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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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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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While I can understand your perspective, it's one of those unfortunate cases where ideology clashes with reality.
Yes, Trump never planned on following through on actually helping people. He lied, and people bought it. And yet it's no ones fault Harris's that she decided to tell people "things won't change if you vote for me".
A nation of voters isn't made up of individuals who you can convince, it's a crowd of people following certain dynamics, just like any other large grouping of things. You can either accept that and work with this fact to steer the crowd, or you can ignore this fact and lose because you're trying to go against the flow. And in the end, the only people who had any meaningful control was Harris' campaign.
Imagine you're a shepherd, and your flock is running towards the edge of a cliff. Sure, you can plant your feet and say "they shouldn't run off the cliff", but the only end result will be losing all your sheep.
I respect your argument, but I still refute it.
There was a saying someone shared recently: Give them the third best option. Because the second best comes too late and the best never comes at all. Essentially, do not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
I agree that Kamala should have developed more of a campaign around frustrated white young men, and working class America. That was a mistake, but I also think it was an easy mistake to make when scrambling to take over from Biden’s campaign.
If we go 4 years from now, 8 years, 30 years, I think every candidate we see will be imperfect and will make mistakes. The only time we’ll ever see a perfect candidate is when they lie about their accomplishments and overstate themselves. Americans need to be able to spot those flaws themselves, and that will not change in any election cycle. I should not get into the White House by promising every working American a trillion dollars.
I'm not asking for a perfect candidate, not sure where you got that from.
My whole point is that Harris' positions got her some number of voters. We now know that this number was too small, and we also now know that they knew this fact.
Harris could have changed her positions to get more voters, but she didn't. How is this not completely her fault?
Again, I'm not asking her to be some perfect politician. I'm asking her to look at the polling results (which we know she had) and to adapt her campaign based on those, which she didn't do.
I have never respected this circular logic. You could use this argument to make any position a "bad one" as long as biases, foolishness or gullibility on the part of the listener override any convincing points. At some point, it is possible for recipients of a message to be bad listeners, and for voters to be irresponsible in their naivety towards a candidate.
Okay, but we're not talking about any random position, we're talking about "nothing will change with me" being a terrible position if you want to get elected by people who aren't doing so well.
At some point, the senders of the messages have to accept blame. Otherwise things will never get better, as the least shitty option will get ever shittier.
It is not completely her fault because voters have agency and accountability.
The larger the group, the more predictable those behaviors are. It's everybody's fault, but she's a single person who could've changed the outcome unilaterally.
I wish I didn't just become more misanthropic knowing people just kinda turn their brains off in crowds. Obviously, that is the situation, and the Dems should've worked with it. But I don't think it's wrong to be frustrated by that either
Yet each individual voter had almost no impact, while she had an incredibly large one.