If the current administration doesn’t prove their value, the people will start to have a say in another 2 years at the house level.
None of this is a surprise. It's not even like 2016, where people could say "I figured he'd be less bad than he said he would be" with a straight face.
Whatever excuse they found to not vote for the Democrat in 2024, will still apply in 2026 and 2028. Or they'll find a new one.
And turnout in midterms is even worse than in Presidential years. I don't see those non-voters suddenly taking an interest then.
It would be fantastic if somebody learned some lessons. But I think 2024 proves pretty definitively that people don't learn lessons.
My recollection is that non-voters tend to be reliably lazy, but I can’t find a good source.
The system almost relies on it. If you can identify a non-voting bloc, in primaries or ideally even generals, you can tax them to give goodies to citizens.
It's maddening, they complain about Trump, and when I mention that they didn't vote they say "YOU THINK KAMALA WOULD BE BETTER??? YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO FIX THIS PROBLEM BY VOTING LOL!!". And of course, they never define what "the problem" is, so there's actually no way to solve it, so they never have to actually vote.
By not voting for Harris and making her lose it means next cycle people have to care about your opinion to get elected. It's the opposite of when Progressives don't like a Democrat's proposal but still vote for it; it means the Democrats don't have to negotiate with them because they're getting the vote anyways.
It's honestly pretty fucking dismissive of people who are affected by Trump's regressive policies. "It sucks that you got deported but maybe in fifteen years you'll thank me because we will have a proper progressive in office to fix problems that are really important but apparently impossible for us to actually enumerate with any kind of consistency".
Like the Gazans!
The American Palestinian movement has been 100% about the protesters themselves. Not the Palestinians. The Defund the Police and Chesa crowd found a new cause to ruin. Folks who have never been to both countries confidently redrawing borders on another continent, the new Sykes and Picot.
No? It makes you electorally irrelevant. Possibly toxic. Trump has carte blanche with Gaza because it’s not an issue any senior Democrat is willing to fight for after the Palestine vote proved both mercurial and unreliable. Hell, I’m experiencing some schadenfreude with the whole thing.
The way to play it is to bloc vote in primaries and then reliably turn out in generals. See: the NRA.
> By not voting for Harris and making her lose it means next cycle people have to care about your opinion to get elected
What actually happens:
The party rationally writes off this flaky voting bloc as not worth the effort, and instead goes further to the right.