What was wrong with Harris?
Given how much disadvantage being an incumbent was the last cycle across the globe I think she actually would've won in say 2016 but an incumbent candidate was not the one to run in 2024.
Many, many polls showed this very clearly. 77% of Democrat voters wanted an arms embargo, and over 30% of 2020 Biden voters in key battleground states said that this issue was serious enough to affect their vote.
> A Harris organizer who worked on youth turnout said that senior campaign officials gave them an order: When they sent out mass volunteer or fundraising emails and people replied by asking about Gaza, they were told to mark it as “no response.” The result? They seldom ended up engaging with voters on that issue.
- https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/uncommitted-le...
So yeah, if there was one thing wrong with Harris, that would be it. That one issue would have changed the result, and as far as single issues go, I call genocide a pretty big one. It's kinda the biggest.
Far from the only issue though - campaigning with Dick Cheney was pretty fucking stupid, for one thing. Then there was promising to be harsher on immigration than Trump. Promising the world's "most lethal" military (we already are?) while trying to gaslight broke Americans into believing the economy was great. In general, trying to pick up right wing votes was a heinous 'strategy'.
Hamas is a hardline theocratic political party based on a very conservative interpretation of a religion. That means they're anti-free speech/press/religion/assembly, anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-free enterprise, anti-secular jurisprudence, and anti-representative government. Neither of the Palestinian Territories have had meaningful elections in over a decade. They're utterly unwilling to discuss any sort of deviation from their foreign policy agenda in good faith.
And yet, that's who many people on the political left-of-center see as the "freedom fighters" of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Is Israel blameless? Absolutely not. They've committed numerous war crimes and atrocities since October 7th. On the other hand, they have shown with Jordan and Egypt that if their neighbors agree to leave them alone, they'll do the same in turn.
Fatah isn't that much better.
Honestly it's a different flavor of the same kind of authoritarianism that many on the right in the US dream of. And with Trump, they're much closer to implementing this, albeit with a different religion. If the idea behind the 2024 election in the US was to prevent more people from coming under authoritarian rule on a global scale, the left in the US failed miserably. And I say that as someone on the political left.
It's the same story we're seeing in the west though, from Hungary to America to Turkey to the UK. Strongman comes along and correctly says "your life sucks", then says "it sucks because of this group of people"
Run with that message for generations, throw in members of "this group of people" actually killing your friends and family, and it's easy to see how that message works.
Oh, absolutely. But the way to solve that is to realize that it was authoritarianism that started the problem.
If the Arab states had been willing to talk about the concept of a Jewish state in the Middle East immediately after WWII, this probably doesn't happen. Instead a bunch of authoritarian rulers (most of them monarchs) decided to send troops to try to snuff out the founding of the new state. "I was put here by God; what I say goes" was their entire experience, and they tried applying it to the geopolitical disagreement in their region.
A bunch of countries who more-or-less sat out WWII were up against the survivors of industrialized state-backed efforts to wipe out their people during the bloodiest war in human history. As we know, the former lost, and with it, any real chance of establishing a meaningful state for the Palestinian people on their terms.
There's two ways to handle a loss: you can accept it on reasonable terms, or you can keep digging a hole. Egypt and Jordan eventually came around to reasonable terms. So far, those terms have held over multiple governments and decades on both sides.
If the continued method taken by Hamas (and by extension, Iran) is going to be that of violence, particularly against a state they have to know, deep down, that they can't beat, then there's not too much else to be done other than keep the region from falling further into chaos. That, whether it is right or wrong in the minds of American voters, means blunting the impact of enemy action against Israel. It's one of the bloodiest examples of realpolitik.
That message was picked up by the russians etc and turned into a wedge issue on social media.
At least within my little bubble, I saw a lot more concern about that than the fact that Hamas had basically committed a massive war crime on October 7th. The only people consistently talking about the hostages that I saw were my Jewish friends. Otherwise, it was mainly "Free Palestine".
