden on us instead.
They sabotaged Sanders twice, technically.
And Hillary Clinton literally ran with a "Pied Piper Strategy" to elevate Trump because she was convinced she was going up against Jeb Bush. She wanted to make the right-wing seem unhinged and god damn it she got what she wanted, they're actually unhinged.
Better not vote for the Kamala because she "supports" genocide. I'll just sit back and let the guy that said he'd let Isreal wipe Palestine off the map win. That be much better, and I can lir to myself that I didn't take part in a system that gave us these two choices.
This is a great example of why Democrats lost: feeling entitled to votes. You don’t get someone’s vote just because the other guy is worse, you have to get the vote out by convincing people you will help them. “Stop whining about drowning in debt and the rising COL, the economy is great” obviously didn’t do that. Better double down on it and call everyone morons, I guess.
Do you disagree, was voter turnout for Democrats not low? Or are you being sarcastic because you can't address the content?
I don’t directly blame Biden though.
I do, he wasn't capable to be president and knew he was just going to be an empty suit.
And he signed up for it faster than Reagan.
If Biden gave half a shit about America he'd never have even ran in the 2020 primary.
There's a lot of 'either-or' fallacy going on here.
You can be pissed off at Biden and Harris for their enabling genocide; angry at the DNC for making the same mistakes again and again that keep opening the door to fascism, recognize Trump as the worst case scenario, vote for Harris despite the bullshit above cuz she was the clear lesser evil, be angry at other voters for either overtly supporting fascism or allowing it to win in some self-defeating act of defiance, and recognize that people are burnt the fuck out and drew the line at both sides supporting genocide to just clock out and let the world burn cuz nothing else is working.
Pointing your finger at any one person or concept isn't going to accomplish shit. We're dealing with a system that's absolutely saturated with compounding failures.
The solution? I don't fucking know. Probably nothing Lemmy's TOS would allow us to discuss. But two or three or fifty etc things can be true at the same time, and what we DON'T need to be doing is fragmenting communities that see eye to eye 99% of the time - that'll just package ourselves up in little bite sized pieces for the fucking Nazis to steamroll like they did the last time.
There literally is only one party(no pun intended) worth holding accountable, and that is Biden, Harris, and the Democratic party leadership. Sure you can be angry at other voters for not voting how you wanted, but that's not productive, and ignores the issues that made them vote however they did. The Dems one job was to appeal to their voting base, and they failed miserably. Holding them accountable is the only solution that actually addresses the issue, which is that millions of people are dissatisfied with them. You're not going to bully a huge amount of Americans into changing their minds, but putting pressure on the Dems, whoch is what the 'undecided' voters were all about, might eventually yield results. It might have even happened in this last election if other so-called progressives hadn't taken such a strong stance trying to silence them, or accuse them of being russian trolls. If the polling numbers had been worse in the year leading up to the election, if the 'blue no matter who' crowd had taken a stand, if people hadnt theown away their only leverage months before the election even happened, then maybe the democrats would have altered their campaign trajectory and we wouldnt be in this situation. As it is the DNC are the only ones who are truly at fault.
As it is the DNC are the only ones who are truly at fault.
They certainly hold a large share of the blame, but my point is they're not the only ones who fucked up.
Since we're following parallels to pre-Nazi Germany, let's compare it to that. They had a similar cascade of failures that lead to the Nazis rise in power, so as a 'what if' kind of thought experiment, what should _____ have done in order to prevent that rise (and ultimately the Holocaust)? The blank applies to any of the key players, ranging from the established government, to the individual citizen, and everyone/every group in between.
All of them fucked up to some extent - some WAY more than others, but the important bit is that their collective effort (or lack thereof) failed.
I'm sure you see where this is going. Fast forward to today and we find ourselves in the same boat, riding the razor's edge edge of that exact same failure... but as dangerously close as we are, we still haven't gone full Nazi, so we're still (barely) in 'what should ____ be doing' territory. Not what should we have done, but what should we be doing.
And like I said in my previous post: I don't know. Probably something we're not allowed to discuss per Lemmy's TOS, so I guess we just skip that part of the conversation while we're here. What's left? Mutual aid. Planning. More planning. What are the most immediate threats we're facing under the worst case scenario, and how are you prepared to handle those? Do you have a passport? Where do you plan to go if you need to use it? Is it up to date? Are you equipped to defend yourself in the event that you belong to one of the groups Trump targets via stochastic terrorism? Do you own a firearm? Have you cleaned it in the last decade? Is the ammo still serviceable?
Those are the kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves and anyone in our life who's part of a group targeted by Trump. Here and now, I don't really give a shit about the DNC. What's done is done. I'm worried about what I need to be doing to keep myself safe. I'm worried about whether or not my trans neighbors will be able to stay safe, or the immigrants who have come to support my community through their labor, or, or, or, -- you get the point.
What we need right now is unity. If it becomes evident that Trump or his admin lack the capacity or spine to go full Nazi, then fine, let's spend our energy on bitching out the DNC. Right now we have bigger fish to fry.
Do what you need to do to be safe, and please help others on that path as you're able.
"An American Tragedy 2: How they'll fucking do it again in a few years if Democrats keep running on a return to normalcy boogaloo"
It's wild to me that we're having a discussion about Israel in these comments, voters told us exactly what their major concerns were and they were economic and it wasn't even close. Foreign policy, trans issues, etc are all hot button topics easy to argue over but voters felt the economy was bad and that's the biggest reason Trump won.
29% - Ending Israel’s violence in Gaza
24% - The economy
12% - Medicare and Social Security
11% - Immigration and border security
10% - Healthcare
9% - Abortion policy
5% - Don’t know