'Very troubling': Leader of 'Abandon Harris' movement now anxious about Trump appointees
'Very troubling': Leader of 'Abandon Harris' movement now anxious about Trump appointees
In interviews with NBC News, prominent members of the "Abandon Harris" maintained they made the right decision to either not vote for Vice President Kamala Harris or cast their ballot for Donald Trump despite previously being in the Democrats' camp.As NBC's Jillian Frankel reported, members of the m...
Summary
Key leaders of the “Abandon Harris” movement, which encouraged voters to oppose Kamala Harris due to U.S. support for Israel during the Gaza war, are now expressing unease about Trump’s incoming administration.
Many in the movement, including prominent Muslim leaders, voted for Trump hoping he would bring peace to the Middle East.
However, concerns are growing over his Cabinet picks, such as Mike Huckabee and Tulsi Gabbard, which some see as troubling for Muslim communities.
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It's weird people are blaming the ones who didn't vote...
Obviously, if they voted trump, blame them away.
But it's like people don't realize how big of an ask it was to have people to vote for a genocide, especially when it's against the country someone came from and their family is still there.
If Kamala would have won, trying to criticize her would have worked as well as criticizing Biden on Israel the last four years. Any criticism would be met with "Trump would be worse".
With trump in charge, people will (rightfully) call out American support of a genocide as wrong. So while trump will undoubtedly make shit worse. Him being president means the Dem party will criticize him, and be more left in 2028.
If Kamala had won, she and the party would have moved more to the right in 2028. Just look at what happened after 4 years as VP. The few parts of her 2020 platform people liked, she moved to the right on.
The genocide of Palestinians didn't start two years ago, it's been going on for 70 years. It makes sense they're thinking long term rather than only focuses on the "now" and voting for a lesser evil that maintains the status quo that is a genocide.
If you want someone to blame, it seems like the blame should be on the "left" candidate that ignored everyone actually on the left and became bff's with Liz Cheney. Not the people that understand when a Republican wins, we get a primary which even when the party pick wins, the primary pulls them left. Even if it's just lies to win the primary, as long as they keep the lies up, it helps in the general because voters want Dems to move left.
Without a primary, the chosen candidate takes the left for granted and moved right. In this case if Kamala won, we wouldn't have another option in 2028 either, it would be 2032 before the next real primary.
Like...
I just don't see how someone could blame anyone except the candidate, her campaign team, and the DNC.
They're the ones that prevented a real primary, and that made the campaign platform that alienated lifelong Dem voters in hopes of gaining republican voters who wouldn't be caught dead voting for a Dem.
It obviously failed, and the media is desperate to blame anything other than the stuff their billionaire owners bribed the Dems to support.
They'll never ever say the problem was a Dem is too "fiscally conservative" because they're the ones paying neoli eral candidates to pretend that's a good move for the average American
Fun fact: if you're not actively against neofascists, you are with them, and everything you say to justify sitting at their table should and will be considered insincere vaporing. It really blows that other people are going to suffer when you get what's coming to you. I feel bad for them. I better not hear so much as a sigh out of you, since you're getting what you wanted, what you knew would happen, and what you chose.
Hear Hear! Thank you for taking the time to voice the opinion of many. We should never relent and keep shining a light on these idiots and their moronic reasoning. They chose to not vote, vote jill stein or vote trump (all the same thing) and then want to reason about it? Justify it? They chose, they chose clearly and they knew what they did. Never let these fascist wannabees off the hook.
We should never relent and keep shining a light on these idiots and their moronic reasoning.
They are a significant portion of the dem vote. So if you follow your plan you never win an election again.
Only uniting behind a candidate who is NOT a right wing fellating, corporatist sellout, genocidal peice of shit do the dems have any chance at all of any future. It might even be too late already though.
This is true now and was true before this last election too. Now you have proof staring you in the face.
If you are so concerned with 3rd party voters, you should be working tirelessly to replace First past the post voting in your state.
That way, people could vote how they want and still have their vote count against those they don't want in office.
