this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I will never look down on someone who voted or refused to vote because of thier conscience. Obviously for this specific question, that excludes people claiming to care about gaza, but still voting for trump. There was no illusion that trump was going to do anything positive for gaza.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I will never look down on someone who voted or refused to vote because of thier conscience.

You should. They only bring about worse situations at best. Pretending to be moral when what you're doing is the opposite is pure hypocrisy.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Remember, the most constructive thing you can do is get mad at other, equally powerless people like yourself! This is how political change happens.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (4 children)

Remember! People aren't powerless! Voting is a power! Not voting is not how political change happens

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 hours ago

that's a good point

I wonder what would happen if the Democrats tried to activate those chronic non-voters, rather than trying to flip those moderate republicans i keep being told are real

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 13 hours ago (11 children)

Democrats then: "We'll win without appealing to Arabs in Michigan or anyone who demands we stop funding Israel. Shut them out of the DNC and scold them at every turn. Who cares how they react or that they're forming PACs like 'Arabs for Trump.' We don't need their votes."

Democrats now: "We lost because you STUPID Palestine-lovers wouldn't vote for us. Your country needed your votes, Gaza needed your votes. It's actually your fault that we didn't bother appealing to you."

[–] [email protected] 11 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

To the DNC and right wing Dems, its always someone else's fault why their candidate failed to appeal to the voters they are trying to represent. No accountability for their failure.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

"We don't need you! We never needed you! Every one of you is a paid Russian actor! We will win with Chaney and Romney!"

"GOD PLEASE WE NEEDED YOU! WHY DIDN'T YOU TRUST US?! WE CHASED AFTER THE REPUBLICANS TO MAKE YOU LOVE US!"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

The more I think about it, the more this sort of gaslighting reminds me of Eve Online shenanigans. Which is fair, after all, users like Jibrish moderate r/eve like they do r/conservative.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 21 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

i hate the big d Democratic party. i dont like their platform, i don't like their candidates. i voted for harris in2024. the time to make political statements and form a movement is now. do you know what you are supposed to do during election season? VOTE!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, ive said exactly that countless times right before the election, criticize her all you want after the election but ffs, elect her and the average response was something along the lines of "but genocide Joe!" or just nothing .

Also, all those fuckers are gone now, you're not hearing anything about it anymore so I'm guessing that a lot of them could also have been right wing trolls just pushing people to ensure trump would be voted in

[–] [email protected] 6 points 14 hours ago

I want to believe that was a large scale, coordinated influence operation, but the truth is probably a bunch of scattered, uncoordinated young folks tring to make a statement

[–] [email protected] 19 points 15 hours ago

The democrats tried everything except for actually grappling with the subject. Now blaming the voters completely misses the point .. that the dems where supporting Israel and clearly stated they would continue the current path. Trump had the decency to lie to the constituents. And now they cope by convincing themselves it's part of his plan. The voters where duped.. but the Dems did this.. not the voters.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I wrote the comment below on a thread that got locked while I was writing. TL;DR: Any bonehead who thinks that every single voter is politically-engaged and fully-informed, and that 6 MILLION of them all made a rational, reasoned decision to sit out the election is dumber than they look.

Oh, well, 18 months, what a slog! /s

Look, I've spent close to 30 years now detailing that this fucking insane "lesser evil" slide-to-the-right thing that Democrats were doing was going to end in evil. (That is, fascism.) Either the Democrats themselves would become what we feared, or the greater evil would happen to win.

Guess what? I was fucking wrong. I admit it now. I didn't guess that BOTH would happen simultaneously. It was bad enough more than 20 years ago when my Senator was the only vote against the PATRIOT ACT. It got worse when Obama decided to abolish due process and the rule of law. But by 2024, Democrats were straight up aiding and abetting the biggest war crime of all. Jesus jumpin' Christ on a pogo stick, how did we get to a place where that is the lesser evil?

Y'all couldn't vote for Nader in 1996, because "he can't win." Well, guess what, bucko, we had to change course somehow. He, or a spiritual successor, had to win, or we'd get... well, look around. It was clear even back then. We had to at least try something different, other than the lesser evil every time.

As they say, the best time to change was then, and the second-best time is now. But, no, Kamala Harris couldn't change her mind on genocide to win. No, sir! We have standards of evil to maintain, you see. Meanwhile, the billionaires weren't going away. The wealth inequality wasn't shrinking. Late-stage capitalism wasn't on track to make the serfs' lives better. The climate crisis would still loom. Charismatic fools like Rogan et al. are still young. So the choice in 2024 was fascism now, or fascism later. 2032, most likely, when the partisan pendulum would predictably swing the other way. 2028, possibly.

Is it any wonder that many voters felt overwhelmed, hopeless, defeated, and declined to participate, through the fabulous power of denial? Politics is depressing, the system is big, my vote is inconsequential... Y'know, denial, that power that we've all honed through a lifetime of practice—knowing the horrors of industrial meat production and still ordering a burger, knowing the role of CO~2~ in the climate disaster while waiting in the car at the drive-thru window for it, knowing the causes of cardiovascular disease and still eating it?

Knowing that someday, eventually, we have to fix our political system now that radicals have found its cheat codes, but still browbeating those disengaged voters that they are the ones responsible for this calamity. Yeah. Denial.

The same denial as 30 years ago. This election has been a long time coming. A year and a half? Get outta here.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 18 hours ago (8 children)

This push to demonize the strawman protest voters is an ongoing propaganda campaign to cause poor people to infight.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 18 hours ago (16 children)

Strawman?

6.27 Million more people voted for Biden in 2020 than Harris in 2024. That's not strawmanning, those fuckers stayed home and that is exactly why we are in the current situation.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 19 hours ago (9 children)

Honestly, the election was three months ago, and we have bigger fish to fry right now. My default assumption now is that anyone still trying to relitigate the Gaza voters is a Russian troll trying to sew division among the left.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 20 hours ago (17 children)

How do you change voter behavior?

You don't. If you want someone to vote for you, you need to provide something that they want. The point of democracy is not to change the people to fit what the rulers want, it's to change the rules to what the people want. If you can't do that, the people don't want you.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 18 hours ago

It’s also to appeal to candidates , which doesn’t get talked about enough in the case of Gaza

Joe and Kamala did nothing to appeal to those voters, going so far as to cancel a Palestinian speaker at the DNC who agreed to have her entire speech vetted

so why arent we pointing the finger at them?

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 18 hours ago (9 children)

Seems like this is more of a candidate problem than a voter problem - Joe and Kamala were very aggressive to anti-genocide voters and protestors - Gov Shapiro even wanted them arrested

Vote shaming will not get these voters to your side, but you know what will - candidates who will listen

[–] [email protected] 19 points 17 hours ago

Vote shaming will not get these voters to your side

This is beyond voter shaming, though. This is asking what the fuck were they thinking.

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