'Uncommitted' leaders stand by 2024 strategy after Trump floats Gaza takeover
'Uncommitted' leaders stand by 2024 strategy after Trump floats Gaza takeover
Trump's latest idea has renewed Democratic criticism of pro-Palestinian activists who encouraged voters not to back Biden or Harris in the presidential election.
most of this article is fairly ho-hum - a series of quotes from various people that are unsurprising given whatever their position is.
but then buried way down at the bottom, a little nugget of Actual News - as opposed to "political figure gives on-the-record statement to a journalist about what they think".
I hadn't seen this reported anywhere else:
A Harris organizer who worked on youth turnout said that senior campaign officials gave them an order: When they sent out mass volunteer or fundraising emails and people replied by asking about Gaza, they were told to mark it as “no response.” The result? They seldom ended up engaging with voters on that issue.
“We also didn’t create a new category for Gaza responses out of fear that category would be leaked. Instead we were told to mark them as ‘no response,’” the organizer said, faulting top Harris campaign leaders for failing to address the issue. “The only ‘clowns’ out there are those who were in senior leadership and decided to abdicate on this issue, who silenced a Palestinian speaker at the DNC, and who told us to ignore it every time a voter asked us about Gaza.”
just, head in the sand. literal head in the sand.
a smart campaign would have at least tracked this data.
even if the campaign steadfastly maintains their "we are entitled to your vote either way, so shut the fuck up and stop complaining" stance, you would want to gather the data about how many people on these contact lists responded and mentioned Gaza.
but they were scared of that data leaking. because it would have generated a bunch of "the DNC's own data shows it's out of touch with Democratic voters about Gaza" headlines. those headlines would have made the Democrats look bad. they would also have been true, but that's besides the point.
a smart campaign would have at least tracked this data.
even if the campaign steadfastly maintains their “we are entitled to your vote either way, so shut the fuck up and stop complaining” stance, you would want to gather the data about how many people on these contact lists responded and mentioned Gaza.
Thank you! It's one thing to philosophically not view what's happening in Gaza as a genocide or not want to upset the Israel lobby, but you have to know where the people are at. The amount of people in this world who cannot reflect on their failures and grow from them is astonishing. I have people on my team that I tell them that it's OK to make mistakes, just please make new mistakes each time.
It leads me to think the Democratic Party, those in charge, either are fine with what's happening now or are too stupid to reflect on why they lost, and neither of those are good options.
In my interpretation, the Democrats chose supporting genocide and therefore maintaining the funding for all elections in the future in our quid pro quo system rather than to end the genocide and win the presidency but have most of the plutocracy yank their funding for future elections. Ultimately, it was the result of a long term strategy by our Capitalist class to capture the government for financial purposes which culminated in 2010 with the Citizen's United decision. Since then, the behavior of our elected leaders correlates directly with funder interests and not at all with polling data from constituents.
The amount of people in this world who cannot reflect on their failures and grow from them is astonishing.
This is a pretty ironic thing to write underneath this article.
Blame can be shared. We can blame Biden for continuing half a century of support for genocide as long as it’s a close US ally that’s doing it. We can blame the media for creating an environment where more Americans support Israel than Palestine, in one of the most morally unambiguous situations that has ever existed on the planet. We can also blame short-sighted political operatives who were unmoved by warnings that their efforts to “help” in Gaza by advocating against Democrats in this election were going to accelerate the genocide tenfold, if they accomplished anything at all. Now that the warnings are working out precisely as envisioned, I have very little sympathy for “Arabs for Trump” or anything resembling it.
I’m actually not sure how much we can blame Harris, since she was handed a totally impossible situation where attempting to change course on Gaza would have lost her significant support from Israel-supporters, and I strongly suspect gained her pretty minimal support from Palestinian supporters. We may disagree about that. But regardless, I think the pretty reasonable claim “the Democrats have their heads up their ass as far as Gaza” is in no way a counter argument for the claim “and the uncommitted movement was, in retrospect, a big mistake.”
Edit: Typos
Harris left a vacuum by not visiting Michigan families impacted by US-supplied bombs to help create a permission structure for their trust
Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are horrific, but as on so many other issues
Shut the fuck up.
Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are horrific, but as on so many other issues
Shut the fuck up.
if you're going to quote her, at least quote the full sentence of what she said. here's the same quote, with the part you omitted in bold:
"Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are horrific, but as on so many other issues, Democrats had a chance to persuade voters they were the better alternative and they blew it."
That completely changes the context. Sigh. Thanks for posting.
Literally evil winning because good people did nothing, great job jackasses!
I voted uncommitted in the primary, and voted for Harris in the general. I imagine lots of people like me did the same.