the_abecedarian

I can see we're not going to reach an agreement on how to look at this particular instance. Still, I wish you well and I hope people like you and me can find a way to effectively fight fascism going forward.

It's also the publics job to be informed.

We'd get an informed public if people had enough time, material security, and agency to get involved in politics.

Even if it was identical under harris. It was still better under biden. He wasn't actively cheering the genocide on etc. And at least gave some appearance of trying to support relief and peace.

This is infuriating. The appearance of trying to support relief and peace? These people's families are dying. The US is the number one funder and arms dealer to Israel. The few, milquetoast statements Biden/Harris made were only political cover to the overwhelming support for the genocide that the US provided. Look, you don't have to personally care about this issue beyond appearances if you want, but it is a central issue to voters in a particularly politically-important location.

That you feel no responsibility or remorse. For helping to Usher fascism in. [etc]

Don't make assumptions: I was not an activist in Michigan. I didn't tell anyone not to vote for Biden/Harris. I voted for them, even in a place where it doesn't matter. I'm just a stranger on the internet who is tired of Democrats paying more attention to the right than to, well, even the center, let alone the left. They know that there is no alternative vote for us, so they keep tacking right to try and pick off a few so-called "swing" voters. But, doing that demobilizes their base! You need to get people excited to vote, volunteer, donate, and campaign. It's basic electoral strategy. They refuse to learn that lesson and so they lose to someone who has a smaller, but rabid base.

Also, why are we focusing on only the Palestinian voters in Michigan as the ones who lost the election when plenty of other voters there and other swing districts also didn't vote Biden/Harris? Because they're "supposed to" vote dem? Assumptions like that are part of why the democratic party loses elections to Trump. They made a decision to cater more to pro-Israel voters than voters who wanted to at least halt the genocide, it was an important strategic misstep. Zooming out, why aren't dems able to contest more districts? There's plenty of blame to go around.

Finally, if you think this one thing is what ushered fascism in, you haven't been paying attention to the last 30 years of politics. Trump's election is not an aberration, it's an expression of a large and growing right-wing and fascist movement in the US.

Tolerating them is a form of support. They make spaces unsafe for others.

She was his VP!

First, it is the job of the political party to convince the voters to vote for them. But even then, we don't actually know if the outcome for Gaza would be any different under Harris (I'm only referring to the two campaign ads shown, ignore the commentary after). Maybe the Democrats, with an eye toward the next election, could have said "hey we're gonna lose Michigan unless you take a tougher line with Netanyahu".

I don't think it took much of a "masterful play" or much influence at all for the Palestinian and middle eastern origin populations in Michigan to demobilize or protest vote. They had been watching intense and horrific destruction of their families and place of origin for more than a year at that point and they watched Biden, with Harris as VP, transfer weapons and funding to Israel while reiterating their support for Israel and weakly "warning" them about going too far.

It's a bit infantilizing to say that the Palestinian-Americans "got played", as if they couldn't see what was happening in one of the central issues of their lives and make a choice.

"Had been campaigning on" is a joke after Biden spent his term bending over backwards to get weapons and funding to Israel, veto UN resolutions in opposition, and avoid pressuring Netanyahu

The article itself, several paragraphs down, admits you can't attribute trump's win to Palestine activists:

"It’s hard to determine just how much of an impact efforts like Uncommitted or Abandon Harris had in the election results. After all, exit polls showed that voters were motivated more by the economy than by foreign policy. But in battleground states with large Arab-American populations, like Michigan, data suggests that the Israel-Hamas conflict turned people away from Harris. In Dearborn, the country’s largest Arab-majority city, election data showed that Trump won 42 percent of the vote while Harris received 36 percent—significantly less than the 69 percent that Biden earned in 2020.

But the activists note that it wasn’t just Dearborn and other Muslim-American enclaves that moved toward Republicans in 2024—nearly every district in the country moved to the right as well."

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