From 2020 to 2024, Democrats saw a staggering dropoff in support at the presidential level, with some 19 million people who voted for Joe Biden staying home (or not mailing in their ballots) in 2024. Now, a new survey conducted by YouGov suggests Biden’s support for Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza played a surprisingly large role in the choice of those previous Biden supporters not to vote. (Read the full poll here.)
The top reason those non-voters cited, above the economy at 24 percent and immigration at 11 percent, was Gaza: a full 29 percent cited the ongoing onslaught as the top reason they didn’t cast a vote in 2024.
Looking narrowly at states that swung from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, the number is smaller. But in those states, 20 percent still cited Gaza as the reason they didn’t vote again. The poll was paid for by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, which has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
The survey showed that the issue of Gaza was most salient among white voters, 34 percent of whom said it was the top reason they didn’t vote for Harris, and Hispanic voters (27 percent), while less so with black voters (just 9 percent).
Doubt she’d have won the EC, regardless. People are pissed about inflation and the wealth gap, so they decided to shoot themselves in the dick. Cool, cool.
the polls shows that many more were pissed off about gaza than anything else, including inflation or the wealth gap.
Which is dumb because trump’s kids have talked about building condos in gaza after it’s “empty”
Here’s a link to the actual poll, in battleground states it was 33-20 Economy-Gaza. The Economy was the bigger issue. Would Gaza have been enough to put her over the line? We can’t know without a different poll asking people who did vote if that would have made them stay home. Basically, you can’t get that 20 percent without an unknown percent considering a tough on Israel Stance a deal breaker.
I’m not sure that it couldn’t have made a difference. If every Biden voter from 2020 turned out for Harris, it could have swung some states. Enough states? Idk. But yeah, I have to imagine that Gaza was a major contributor to losing most of those votes.
As for everyone else, inflation was a major factor in this election. The current administration has (unfairly) taken the blame for all of it. The average person (even active voters) just doesn’t care to understand how the economy works. They must think the President has a lever in the oval office that controls gas and egg prices and refuses to lower it. They also think the national economy exists in a vacuum independent of the rest of the world instead of being influenced by a global economy beyond the control of any single office or nation. They blame their leadership for a problem that literally the whole world is currently facing. It’s not just a US problem either, as evidenced by election upsets for incumbent administrations across the world. People feel like their leaders have failed and have punished them for it.
There needed to be polling on this? Was frankly obvious from even before she entered the race. The American left has loudly and unanimously been speaking out against the genocide. Instead, she took them for granted and ran to the right talking about the border.
I wish she had won, or more accurately, I wish Trump hadn’t. But her loss was foreseeable and preventable.
This campaign was very obviously NOT courting the left.
I imagine the phrase “who else are they gonna vote for” was said in a lot of their meetings.
It is as foretold by Richard Pryor.
Well yeah, they clearly assumed enough people were smart enough to understand the stakes and tried to siphon enough from trump to widen the gap.
Clearly they were wrong, there’s still too many people who simply are too dumb.
Never assume people are smart.
Consider how dumb the average person is. Half of them are dumber than that.
the democrats are very publicly insisting that they lost because they either didn’t appeal to working class or they went too woke; that means they’re willfully ignoring this main reason so it needs to be said outloud and just as publicly as possible so that they can’t just keep burying it.
Even when there is polling people tend to ignore it so, yeah. Good on these guys for doing the measurements that prove what we can already guess.
It’s frustrating because yes, online, this is true.
But you take my liberal parents whose gospel is MSNBC, and they cringe when I bring up that it is a genocide.
The way these old fucks collect voting demographics reflects the people who vote – old people.
I guess I’m saying is I know why she didn’t. Because dumb fuck boomers running her campaign told her it was their best bet because historically young people don’t vote and old people do.
I’m jaded. I might officially be jaded.
I was fretting that Israel would cause a second orange admin at the end of 2023. This is not at all surprising.
i got a lot a vitriol for pointing this out during the election and i’m wondering how those people justified ignoring/attacking it.
this isn’t an indictment on you or anyone, i genuinely want to know the thought process regarding this topic because it was clear as day to people like me, but somehow not so much to a huge majority of democrats; yours is the first i’ve seen where it’s at least acknowledged.
was it because of trump or the culture wars?
