238
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
238 points (99.6% liked)
news
24519 readers
777 users here now
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
-
To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
-
To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
-
To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.
Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
-
Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
-
Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
-
Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
-
Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
-
Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
-
Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
-
American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
-
Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
-
AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes… it does say the actual proportion of voters? That’s literally the first thing it said. Proportion of voters falling into (X) categories who voted Biden in 2020 who did not vote for Harris in 2024. It then talks about votes that flipped from Biden to Trump across swing states
The “makes no difference” is just a part of the sample size that isn’t relevant on those discussions. Clearly the important data takeaway is that 3x more people who didn’t vote Harris would have been more likely to vote for her than turned less likely to vote for her if she promised to stop sending weapons to Israel.
Honestly, it sounds like you just didn’t read the data
Hey, first of all sorry for being a nitpicky statistics nerd. I hope this doesn't come off as debate pervertry, pedantry and the like, but i want to clarify a few things.
Their core point is that Harris didn't lose the swing states because of absent former Biden voters, but because Trump mobilized voters that didn't vote for him in 2020. Harris lost 79,000 voters there, Trump won 810,000. The Biden 2020 voters who didn't go to the polls because of Gaza wouldn't have been enough to change that result, because while Harris lost a lot of these throughout the country, she barely lost any in the battleground states. Beating Trump's mobilization of new voters there would have required successful mobilization of people who didn't vote Biden in 2020.
And these people are simply not represented in the dataset. People who usually don't vote would have been interesting, first time voters would have been interesting, people who could have voted for the first time but didn't go to the polls would have been interesting and the latter two in particular might have been won over by a convincing anti-genocide stance. Maybe enough to flip the election, the tendency shown by the results of this survey and the opinion of young people on Gaza absolutely make that a plausible assumption. That's were i disagree with the person you're replying to, we can't rule out this issue was decisive. But they're correct that this survery doesn't prove that it was, because it looks entirely at people who voted Biden and didn't vote Harris.
Sure, I know you aren’t being debate perverty because you aren’t arguing with a claim that I actually made. Nowhere did I say people sitting out in the election was the reason Harris lost. I said Gaza was the main reason people who voted Biden in 2020 did sit out the election. Those are two entirely different claims.
That being said, I think you are making the same assumption as the other person. Looking at net voter gains/losses across the two years is meaningless without the data to separate them into groups. Harris lost 79000 votes there? Ok. Who? The same exact slate of people that showed up in 2020 minus 79000? That isn’t how election turnout works
Some pedantry from me.
We can't rule out the decisiveness of this issue based on the contents of this thread. I have seen enough other polling about low engagement/infrequent voters to have convinced me throroughly that those folks who might have turned out, but did not favored Trump because they thought he would be better on the economy.
Even that, I admit, does not mean there was not some way for Harris to come out against Israel and distance herself from Biden that would have managed to motivate a subset of low engagement voters who weren't that concerned about the economy, were concerned primarily about Gaza, and large enough to be decisive, but we're getting pretty thin thin with the should/could/would haves here.
yes, that proportion is 0.12% of the Democrat vote. Harris got 99.4% of Biden's 2020 total, and then 20% of that 0.6% difference stayed home due to Gaza. Equals 0.12%
Harris lost the popular vote by 3.5%, which is 30x that number
If she ended all shipments to Israel and everything else was held constant, she would have lost by (3.5 - 0.12) = 3.38% instead
a continent of crackers don't really give a shit about palestine, who would've thought? (except anyone with an ounce of common sense)
Yes, that proportion is .6% of the Democratic vote when compared to 2020. Good thing the exact same slate of 70 million people showed up in both 2020 and 2024 to make that math really easy for us to figure out who exactly stayed home!
That being said, not sure what Harris losing by 3.5% has to do with anything when Gaza is still the largest reason 2020 dem voters who didn’t vote in 2024 states home.
It doesn't matter, and it's already been explained at least 5x over in this thread why it doesn't matter.
At some point you have to get over your hatred of democrats and let go of this weird just world fallacy that a lot of democrat haters have. Democrats are annoying and ineffective and fascist. If they weren't, they still would've lost.
Where oh where, I beg of you to show me, have I made the claim that Palestine is why democrats lost at any point in this discussion? You are literally arguing with nobody about that.
If you're telling me that you think Harris lost 20% of Biden's voters to Trump in those 6 states, then yes, one of us definitely isn't reading. But it ain't me.
Brother, total voter turnout in 2024 has nothing to do with who voted in 2020. Very cool that the total numbers you are using to draw your conclusion are close to the same, but they have no correlation with each other unless you are making the bold assumption that the same exact set of people showed up in 2020 and 2024 lmao
So yes, given this data it is entirely possible that people staying home because of Gaza mattered, though to be clear that was never a claim that I made. I said 2020 voters’ largest reason for staying home was Gaza.
Nothing? No, really. Nothing?
Sure was weird to spend so much effort looking at this particular group of people in the OP then. I think you're grasping at straws here.
I guess going from "The discussion is over." to "it is entirely possible" is progress of a sort.
Sure, it would make sense that you might think going from "The discussion is over." to "it is entirely possible" is progress of a sort. Of course, this is only if somewhere along the way you imagined me making the argument that this is what swung the election one way or the other, then in your own mind managed to successfully debate against the point I never made.
And for the statistics in question, yes, 2020 voter turnout really does have nothing to do with 2024 voter turnout in the argument you are making unless you are making the assumption that the same exact slate of people showed up for both elections.
Close to the same total number of people showing up ≠ the same exact group of people showed up +/- net difference
You cannot expect me to believe this schtick where you pretend this information doesn't belong in the context of the broader discussion about the outcome of the 2024 election. This is not a free floating factoid you happened to be interested in for the purely intellectual pursuit of understanding the motivations of Democratic voters. What is the importance of this information outside of that context?
If you’d stop reading into things I didn’t say, this whole discussion would have been much less frustrating for you. It’s literally in the title of my post. The top reason Biden 2020 voters sat out of the 2024 election was Gaza. Literally that is the point. The point is that it was actually a reason people chose not to vote.
I'm not frustrated, even slightly.
What discussion is over then? What is the purpose of bringing this up in all future elections, as the title directs me to do?
can you Indian number system
if Dem voters in 2024 are different from Dem voters in 2020, it means that Gaza turned people off yes, AND ALSO that something Kamala did BROUGHT IN ADDITIONAL VOTERS. MEANING THE NET LOSS IS ALMOST BREAKING EVEN.
So yes, you can consider them equivalent big picture. She lost a very small fraction of voters, which is irrelevant to the whole reason of why she lost.
Yes, it is entirely possible that policy on Palestine is irrelevant to the reason Kamala lost. Have you also considered that people showed up for other reasons that weren’t Palestine related at all?
Net change in vote between 2020 and 2024 means literally nothing here. It gives you no useful information other than comparing the vote totals. It does not tell you who did/did not vote and why, it tells you how many people did/did not vote.