Or maybe you just enjoy telling others how to vote. So which is it, are you working to replace FPTP voting or are you against democracy?
I do not seek or want to tell others how to vote. I just look at the results and the people abstaining or voting trump or voting 3rd party should accept what they did: elect donald trump.
Just admit it, these people (possibly you as well?) fucked america over and the consequences will be dire. But accepting responsibility and acknowledging these people know what they did seems out of the question for some reason. It seems they rather would argue someone else did this, just as you seem to do. It's always someone else who 'blocks' you in doing the right thing. Now there are scores of people left in uncertainty and quite possibly face a horrendous time while the fascist is in office.
My message to people who made this choice: don't mope and moan, accept what you did and live with the outcome of your choices and what they will do to part of society who will not be able to defend themselves.
Imagine that, helping elect that fascist and then complain you had no other choice so hey, fuck all the vulnerable people who will suffer because of it, not my problem.
And now wanting to hide under the umbrella of righteousness because 'you had to make a stand', also hating that people point out that what you did was morally questionable. It has to mess with your head I imagine and what better defense is there then attack and blame others?
All of this turns to dust when you understand that the democrats and republicans are two arms of the same neofascist party.
Oh please. That will be enough with the histrionics, go play outside.
So the neofascists only exist on the other team, then, and anyone who disagrees is being hysterical?
And everyone who doesn't actively oppose the neofascists is part of it. Except if they're on your team and actively adopt the neofascists's narratives, among other things that turn away voters, demonstrating that allowing the neofascists's own narrative to exist uncontested at the national level is more important to them than winning on the actual alternatives that exist to the neofascists's narrative.
Then you should ignore them turning you away as a voter and abandoning the supposed principles that make them not neofascist and vote for them anyways, because the other guy did it worse and "you can't vote for anyone not evil so it isn't on the ballot and don't you dare mention that third parties exist on the ballot because then the evil party will win"
Hm. Understood.
It must be tough to look in the mirror for ya. We won't feel sorry holding it up in front of you no matter what insults you throw my blue conservative "ally".
Making shit up with conviction doesn't make it true, which I know is probably a hard sell considering it's the basis of your performative imitation of sincere belief. You can stop following me around and replying to everything I say now. I'll dismiss you if that helps.
Did we all just collectively forget that the DNC was panicking about rushing the vote for Kamala as fast as possible to avoid lawsuits from Republican states that could have kept her off the ballot?? If that happened then Trump would just have won by default.
We're in this fantasy world that we could have had a primary. It's stubborn old fucking Bidens fault that we were in this position. There was no time to have a primary even if I really really really wish there was. Biden decided that even though he doesn't know where he is 90% of the time he was The Best Person™ to run against Trump because pretty much every human being that obtains some sort of power for any meaningful amount of time becomes a narcissistic asshole.
This is 100% on the old fuck Biden for not accepting that death comes for us all and decline is a real thing. He just plugged his ears and went "lalalalalalala I can't hear you!" until someone told him he just finished a debate and it went horribly.
Biden was incapable of leading from the moment he was elected and the party could have forced him out much sooner if they were committed to having competent leadership through the next election cycle.
Edit: also, if they had forced him out, perhaps by invoking the 25th amendment during his term, I have zero doubt they would have proceeded with Kamala as if she was the incumbent and foregone a primary anyways.
They will pull myriad post-hoc excuses out of their ass, as they did to get Biden elected in the first place and is their specialty as a party, but those are the facts. The rest is just noise.
Did we all just collectively forget that the DNC was panicking about rushing the vote for Kamala as fast as possible to avoid lawsuits from Republican states that could have kept her off the ballot?? If that happened then Trump would just have won by default.
What?
As far as I know all those states would have just listed "Democratic Party"...
Like, that's how the electoral college works. The party with the most votes gets to appoint electors and then they cast the vote for a person.
The name being on the ballot or just the party doesn't matter. The DNC lied that it would matter to stop people from fighting Kamala's anointment.