I feel like it’s just that the fact that the democrats were sabotaging their own chances of winning to support a genocide does not align with some peoples view that the democrats are the ‘good guys’.
i experienced the democrats not be the “good guys” because of things they did that impacted my life HEAVILY. (ie anit-gay marriage law; anti-gay military service; anti-gay federal service; student loans; green technology tariffs; immigration; etc.)
is that what it takes to get people to see that they’re only a lighter shade dark; having to experience the pain of thier policies for yourself?
there’s a meme of nancy reagan out there saying that she didn’t care about things until it happened to her; typifying republican ethos; and i don’t want to believe that the same thing applies to democrats.
Honestly I don’t know if it’s ignorance or cognitive dissonance or something else. When talking to USamericans it really feels like they’re indoctrinated into thinking the 2party system is the only way, even though there are many examples of other countries with similar systems where 3rd parties won elections. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. But if you can only think in that scope then I think it’s easier to lose sight of the abhorrent nature of the ‘lesser evil’.
There are many people who are hurt by democrat policies who still go down that path of claiming they’re ‘good’, but it’s harder to do because those people won’t forget the bad stuff as easily.
It’s also really difficult to convince USamericans to get to the streets and do direct action. That’s something I find hard to grasp as well. If you have to choose between two evils and protesting is not forbidden, then the logical option is to shut the country down and not vote for either evil. My only conclusion is that most people here really didn’t care about Palestine as much as they claimed to, because otherwise how can you just continue supporting the person that is the number 1 supporter and facilitator of this genocide? That’s inconceivable. My country isn’t even sending weapons directly but its open support for the genocide still disgusts me and it forces me to put my life on hold while I do everything I can to stop it.
Sorry this became a much longer rant than I intended.
i’m inclined to agree; but it think it behooves any dissenter to learn why the majority does the bad things that they do.
It’s one thing to hate the entire gaza situation.
It’s another to make it the single issue when voting.It’s one thing to hate the entire gaza situation.
It’s another to make it the single issue when voting.
but it turns out it was THE biggest issue. will a majority of americans continue to decry them as malcontents or foolish to our peril as we continue to slide further into fascism; or do we do recognize it for the very real moral & ethical dilema that it is and give it the weight it truly deserves?
False dichotomy. Sliding further into fascism was something we could have avoided while also recognizing the administration’s failure to address the genocide for the very real moral & ethical dilema that it is and give that issue the weight it truly deserves.
that didn’t happen; they wouldn’t even let a palestinian speak at the convention and told the protestors to shut up; they did worse than not recognize the failure to address the genocide, they flat out ignored it.
I’m not claiming otherwise, so I’m not sure what your point is
my ultimate goal is to understand how something so clear is not to other people.
my point here, with you is that democrats are ignoring democrat voter’s concerns and it’s causing this country to become more screwed up than it already is.
A percentage of a percentage does not make it THE reason. It may your reason.
Single issue voters are a poison in a democracy.
the poll shows that it was the largest of the issues for voters, even larger than the economy; what else could it possibly mean?
A percentage of a percentage does not make it THE reason. It may be your reason.
Single issue voters are a poison in a democracy.
did you copy and paste your response by accident?
or are you just going to cover your eyes & ears to reality and ignore the damage that doing so is causing to this country?
framing it as a single issue voter signfies to people that you don’t care about genocide as much the other issues and that’s what caused democrats to checkout in this election; it’ll happen again if democrats don’t address reality.
The exist though, so you can gnash your teeth and blame it all on those damn irrational voters or accept reality and try to capture them.
Never said they don’t exist.
To be clear, Trump’s stance on Gaza is just the same, if not worse than hers. Everyone who sat out on principle did zero thinking about this and shot themselves in the foot and gave the rest of the Palestinians a death sentence.
In short, he said he’d “finish the problem,” crush pro-palestine demonstrations, and that once it’s rebuilt, Gaza “could be better than Monaco.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/27/trump-israel-gaza-policy-donors/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-israel-gaza-finish-problem-rcna141905
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/08/trump-gaza-israel-monaco-rebuild
Edit: All these links are from before the election. There’s been even more he’s said since then.
To be fair I found this.
See this, for example:
In what some Israeli media described as a “tense meeting”, Witkoff delivered his message. The president-elect was emphatic that he wanted a ceasefire-for-hostages deal. Trump wanted the war in Gaza finished. He had other fish to fry.
It seems Trump simply doesn’t care about Gaza and wanted the whole thing done before he had to deal with it.
