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.

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

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.

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

Well here's one Arab American for Trump views.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250206220053/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/06/trump-gaza-arab-americans/

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.

I will always doubt elections so long as I cannot verify my vote was actually counted in the final tally.

I always think of Florida in 2000. The hanging chads represented votes denied.

The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?

Give them something to vote for. You can write articles of many paragraphs to analyze the course of the election, but in the end it boils down to this: The DNC pissed off too many of their voters and offered nothing in return.

I yelled, but voted Kamala, and encouraged others to do the same. I always wanted to try and push the democrats to not be Republican lite and actually taking a meaningful, impactful stand on fucking anything besides being very passionate about not inhabiting Trump's body. I wanted to see the democrats say "you know what? Genocide is wrong, whether it's our allies doing it or not, and this is genocide" instead of "well, we're going to keep handing them bombs, but we promise to wag our fingers at them while we do it". I don't want to hear your goddamn excuses, there's always some fucking excuse why the democrats just had to spill all their spaghetti. I just wanted to do what I could to push them to show some intestinal fortitude and do the right thing, and I honestly believed (and still do believe) that that would have motivated more voters to turn out than purely relying on "less bad than him".

No, I don't regret trying to make the world I want to see; one without genocide. I do resent the democrats for insisting on doing the wrong thing, getting mad at people like me for having the absolute audacity to call them out on it, and still not having the fucking self awareness to be ashamed of doing the wrong thing.