Category: 2024 American Elections Page 1 of 2

I’ve been saying it mattered a lot for quite some time, but, finally, some numbers:

Foreign policy debates rarely determine U.S. presidential elections, although polling suggests that 2024 might be an exception. Nationwide, nearly 4 in 10 voters (38 percent) say they are less likely to vote for President Biden because of his handling of the war in Gaza, according to a July 2024 Century Foundation/Morning Consult poll of 1,834 registered U.S. voters. Many core constituencies—including independents, swing state likely voters, and Democratic Party activists—are angry at Biden’s unqualified support for the Israeli assault on Gaza.

The issue isn’t that people who hate genocide will vote Trump, he’s pro-genocide as well. Instead it’s that they will stay home or vote third party and that if they do hold their nose and vote Democratic, they’re less likely to donate or, more importantly, to volunteer.

In a close election, and Biden’s best case is a close election, that matters.

To put it simply, Biden decided that mass-murdering Palestinians in service to AIPAC and Zionism was more important than being re-elected, and in affect that all the things he claims to care about which might help Americans are less important than helping Israel commit genocide.

That’s a choice, just like his choice to run again even though he’s clearly in serious decline and obviously can’t act as President for another four years.

Biden has chosen to lose the election, and anyone who blames anyone but Biden for his loss is full of it.

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So, this tweet from Stancil, a particularly deranged Democratic partisan:

Hard to express my contempt for people who engage in the “I’m not voting for president” routine, a rejection of the basic civic reality that sometimes all the options aren’t going to be custom-built for you but democracy doesn’t work if you throw a sulk and refuse to participate

Refusal to choose between two genocidal maniacs is “anti-democratic”, rather than an acknowledgment that the Democratic system in the US is broken if it only offers Cheeto-Hitler and GenocideJoe.

Look, Trump has been very clear that he’d support the genocide too. He says he’ll federalize Red State militias and cops and send them into blue states to hunt down immigrants, presumably door to door, which makes the fugitive slave act that was one of the main causes of the civil war look reasonable and sane.. He’s a fool, deeply stupid, a rapist multiple times over, a man who cheats people who work for him and so on. He’s lower than pond scum. Any decent person wouldn’t spit on him to put out a fire.

Biden is actively assisting Israel in an active genocide. He deliberately caused a famine in Afghanistan after withdrawal, showing his one unique genius: the ability to kill more people without troops than with them.

Both of these men are profoundly evil. They’re also old and incompetent, though if you’re going to have evil as President, I suppose incompetent evil is better.

The American electoral system is broken in multiple ways, but one is that it doesn’t offer up even remotely acceptable Presidential candidates (or much in the way of acceptable candidates for lower offices.) This has been true for a long time, but it is getting worse and worse.

“I won’t vote for either genocidal maniac and refuse the system the legitimacy of my vote” isn’t an insane or stupid thing to do in this situation. If you can’t find anyone actually good on your ballot does voting make sense? There are arguments that it does, but it’s not obviously wrong.

Fundamentally the problem is that there is no significant resevoir of sanity among the American elites, and ballot access is very difficult for anyone else. In a country where most  people think of themselves as consumers rather than producers of politics, surmounting that barrier and offering up candidates that enough Americans will vote for seems essentially impossible.

Anyway, Stancil’s just a deranged democratic partisan “even genocide should not be a bar to electing Democrats.”

Lovely country. And not the only one.

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Back in 2010, looking at Obama’s actions in his first term, I predicted the next president after him would be a “right wing populist.” (Scare quotes in original.)

Biden appears to have given up on the $15 minimum wage. He’s cut the promised $2,000 check to 1,400 and said that he’s OK with means testing it. He opened a new “children’s detention center” (aka: kids in cages.) He doesn’t want to forgive student loans, something he could do entirely on his own authority.

Now Obama did make 8 years, since he was very smooth, but he lost seats, including c.1K state level seats, then the US got Trump in 2016. Electorally, the only wings Obama had after 08, were for himself.

In 2024, Republicans are likely to be able to say, and be telling the truth, that “Trump gave you more money than Biden.” Trump himself may run, and stand a good chance of winning. If it’s Hawley, he’ll have the Trump base and be able to accurately say he fought for $15 and larger Covid relief checks.

But Democrats, again, are refusing to make a positive case for electing them. They refuse to do big, obviously good things for the majority of Americans, so the argument will be “we’re better than /them/.”

Works, till it doesn’t. Running on fear generally loses to running on Hope. Obama ran on Hope in 2008, but Dems since then have run on “we aren’t Republicans.”

People prefer hope to fear when voting.

So my bet is that the next President of the US will be a Republican “right wing populist.”  The only possible antidote would be someone like AOC getting the nod. She has problems, but she can run a campaign of hope. However, it’s clear that the Democrats will do everything up to an including cheating to avoid a progressive as Presidential candidate, and I strongly suspect that Democratic apparatchniks, like their UK Labour compatriots, would actively work against a progressive presidential candidate, preferring a Republican win.

Hope everyone’s looking forward to Trump again, or Trump 2.0.

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