Same as they lied about "keys to the war cheat" that was the victory fund that the candidate and the DNC have control over, both have unrestricted access to the funds and there's basically no accountability with it.
We’re in this fantasy world that we could have had a primary.
I stopped reading here.
We can't really continue until you recognize the above. Then we can build off that if you still have questions.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/johnson-replacing-biden-ticket-wrong-unlawful/story?id=112129063
That's just a few articles after a very brief search. What do you think Republicans were freaking out about when Colorado tried to do the same thing to Trump because he really legally shouldn't have been allowed to be on the ballot because of his involvement with jan 6th?
I get how the electoral college works, but the states decide how their elections are run and if the state chose to remove her then it's not clear if there would have been a Democrat on their ballot at all. It's not a federal thing. it's 100x harder to get people to know to write in Kamala and to actually do it, than to just have an easy circle there for them to fill with her name in it so whether the legal challenges would have been successful or not, it's not the best gamble to try to push it when we know how stacked against "us" the courts are.
None of this is to really defend the DNC, I fucking hate them and hope the party burns so we can rebuild something where the people actually give a shit about us. I just don't think in the timeframe we had there was any reality where we could have taken the time for a primary nor did there seem to be any contenders that wanted to cause a disruption that close to the election.
That’s just a few articles after a very brief search
Ok...
But that's Republicans claiming shit, I don't know why you'd listen to them...
Do you listen to them often, or only when it supports your position?
Here's a better source than Mike Johnson:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jul/22/is-replacing-biden-on-the-ticket-unlawful-as-speak/
It explains why every excuse about keeping the Dem candidate off the general ballot was bullshit.
Biden started this election -400 electoral votes in his own polling. Kamala Harris was the least popular, most divisive candidate in the primary (even as gamed as the 2020 primary was) and left at the bottom of the race.
You are right. You even see the echo chamber narrative that Biden could have still beaten Trump on bluesky being the preferred narrative.
DNC has almost fully pulled a "It's the children who are wrong" and I'm not convinced they will ever have a fair, open primary again. This was a historic self-own that saw Trump picking up support in nearly all categories.
DNC has been playing Russian roulette with their primaries and voting base for years, honestly the gun has fired a couple times...
2/2/25 they vote for chair...
There's a very good chance we get a competent chair who cares about winning. Ben Winkler is my favorite but expect for that crazy lady (Marianne Wilkinson?) who has no chance, any of the candidates so far would be a drastic improvement.
What really hurt us was Biden picked the last chair, and like most of his picks it was absolutely horrible.
So until we hear the results of the chair election, I'm trying to be an optimist.
I almost don't have a choice but to be optimistic. There are more prominent people who are to left of the DNC who are going to demand more power. I see that happening now and being rebuffed by the old guard. It's a matter of time and I hope it doesn't break the machine entirely, we need the stability of institutions.
Gonna be honest, i think Biden could have beaten Trump. I don't blame him for stepping down (though if he had done so sooner i think it would have been better) but i think he had at least as much chance as Harris, maybe more. That's purely strategic, though. I think the calls for him to step down were coming from a position of weakness and fear and were interpreted as such by the electorate.
He could have easily won if he did something about Gaza other than "support genocide" but here we are, at the (current) end of a long string of such decisions.
We see with the UHC shooting how much anger there is for the inequities in this country, it would be easy to tap into that.
Anyone Democrat could have won if they did the populist thing and didn't split the difference on Gaza. I think Biden and Harris might have been the only two people who could have lost to him!
Biden wasn't going to run a different campaign to the one that was losing to Trump when he finally stepped out. Nor did Harris. They both ran losing campaigns against a dude who's a fucking felon.
The message last time from leftists in the party were that they held their nose to vote for Biden in 2020, it a referendum AGAINST Trump. Well, the DNC loaded another 2 bullets into the revolver, maybe 3 if you included Liz Cheney at the end there, rolled the wheel, and fired a bullet right into the country again.
