467
I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
467 points (88.6% liked)
Political Memes
5998 readers
2702 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While I can understand your perspective, it's one of those unfortunate cases where ideology clashes with reality.
Yes, Trump never planned on following through on actually helping people. He lied, and people bought it. And yet it's no ones fault Harris's that she decided to tell people "things won't change if you vote for me".
A nation of voters isn't made up of individuals who you can convince, it's a crowd of people following certain dynamics, just like any other large grouping of things. You can either accept that and work with this fact to steer the crowd, or you can ignore this fact and lose because you're trying to go against the flow. And in the end, the only people who had any meaningful control was Harris' campaign.
Imagine you're a shepherd, and your flock is running towards the edge of a cliff. Sure, you can plant your feet and say "they shouldn't run off the cliff", but the only end result will be losing all your sheep.
I respect your argument, but I still refute it.
There was a saying someone shared recently: Give them the third best option. Because the second best comes too late and the best never comes at all. Essentially, do not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
I agree that Kamala should have developed more of a campaign around frustrated white young men, and working class America. That was a mistake, but I also think it was an easy mistake to make when scrambling to take over from Biden’s campaign.
If we go 4 years from now, 8 years, 30 years, I think every candidate we see will be imperfect and will make mistakes. The only time we’ll ever see a perfect candidate is when they lie about their accomplishments and overstate themselves. Americans need to be able to spot those flaws themselves, and that will not change in any election cycle. I should not get into the White House by promising every working American a trillion dollars.
I'm not asking for a perfect candidate, not sure where you got that from.
My whole point is that Harris' positions got her some number of voters. We now know that this number was too small, and we also now know that they knew this fact.
Harris could have changed her positions to get more voters, but she didn't. How is this not completely her fault?
Again, I'm not asking her to be some perfect politician. I'm asking her to look at the polling results (which we know she had) and to adapt her campaign based on those, which she didn't do.
It is not completely her fault because voters have agency and accountability.
The larger the group, the more predictable those behaviors are. It's everybody's fault, but she's a single person who could've changed the outcome unilaterally.
Yet each individual voter had almost no impact, while she had an incredibly large one.
I have never respected this circular logic. You could use this argument to make any position a "bad one" as long as biases, foolishness or gullibility on the part of the listener override any convincing points. At some point, it is possible for recipients of a message to be bad listeners, and for voters to be irresponsible in their naivety towards a candidate.
Okay, but we're not talking about any random position, we're talking about "nothing will change with me" being a terrible position if you want to get elected by people who aren't doing so well.
At some point, the senders of the messages have to accept blame. Otherwise things will never get better, as the least shitty option will get ever shittier.
Did you forget noone chose kamala? Twice in a row the democrats have taken popular choice away to put in their best corporate sponsor. We have had better choices every time and the democrats say fuck you anyways.
She didnt scramble to take over the campaign, she killed it out of the gate before moneyed hands got ahold of her and restricted what she could say and how. She showed us a good campaign and then threw it away. You remember that too right?
Nobody is looking for a perfect candidate, just one that actually wants to help the american people instead of use the government as a global pyramid scheme.
It's pretty clear to me though, that the scramble with her campaign was far less to do with pushing ahead the party's corporate interests, and more a mistake of realizing age and perceived senility were affecting their chances with Biden, and being too afraid for buildup time to get another primary. I have no idea what you're citing around corporate interests, I've already agreed that she wasn't pushing a strong message.
The other problem is how you phrase your last paragraph, because you're highlighting the specific problem you'd like fixed, when voters all across America all had different issues they wanted prioritized, and many opposed each other on. Palestine, trans rights, government waste, federal aid vs education vs full employment, etc etc. It isn't so easy to pick and push one message that will uniformly win you votes. It's also easy for people like me to come under the belief that people felt life under Biden was fine and that the country was steadily getting better, and that change from that path would've been bad. It is very easy for that to be more of a communication problem of a rushed campaign, rather than insisting corporate corruption. Again: Basic mistakes. Mistakes not nearly so bad as "I grab treasury dept and gut the government"