• daltotron@lemmy.ml
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    4 hours ago

    He can cease arms shipments to Israel, but not without losing the election by angering the Jewish voters

    This is a good point I shockingly hadn’t thought about until now, but, true, biden could stop sending weapons, and then harris could decide to still stand as though she supports israel in order to minimize any viable hit to her polls, since he’s the one in power but he’s not actually running for re-election. But also, what jewish voters? What, single issue, jewish voters, exist in a valuable swing state, that aren’t already voting for republicans? You could maybe put up nevada or arizona, where they make up 2.6% and 1.7% of the state’s population, but you have to weight that against michigan, where muslim voters make up 2.4% of the population. I think wisconsin also has a larger percentage of muslim voters than jewish voters, as well. I’ve also seen a couple polls that suggest that jews have about as favorable a view of israel as the average american, I’m not even really sure that they’re a specific demographic to point out. Orthodox and conservative jews, maybe. There’s another handful of calculations you can make there, but that also doesn’t really factor in that by far the largest cohort which is going to be voters on supporting israel is probably evangelical christians, which are also obviously going to be a huge piece of the republican base, and that’s not something you’re going to strip away by outflanking them, like democrats are currently also trying to do with the border. The main democratic base, though, is going to be a myriad of different people, since they tend to be more popular overall, more popular in ethnically diverse cities, whatever, and it’s definitely going to be very alienating to the base to decide to keep pumping weapons into israel, take a harder stance on the border, and provide no real tangible economic policy to improve people’s lives.

    Not to mention, none of these electioneering calculations, over less than 3% of the population, in very particular states, really means that it’s a good decision ethically, economically, geopolitically, to not pull back on the reigns of the rabid dog we’ve had plopped down in the middle east. Mostly to protect an insanely stupid global trade port that we’re using to help ship chinese goods to europe, and maybe also using to train a couple cops we can deploy to shoot fare evaders and also like 3 other people. Everyone loves to play at an election journalist and say, ah, well, this just a strategic move that exists for some other theoretical person that exists, it’s not really for me. They never actually defend the policy on it’s own merits. Then, consistently ignore the same thing happening, repetitively, for like 30 years, since that electioneering shit was really coined as a strategic rhetorical move afaik. The country shifting rightward, that’s not just some sort of like, crazy coincidence, and it’s not something that’s due to random chance events that happened to screw the democrats over and force them to consistently slide to the right for the last, well, last 80 years, at this point. It’s because the like 30% of hardline voters are willing to parrot the same swill they’re given, and are totally willing to slide as right as is necessary and follow the dems off a cliff, it’s because the american population at large is captured by a huge corporate propaganda apparatus that the democrats are not willing to do anything about, it’s because the american population is swamped by a nosedive in standards of living and a shrinking middle class and are looking for an easy scapegoat. At any point, dems could’ve pointed out that illegal immigrants are, in total, fucking 3% of the population. They don’t, because they don’t really care, because it’s the institutional security stance that we should be more xenophobic to shore up against climate refugees.

    Me? I’m not a swing state voter, so I’m just gonna vote for whichever third party candidate is a valid write-in and also maybe seems like they’ll get enough to get federal funding, if that exists, and otherwise I’ll just vote for claudia de la cruz.