• WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works
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    13 hours ago

    Nope. That’s not what happened in 2024. This is victim blaming. Progressives did not cause Harris to lose. Progressives refused to go full Orwell and pretend that Harris was the messiah. They had no problem speaking out about her failures and trying to get her to do better. But in the end, progressives still turned out to vote for her. Harris didn’t even lose because people stayed home. If the voter turnout had been higher Trump would have done even better.

    Biden won in 2020 because of two key reasons. First, he had covid helping him. Second, he adopted a lot of policies popular with the working class that would provide direct support to the embattled working and middle classes. Harris abandoned this path and only offered paltry heavily means-tested wonkish tax credits for a handful of people. She certainly wasn’t running on something like Medicare for All.

    Yes, progressives shat on Harris in a lot online discussions; she was a deeply flawed candidate. A lot of liberals took a more Orwellian bent, wanting to censor any and all criticism of her. They forget that responding to criticism is the fire that forges strong candidates. Instead they shielded her from criticism, and it just made her look weak.

    Harris lost because her policies were so uninspiring that she couldn’t appeal to enough low-engagement voters to get her over the top. The politically active people on the left who spend time talking politics on social media? Yeah, they held their nose and voted for Harris. Her status on Gaza cost her a lot of Muslim votes, but Muslims aren’t hardly a reliably progressive voter base. If it weren’t for the right’s raging Islamophobia, most practicing Muslims would naturally be Republicans. It’s only the right’s historic Islamophobia that gives Democrats any chance with Muslim voters. Naturally, the religious conservatism of most Muslims should fit right in with Republican values. And predictably, as Harris chose to run a campaign leaning in to Islamophobia, Muslim voters found little reason to support her. Resisting Islamophobia is one of the few reasons most Muslims have to support Democrats. If Democrats aren’t going to resist Islamophobia, then Muslims might as well support the party that aligns with more of their beliefs.