Yeah. To my knowledge this is basically the same shit deal that Hamas refused a few months (?) back. It doesn’t do anything other than give israel time to stockpile more weapons and wait until people go back to not giving a shit what happens in the Middle East.
Which… is terrifying for Ukraine since we know the plan there is “Zeneskyy, you can either take this shit deal or we’ll make sure papa putin wipes you off the face of the Earth. Also, we will probably do that in 3 or 4 years anyway”.
And people will eat it up as justification for why they helped kill democracy…
To my knowledge this is basically the same shit deal that Hamas refused a few months (?) back.
Pretty sure Israel refused/sabotaged that one. Israeli offeres notably don’t include a full withdrawal from the Gaza strip.
Keep not getting how politics works, I guess.
Yeah, you have to cater to the most stupid, least informed people. It’s sad.
She did pay the price, she accepted millions in
bribeslobbyist donations from Zionist groups like J-Street.Americans should be furious at Harris and Biden for selling out the country and letting Trump win.
This looks like an internet survey, so I’d take the findings with a huge grain of salt. Having said that, I expected the D loss due to supporting Israel’s genocide since well before the election; especially after their support for crushing student protests.
Liberals can whinge all they want (they still are) about the lesser of two evils, but at the end of the day progressives are exhausted of the corporate plutocracy and there will always come a time when people switch from biting the pillow to tearing the whole fucking system down. That is what progressives in America signaled with not voting… to let Trump destroy the system. If you wanna make an omelette you gotta break some
legseggs.Also, Trump won because his voters want change; they may be too stupid to know they’re the problem or to vote in their best interests, but they want to destroy the system as much as progressives. Only the centrist minority want to maintain the corporate plutocracy “status quo”.
Note: I am not American, and would’ve voted against Cheeto if I were, so save your outrage for someone who gives a shit. I’m just a messenger.
“What would you do different from Biden?” Her: “Uhh nothing hehehe” loses.
Nobody wanted Trump back in power than Dems and the people helping make bad choices. She started off decently with good momentum given the short amount of time.
19 million? Where are they getting those numbers?
I read the poll when I read the article, it never shows where the get the 19 million number. Even when I ctrl+f and search for million, it only talks about the rights of millions of Palestinians. Never talks about where they got the 19 million.
I think that is the discrepancy between the total amount of Biden voters in 2020 and Kamala voters in 2020. I have not checked the exact numbers but I recall her voter turnout being significantly lower.
Harris got 75 million, Biden got 81million. That’s a 6 million difference and there were people who switched to Trump so not all of those 6 million sat out. Them saying 19 million shows they are not the best site to represent this data. I’m not saying I disagree with the data, just that saying 19 million sat out is a terribly way to start.
I’d also be really interested to see a study that both does something like this one, asking non Harris voters what would have convinced them to vote for her, but also if Harris coming out in support of ending support for Israel as long as the genocide continues would have made any of her voters not vote for her. Just to understand what she might have been gaining and losing by changing her position.
From the election Wikis:
2020 - Biden 81,283,501 Trump 74,223,975
Total - 155,507,4762024 - Trump 77,303,573 Harris 75,019,257
Total - 152,322,830The numbers for 2020 were artifically inflated due to increased vote by mail usage due to the pandemic.
From that inflated number, the overall count was down 3 million, but Harris only dropped 6 million from Biden’s numbers, not 18.
474 people polled.
Ignore this clickbait crap people. I mean, c’mon.
Kamala paid the price on having no concrete policy and simply just not identifying/acknowledging every day folks’ financial struggles.
I voted for her, but I get why she lost.
Polls are meaningless. Kamala lost because apathy, racism, and misogyny among other things.
Problem, the number they quote of 19 million people who voted for Biden staying home is a bullshit number:
2012 - Obama 65,915,795 Romney 60,933,504
Total - 126,849,2992016 - Trump 62,984,828 Clinton 65,853,514
Total - 128,838,3422020 - Biden 81,283,501 Trump 74,223,975
Total - 155,507,4762024 - Trump 77,303,573 Harris 75,019,257
Total - 152,322,830The numbers for 2020 were artifically inflated due to increased vote by mail usage due to the pandemic.
From that inflated number, the overall count was down 3 million, but Harris only dropped 6 million from Biden’s numbers, not 18.
They needed an entirely different pole for this one. Lol