It's worth remembering that they also mainly targeted civilians, and that basically no nation-state today would do too much different from what Israel has been doing. If you were to kill, rape, and kidnap the proportional equivalent of any country's civilian population, you are likely to see their military attack you, and not stop until you at the very least returned the hostages.
Everything Trump has done, from rearming Netanyahu, to allowing more bombing during a ceasefire, to making efforts for ethnic cleansing was initially proposed/endorsed by Biden; and Harris had promised to do the same.
77% of Democrat voters wanted an arms embargo. The vast majority of elected Dems keep voting to rearm. You can't blame voters for abandoning a party which point-blank refuses to even listen to them, never mind represent them.
In case you weren't aware, that language isn't coming across as super-observational and not smug.
Not sending arms to allies seems to be a good way to piss them off.
That's domestic and international law, by the way.
The question was, why did Harris lose, and the answer is that many Americans are still too decent to vote for someone who promises to arm the world's most live-streamed genocide.
Millions of potential Dem voters saw atrocities being committed with weapons sent by Biden and Harris. Every day, for over a year. Harris promised to keep doing that. That's viscerally disgusting, and a red line for decent people everywhere.
That's why she lost, which answers the question. Polls before during and after the election back that up unequivocally.
Now, you can argue that it's practical and more moral to vote for the lesser genocide all day, and you can point to all the ways that Trump is worse all night, but you can never, ever convince me that Democrats actually wanted to win more than they wanted to fuel genocide. Because they knew. They knew Harris' numbers, they knew the margins, and they knew what the polls were saying about Gaza. And then they campaigned with Dick Cheney. They managed to lose to a rapist insurrectionist, despite outspending him and his billionaires.
One more time - it's not the voters fault that they couldn't stomach voting for someone actively enabling the mass murder of tens of thousands of children, even if the alternative was openly worse. And it's weird that this is in any way confusing to people.
That might be true but it would have set herself up for a lie that would then be weaponized by Trump for another four years. A lot of people in this country don’t want a liar in office, that’s why they didn’t vote Trump.
So while she said she wouldn’t do anything different than Biden on immigration and not stop funding Israel. Those would have been lies if she did. Saying you’ll change things also builds distrust in past government and our well working systems. This rhetoric Trump champions and puts us in the problem we have today. We can see those lies in effect today as Trump ignores the voters he won from briefly talking about Gaza and still funding those wars.
No. Committing genocide - murdering tens of thousands of children - nullifies any previous weapons contracts. That's obvious.
Here's the specific law against it [0]. If you want to insist that Harris would be "forced" to keep arming Israel because of contracts, I do hope you'll have a read of it first.
0 - Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA), codified at 22 U.S.C. § 2304(a)
Well, no, because he campaigned on that. Including pardons for people that participated.
Are you suggesting that Harris would have reeled in some of the most outrageous policies on this issue? She said no such thing so the reasonable assumption anyone would make is that it would be business as usual. Not talking about it is the problem.
She was accused of many things in bad faith, e.g. not being Black, being a Marxist, being a communist, and more. Spending time and effort to address every single one of these would have been tantamount to allowing her opponent to dictate her campaign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_is_for_they/them
It was and is an important issue to a lot of voters and by ignoring it she let her opponent explain her position for her.
The Democratic Party refused to grapple with these questions either and their electoral loss is going to do far more harm to trans rights than some reasonable policies (for example some gatekeeping of "self-ID") would have.
Prisons should of course have safeguarding policy for further separation of vulnerable inmates within the prison.
Interestingly this is exactly what male prisoners with a transgender identity were requesting, according to https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/chase-strangio...:
> He teamed up with Lorena Borjas, the unofficial den mother to transgender Latinx women in New York City, to start the bail fund for transgender immigrants, and he joined a working group of lawyers who were drafting recommendations for President Obama's Department of Justice on the incarceration of trans people. "We asked people in prison what they needed, and they all said that they wanted a trans unit," Strangio said. But the lawyers in the working group, including Strangio, believed that L.G.B.T. units were stigmatizing, and only served to perpetuate the prison system.
However they were ignored, and instead of this, a policy of transferring males to women's prisons was introduced.
