Summary
Key leaders of the “Abandon Harris” movement, which encouraged voters to oppose Kamala Harris due to U.S. support for Israel during the Gaza war, are now expressing unease about Trump’s incoming administration.
Many in the movement, including prominent Muslim leaders, voted for Trump hoping he would bring peace to the Middle East.
However, concerns are growing over his Cabinet picks, such as Mike Huckabee and Tulsi Gabbard, which some see as troubling for Muslim communities.
It’s weird people are blaming the ones who didn’t vote…
Obviously, if they voted trump, blame them away.
But it’s like people don’t realize how big of an ask it was to have people to vote for a genocide, especially when it’s against the country someone came from and their family is still there.
If Kamala would have won, trying to criticize her would have worked as well as criticizing Biden on Israel the last four years. Any criticism would be met with “Trump would be worse”.
With trump in charge, people will (rightfully) call out American support of a genocide as wrong. So while trump will undoubtedly make shit worse. Him being president means the Dem party will criticize him, and be more left in 2028.
If Kamala had won, she and the party would have moved more to the right in 2028. Just look at what happened after 4 years as VP. The few parts of her 2020 platform people liked, she moved to the right on.
The genocide of Palestinians didn’t start two years ago, it’s been going on for 70 years. It makes sense they’re thinking long term rather than only focuses on the “now” and voting for a lesser evil that maintains the status quo that is a genocide.
If you want someone to blame, it seems like the blame should be on the “left” candidate that ignored everyone actually on the left and became bff’s with Liz Cheney. Not the people that understand when a Republican wins, we get a primary which even when the party pick wins, the primary pulls them left. Even if it’s just lies to win the primary, as long as they keep the lies up, it helps in the general because voters want Dems to move left.
Without a primary, the chosen candidate takes the left for granted and moved right. In this case if Kamala won, we wouldn’t have another option in 2028 either, it would be 2032 before the next real primary.
Like…
I just don’t see how someone could blame anyone except the candidate, her campaign team, and the DNC.
They’re the ones that prevented a real primary, and that made the campaign platform that alienated lifelong Dem voters in hopes of gaining republican voters who wouldn’t be caught dead voting for a Dem.
It obviously failed, and the media is desperate to blame anything other than the stuff their billionaire owners bribed the Dems to support.
They’ll never ever say the problem was a Dem is too “fiscally conservative” because they’re the ones paying neoli eral candidates to pretend that’s a good move for the average American
Biden started this election -400 electoral votes in his own polling. Kamala Harris was the least popular, most divisive candidate in the primary (even as gamed as the 2020 primary was) and left at the bottom of the race.
You are right. You even see the echo chamber narrative that Biden could have still beaten Trump on bluesky being the preferred narrative.
DNC has almost fully pulled a “It’s the children who are wrong” and I’m not convinced they will ever have a fair, open primary again. This was a historic self-own that saw Trump picking up support in nearly all categories.
DNC has been playing Russian roulette with their primaries and voting base for years, honestly the gun has fired a couple times…
2/2/25 they vote for chair…
There’s a very good chance we get a competent chair who cares about winning. Ben Winkler is my favorite but expect for that crazy lady (Marianne Wilkinson?) who has no chance, any of the candidates so far would be a drastic improvement.
What really hurt us was Biden picked the last chair, and like most of his picks it was absolutely horrible.
So until we hear the results of the chair election, I’m trying to be an optimist.
I almost don’t have a choice but to be optimistic. There are more prominent people who are to left of the DNC who are going to demand more power. I see that happening now and being rebuffed by the old guard. It’s a matter of time and I hope it doesn’t break the machine entirely, we need the stability of institutions.
Gonna be honest, i think Biden could have beaten Trump. I don’t blame him for stepping down (though if he had done so sooner i think it would have been better) but i think he had at least as much chance as Harris, maybe more. That’s purely strategic, though. I think the calls for him to step down were coming from a position of weakness and fear and were interpreted as such by the electorate.
He could have easily won if he did something about Gaza other than “support genocide” but here we are, at the (current) end of a long string of such decisions.
We see with the UHC shooting how much anger there is for the inequities in this country, it would be easy to tap into that.
