electoralism

over half of inflation was corporate price gouging.

they could have gone after that. guillotined a few CEOs who exploited covid to jack up prices and squeeze more money out of everyone. if they had clawed back the excess profits and sent everyone refund checks from the seized profits of price gouging. they would have won in a landslide.

people love getting a check of free money.

I think it's pretty irrefutable she lost Michigan's large block of Muslim voters over the genocide.

since Gaza protest voters weren't actually a difference maker, there's not as much opportunity for us to agitate about it as we would've liked.

Liberals don't really care if the stats aren't obvious. Just enough to make them sweat. Simply assert they would've won if they hadn't doubled down on genocide.

The stats aren't even necessarily wrong on this. People not voting are the primary cause of Harris' defeat and being uninterested in a soulless genocider is a good reason to stay home.

I would probably also add on that they did nothing to seperate her from and the average voter probably hates him now even more than they hate her.

Also if they continue to insist on running on being diet Republicans they need to run a ticket with a white man as the president and probably a man as the VP too. At this rate Ivanka is probably gonna be the first woman to be president of the US.

It's a mistake to treat these issues as disconnected. People saw the Biden administration writing blank checks to Ukraine and Israel when they were struggling to make ends meet. Foreign policy had both a material effect and a perceived effect on the economy, and people might not have a correct understanding of exactly how or why but I'm inclined to believe people made some connections there.

Obviously it's disappointing that more people aren't opposed to genocide on principle, but there are people who blame it for interrupting their treats, or who are upset about treat disruption resulting from it but don't connect the two.

Polls say most democrat and independent voters want the genocide to end, and we don't know how many didn't show up to vote for this reason.

As much as there's some segment that didn't vote for her over the economy, I'm sure there's a lot of folks that just didn't like her and probably weren't too happy about the fact that there wasn't a primary. The Biden admin shit on every marginalized group out there for the past 4 years and then she went on a Iraq War Neocon Tour. Like there were a lot of reasons to not vote for her and I'm guessing the BIG disparity in voter turnout between 2020 and 2024 is primarily that people turned out for Covid. Her loss is just us getting Back to Normal.💁

I'm not sure that this is completely correct. I agree that this is a repudiation of the Biden Admin and that inflation is probably the largest factor in the unfavorables. But Harris underperformed with Dem voters. They did not turn people out who voted in 2020. I don't believe that the genocide and Biden's foreign policy mote broadly had nothing to do with that.

The electorate doesnt have a sophisticated handle on foreign policy, but they kind of care when something like war with Iran is on the table. USians may not vote based on foreign policy, but they also have not voted for anything that seems like a return to Bush area style wars for 20 years. They rejected it in 08, and they rejected it 2016 with Clinton being tied to that

I think you're correct in the causes. Still, if Biden and the Democrats were actually willing to wield their power the way Republicans are, they could have significantly improved how people feel about the economy. Even the perception that Dems are trying would've been big. They would rather lose than go against their own interests, though, and they did.

The other thing is that Kamala was one of the worst candidates in decades and despite what libs were hoping, being "not Trump" isn't good enough to win. Biden had the Obama VP bonus and still only barely won.

How many voters sat out entirely because they opposed genocide?

Inflation is absolutely their fault. The government has the power to enact price controls. Nixon did it

I think you're wrong about this because these things are connected. The path to the white house was a Berniecrat campaign. They had to push an anti-corporate narrative really hard and rely on grassroots donations to get way more people involved, naturally boosting turnout. Part of the anti-corporate (not necessarily even socdem, but bonus points if it was) strategy absolutely would've been standing up to the MIC. There was a way to victory that confirmed people's doubts about the economy with a substantial policy platform that wasn't pandering to petit bourgeois pigs.

Think about the alternate reality where Kamala's strategy was to run a far more progressive campaign. She would've depended on orgs like DSA to drive the message home that she was trying to appeal to those voters; that doesn't necessarily mean she would have had to drop Zionism from the campaign since the DSA is spineless and there is no organized left in the US that could make a demand like that, but it certainly makes it a lot more likely that she would've considered the pro-Palestine political block a more expedient group to capture than Zionist voters.

Harris lost because she offered nothing to anyone.

the liberal smugness about ignorant voters that we're surely going to see in the next few weeks is... actually kind of correct.

I've been contemplating this today. I think it's reasonable to say that we need someone to do some polls before we can tell for sure what caused some 12 million or so people who turned out for Biden to sit this one out. Sexism? The fact that they had more time or energy to vote in 2020. The fact that the world seemed to be falling apart way worse than it does now? Or just the fact that things seem more expensive and neither candidate seemed appealing enough to turn out for?

I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that life is harder for the dems in that they still have an onus to deliver material benefits to their voters while Republican politicians get to do whatever they want so long as it looks like winning or punishing an outgroup, and voters don't really take the time or the energy to understand why things aren't happening, who the actual source of the obstructions are. But, at the same time, the dems seemed to spend a lot of the early years of the admin tripping over their own dicks and then not executing any follow-ups. HR1 crashed and burned and that would've made it a lot easier to turn out apathetic voters, but when was the last time anyone even said anything about it? Then torched the minimum wage increase and everyone just kinda shrugged and forgot about it. Then the Supreme Court blocked student loan reform. The Biden admin had to have known that would have been a problem but evidently they were too wedded to the idea of sacrosanct institutions to think about trying to tip the balance. The stay-at-home voters probably don't remember any of these incidents, but it's possible they would have motivated a lot more people to turn out, and dems need turnout.

On the Gaza front, it's likely that didn't move the needle for a lot of people, but the ones it did move the needle for were probably important. I mentioned in a different thread that the folks who have the energy to show up and protest also have the energy to knock on doors, volunteer, donate money, everything else that you need to run a truly grassroots campaign, and Kamala seemed to go out of her way to thumb her nose at them. So they either went home or continued to spend their energy on protesting her instead of helping, and that may have eaten away at some of the margins. Although she also spent a bunch of campaign money on billboards trashing the Green Party in Michigan so there were probably some issues around efficient resource allocation within the campaign.

Gaza might have brought out voters that otherwise stayed home. But of course the bigger problem is they had not even a concept of a plan to help the working class.