Harris failed to distance herself from positions that are deeply unpopular with the majority of Americans (e.g. sex changes for illegal immigrants). That's all there is to it.
If you want to step away from this particular issue, she failed to distance herself from the Biden administration's policies. There's a pretty famous clip of her failing to answer a question to that point, definitely on the youtubes.
You're excluding a key point - the policy often benefits one party at the cost of another. You mentioned immigration and that's a great example of this sort of pathological empathy that has infected the left.
There's a cheap and fleeting sense of virtue attained when you champion illegal immigration and decry deportations. You post photos of mothers and their children crying at the border because the human trafficking organisations are having a hard time getting them across nowadays. But it's important to remember the negative pressure illegal immigrants place on wages and why there's a gross cabal of large corporations, lobbies, and affiliated NGOs, who virtue signal immigration as a means to lower their labor costs. It's important to remember the entire pipeline of illegal immigrants is owned and operated by extremely violent cartels - humans are now their most valuable product. Your desperate craving for that high of in-group acceptance is propping this up.
It's not that you're empathetic - you just don't care about the negatively impacted party. Nothing new under the sun.
I made no assertion about the criminality of the immigrants, but rather the cartels bringing them here.
Regarding "trans rights", which is quite a large umbrella of ideas, negatively impacted parties include:
1. Parents who don't want schools influencing their children's ideas about sexual identity.
2. Women who don't want to compete against biological men in athletics (this is the most bewildering failure of the left's tolerance).
3. Women who feel uncomfortable sharing previously women-only spaces with biological men.
4. Trans people who made life-altering decisions as a minor and now regret it.
These negatively impacted parties are vocal now - they aren't hard to see. You don't care about them, is all.
I’m an independent and I could not and would not vote for her for this reason. I could not and would not vote for Trump either, so I simply didn’t vote.
Your view of Biden’s mental state is lies spewed by all the media. How many videos of Biden speaking have you actually watched? He is actually 10x better speaker than Trump or George W Bush ever was. It’s ridiculous how people take those lies verbatim.
We took the car keys away from my dad when he was measurably more mentally capable than Biden appeared to be in 2022. I worried every single day between when I recognized the signs and when he left office about the dangers of having someone in his state as the presumed most powerful person in the world. What I do know is that whoever was running the country for the last 3 years, it wasn't someone elected to do it.
Not voting is a vote. It’s applying my opinion that there was not a reasonable candidate worthy of my vote.
Joe Biden was running the country, he signed bills, gave speeches, and helped restore our economy. Because you chose to only read headlines and drink the “Joe is practically dead” kool-aid. That is how you led yourself to the lies and not voting.
Not voting is not a vote in a national election system. It is a vote for your own smugness. It is opting out of voting because you’re looking for a reason to stay neutral instead of a reason apply your opinion in a meaningful way.
That is what makes your opinion today meaningless because you voted for meaninglessness.
I know what I saw, and I am sure your dad did too. I spent years as a caregiver to an Alzheimers patient, I may not be a “medical expert” but I am capable of recognizing similarities, especially when they are obvious and frankly common for dementia sufferers. I can also make judgements of who I vote for and not vote for based on my own observations. Whatever your opinion of my decision and my reasoning for it—-that is meaningless to me.
So it's just funny to think that people looked at the mental capabilities of Harris and trump and decided... yep trump is the guy!!
You can “see” all the dementia signs you want. It doesn’t make it true and you should really seek out more material than the few times you’ve probably watched him speak. He really was a good leader that got thrown under the bus for a few bad performances. Right now you’re just carrying on how you’re not qualified to diagnose dementia but it doesn’t matter because you know what the media circus told you and that lines up with your baseless theory.
You're an embarrassment, I hope you get what you 'voted' for.
The democratic party is an embarrassment (that is coming from a former democrat, now independent BTW). Whatever we “get”, they own it.
How would Pelosi help you? She might have been happy about the TSLA rally after the Trump election, like many other Democrat share holders.
One must choose the lesser of two evils!