Anyone Democrat could have won if they did the populist thing and didn’t split the difference on Gaza. I think Biden and Harris might have been the only two people who could have lost to him!
Biden wasn’t going to run a different campaign to the one that was losing to Trump when he finally stepped out. Nor did Harris. They both ran losing campaigns against a dude who’s a fucking felon.
The message last time from leftists in the party were that they held their nose to vote for Biden in 2020, it a referendum AGAINST Trump. Well, the DNC loaded another 2 bullets into the revolver, maybe 3 if you included Liz Cheney at the end there, rolled the wheel, and fired a bullet right into the country again.
Mark my words, instead of moving left to capture the voters again, they’ll ratchet right. Fuck the DNC.
Given how Harris ran her campaign, in retrospect, I actually agree that Biden probably would have performed better and I absolutely did not believe that was possible after the first debate.
Harris ran an historically shit campaign that cost bonkers money.
“Nothing will fundamentally change”
I don’t think people are really thinking long term, i don’t think there’s any strategy like that at play. (This is kind of accelerationist anyway, even if it were.) However, i think people who blame the voters for refusing to vote for an obviously poisonous candidate are completely delusional.
People do not have a duty to vote for the Democratic Party’s chosen candidate, no matter who it is. Not moral and not otherwise. The candidate has a duty to appeal to the voters. The party has a duty to put forward candidates that can get elected. If they refuse to do that and the voters refuse to vote for them, that’s not on the voters.
It 100% is, and to be clear I don’t think it was the best path, which is why I held my nose like I have for a very long time and voted D.
But it’s the path we’re on now.
When a Dem wins, they appoint the DNC chair and a symbolic vote confirms it.
When the Dem loses, the chair usually resigns and the DNC has a chance to change direction.
If Kamala had won 2024, the party would stay the same. If she then won 2028 as an incumbent with no primary, shed get to pick chair again. Then in 2032 they would influence the primary to get a similar candidate. It’s a feedback loop that only has a chance to break when a Republican takes office.
Literally, the only way the DNC has a chance to change direction is when the Republicans win. You gotta look at the silver lining, DNC leadership change was accelerated. Which hopefully will be a good thing long term because DNC leadership for decades has been absolute dog shit.
Or they double down and we’re probably fucked. But don’t give up. There’s still the potential of a fair primary in 2028 regardless.
Like Heinlein said long ago:
What did you think would happen when you abstained from voting?
Edit:(i see in another comment that you voted. So my question I guess is to anyone that abstained.)
What did the neolibs think would happen when they ran a campaign designed to appeal to the far right at the expense of the base?
Go ask them.
Some people tried, and were told, “shush, I’m talking”. And anyone with my views was locked out of the convention. So they have taken pretty severe actions to not be asked these questions at all.
Ok, but my point by saying go ask them is that I’m not responsible for that narrative. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
fair.
You’re unlikely to get an answer.
Most people who abstained are checked out of politics. They’re not spending free time on social media talking about politics.
To get them to re-engage is going to take some work.
Which makes it harder to discuss what we need to change to get them back, especially when people reflexively down vote that discussion
This is a volcanic take on Lemmy.
It’s true tho…
Without a primary the Dems consistently move as far right as they can. Sometimes they overshoot and it lets a Republican in.
But no one wanted Kamala as president in 2020, and she moved further right for 2024 and got even less popular.
The next four years will suck. But at least we might have a say in the 2028 candidate.
Kamala would have been almost a decade of “same as Biden” but she was likely to keep moving to the right.
Like, I voted for Kamala. But I knew it wasn’t going to matter because she had zero chance in my state. For it to go blue we need an 08 Obama type.
But I still held my nose.
I just don’t understand why people want to blame those who couldn’t hold their nose, instead of criticizing the unelected political machine who said Kamala was our only option despite being wildly unpopular.
People in the party and Biden’s admin knew how bad he was, and how his age was effecting him. It’s not an opinion anymore, even Chris Clizza admitted it after CNN fired him.
But the DNC still tried to shove him down America’s throats till the last second, then replaced him with Kamala.
If anyone deserves blame for trump, it’s those people. The ones who wasted 1.5 billon dollars on a campaign and couldn’t beat the hands down worst president America has ever had.