Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zawaideh 594 days ago
It's not like people warned that supporting a genocide would cost Harris the presidency...
6 comments

When all is said and done I bet Gaza had very little effect on overall D turnout. If it did, those that either sat out or voted R specifically because of Gaza did so to spite their face. An R administration will turn their backs on a lot of geopolitical happenings and let those involved run wild, of which the Palestinians will have little to no voice at all.

Also people vastly underestimate the political calculus in full throated support of Palestinians and by association, Hamas. There is a whole other side of this conflict and that is with Jews who also care about the resolution, but also care about Israel and the fact they've had rockets constantly fired into their territory. They also vote overwhelmingly D. You alienate one group for another and you've made no ground in terms of voter share.

Exit polls, especially in Michigan, seem to disagree with this.
Wayne County was never going to be the lynch pin of the election and even so, exit polling is notoriously fickle. If we're taking exit polling at face value, across the country the economy was #1 followed by preserving democracy and immigration. Geopolitics is probably at the bottom of the top 10 nationally.
Dearborn alone voted 50% for Trump, 22% for Jill and 28% for Harris. Thats 50-100k votes right there. A clear message and an axe to the foot of Palestine.
Looking at the Dearborn results[1], it looks like Jill pulled 10k votes at 20%. That's not winning MI.

[1] https://dearborn.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/UNOFFICIAL%...

No, but you have to consider that the voted-for-jill-stein signal is considerably dampened from the didn't-vote-for-harris-because-of-Palestine signal; most of those people just wouldn't vote at all
Literally noone in America cares about this enough to swing their vote.
It apparently was the thing that lost Harris the endorsement of the LA Times. That's worth a vote or two.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/us/los-angeles-times-endo...

What percentage of LA Times readers live in a swing state? Probably not many.
Personally I know plenty of people who didn’t vote because of the genocide. Mostly Palestinian americans, arab americans, those on the far left.
the huge protests and the whole big fuss about Michigan disagrees with that statement...

Maybe you do not care.. and I guess you wouldn't have cared about the Holocaust either.

There is probably a large non-vocal group of Democrats outside deep blue areas that doesn't agree, which is why they went that direction
While I agree that genocide is bad, all the numbers point to this not even having had been a factor.
> It's not like people warned that supporting a genocide would cost Harris the presidency...

That's fair. She lost a good number of votes, but 10M+ popular votes? Would that account for it?

Yes, and now those people are stuck with Trump who is far worse on that score.
The oft-repeated question "What could be worse than a genocide?" was ill-thought-out, first-order thinking, IMO. Regardless, we are going to find out the higher order results soon.
Yeah. They have no idea Trump is the biggest pro-Israel anti-Muslim fan out there. He'll literally give Israel anything they want, and those people will gasp and act surprised.
We run our nation on oil. Our nation is built on good a relationship with Israel. Nothing about that will change until our priorities as a country change, dem or repb.
the devil vs the devil wrapped in a rainbow flag is still the devil...
The devil doesn't exist, and real life is complicated. Have fun telling the living Palestinians "whelp, a lot of you already died, so we're gonna let the rest of you die/be deported to a country you've never been to."