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‘I hate Democrats, but I love Abdul’: voters who left over Gaza return for progressive push
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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People like that helped get Trump elected. Harris was far from the ideal candidate, but she would have been far and away better than Trump.
Turns out Harris is a bad candidate
And Americans are stupid.
Both these things can be true at the same time.
Harris also received 48% of the popular vote. She didn't win, but that kind of turnout doesn't make a candidate a bad candidate. There just happens to be a lot of Americans that think a felon rapist pedophile with one failed presidency under his belt was a better option.
Yeah, this unfortunately
Here's something I've wondered about for a while now: Why do some voters have to be assiduously courted, and it's a failure of the candidate if she doesn't win them over, while for other voters the blame falls on the voters if they don't fall in line and vote for the candidate?
Because they're children trapped in adult bodies and want what they want, when they want it, or they're going to throw a fit and it's someone else's fault.
It was a prosecutor that ran on inclusion for a party that supports social programs and is better for our economy vs a felon rapist pedophile traitor who only talks about himself running for a party that kills social programs and regularly violates our Constitutional rights and a TON of grown ass adults said "I'm not going to vote or I'm going to vote for a 3rd party candidate with no path to victory unless Kamala speaks to me personally".
Like, how fucking dumb can people be? You'd be lucky if ONE presidential candidate truly spoke to you during your entire fucking life. Grow up. Make smart decisions whether they're exactly to your liking or not.
I've spent over 4 decades in this country and I can tell you that there is a BIG problem with adults not acting like adults. And that's a big reason why we are where we are.
Spicy! I usually don't see people drag centrists like this. I like it!
Because that's literally the job of a politician running for office.
Because of tribalist authoritarianism and gaslighting.
It's much easier to get away with ignoring the wants and needs of your constituency when you convince them that it's about teams, not policies.
This right here.
Mine was a loaded question. After decades of this stuff, it's entirely clear to me that the difference is that Democrats do not have policy to offer many voters, so all that they have to fall back on is team boosterism. If Harris did have something substantive to offer these Michigan voters, she and her supporters would've offered it.
But they didn't, so all that they had left is what we see: Blame and derision.
And it's the job of American voters to make educated decisions even if those decisions aren't exactly to their liking. Adults shouldn't need to have their hands held. Adults should be able to look objectively at two choices and determine which one is best, regardless of what the person selling themselves to you is saying in their ads.
Harris would have been far better than Trump is a bit line saying "Joe, the car thief, is better than Mike, the serial mass murderer"
If Harris had won, the Democratic party would have kept in it's corrupt, corporate minion state.
A silver lining in the Trump disaster is that the Demicrat establishment is being shaken.
EDIT: I was going to correct "Demicrat", but considering that "demi" means half, I'm going to keep it that way.
Joe the car thief is leagues better than Mike the serial mass murderer though
Except not at all.
One was a successful prosecutor that brought justice to a lot of shitty people/organizations and was a candidate for a political party that creates/supports social programs.
The other was a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and probable pedophile that instigated a violent insurrection to overthrow our government, spends every day of his life attempting to weaken our nation by sowing hatred between its citizens, and works for a political party that destroys social programs and sends masked agents into American's neighorhoods to shoot them in the fucking face.
You need to work on your comparisons.
Both were pro-genocide.
You win with the electorate you have, not the one you want.
People are idiots. Expect this.
If it’s this easy to win them back and the Democrats couldn’t even bother, who’s the real idiot? They thought they could discard these votes and found out they couldn’t. Figure out how to continue treating them like people with understandable sorrow about the genocide in Gaza, or keep losing 🤷♂️
True.
But there's more than one perspective. Do you, as a political party or government as a whole, abandon an ally you have all sorts of ties with because a sub-section of your voters don't like that country anymore? I mean the answer is yes if you know you'll lose enough voters to lose elections, but there's no way they could have known that.
The proper method is to start drawing lines with the ally and see if they cross them. Biden essentially did that. Maybe not as aggressive as necessary. He did verbally state he was against what Israel was doing. He did float arms shipment cancellations to Israel. He did try to broker a peace deal. These were reasonable steps. What was unreasonable was a ton of voters expecting a full disconnection from Israel or they would not vote or vote 3rd party, which would only help a much, much worse president from taking control and giving Israel/Netanyahu two big thumbs up to do whatever they wanted.
Given the, you know, genocide, the answer is "yes.*
Yeah, it's not like there was a whole mass movement saying exactly that.
Which they did, every single time. Where are the consequences?
Ronald Reagan got the IDF to stop firing on Beirut after a 20 minute phone call. That's a reasonable step; what Biden did was theater.