Mark my words, instead of moving left to capture the voters again, they'll ratchet right. Fuck the DNC.
Given how Harris ran her campaign, in retrospect, I actually agree that Biden probably would have performed better and I absolutely did not believe that was possible after the first debate.
Harris ran an historically shit campaign that cost bonkers money.
Harris's major flaw was saying she'd just be more Biden, which Biden would definitely do. And for as poor as she did, it was still an improvement on Biden's numbers. They needed someone willing to break from the status quo.
She said she'd be more Biden but she didn't have the track record to back it up. Biden has been underwhelming in a lot of ways but Harris rejected maintaining stronger union ties and failed repeatedly to commit to keeping on Lina Khan - she basically ran on "Who wants four years more of Biden but more neoliberal!"
"Nothing will fundamentally change"
I don't think people are really thinking long term, i don't think there's any strategy like that at play. (This is kind of accelerationist anyway, even if it were.) However, i think people who blame the voters for refusing to vote for an obviously poisonous candidate are completely delusional.
People do not have a duty to vote for the Democratic Party's chosen candidate, no matter who it is. Not moral and not otherwise. The candidate has a duty to appeal to the voters. The party has a duty to put forward candidates that can get elected. If they refuse to do that and the voters refuse to vote for them, that's not on the voters.
(This is kind of accelerationist anyway, even if it were.)
It 100% is, and to be clear I don't think it was the best path, which is why I held my nose like I have for a very long time and voted D.
But it's the path we're on now.
When a Dem wins, they appoint the DNC chair and a symbolic vote confirms it.
When the Dem loses, the chair usually resigns and the DNC has a chance to change direction.
If Kamala had won 2024, the party would stay the same. If she then won 2028 as an incumbent with no primary, shed get to pick chair again. Then in 2032 they would influence the primary to get a similar candidate. It's a feedback loop that only has a chance to break when a Republican takes office.
Literally, the only way the DNC has a chance to change direction is when the Republicans win. You gotta look at the silver lining, DNC leadership change was accelerated. Which hopefully will be a good thing long term because DNC leadership for decades has been absolute dog shit.
Or they double down and we're probably fucked. But don't give up. There's still the potential of a fair primary in 2028 regardless.
Like Heinlein said long ago:
Certainly the game is rigged, but if you never play you'll never win
What did you think would happen when you abstained from voting?
Edit:(i see in another comment that you voted. So my question I guess is to anyone that abstained.)
What did the neolibs think would happen when they ran a campaign designed to appeal to the far right at the expense of the base?
Go ask them.
Some people tried, and were told, "shush, I'm talking". And anyone with my views was locked out of the convention. So they have taken pretty severe actions to not be asked these questions at all.
Ok, but my point by saying go ask them is that I'm not responsible for that narrative. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
fair.
You're unlikely to get an answer.
Most people who abstained are checked out of politics. They're not spending free time on social media talking about politics.
To get them to re-engage is going to take some work.
Which makes it harder to discuss what we need to change to get them back, especially when people reflexively down vote that discussion
This is a volcanic take on Lemmy.
It is barely warm enough to soften butter, wtf do you mean
Already at -10. US Lemmy is very against abstainers.
Edited to add: lmao all I did was point out why it was a hot take and I'm being downvoted also.
You mean people who indirectly support fascism by not voting for the non-fascist party?
It's true tho...
Without a primary the Dems consistently move as far right as they can. Sometimes they overshoot and it lets a Republican in.
But no one wanted Kamala as president in 2020, and she moved further right for 2024 and got even less popular.
The next four years will suck. But at least we might have a say in the 2028 candidate.
Kamala would have been almost a decade of "same as Biden" but she was likely to keep moving to the right.
Like, I voted for Kamala. But I knew it wasn't going to matter because she had zero chance in my state. For it to go blue we need an 08 Obama type.
But I still held my nose.
I just don't understand why people want to blame those who couldn't hold their nose, instead of criticizing the unelected political machine who said Kamala was our only option despite being wildly unpopular.
People in the party and Biden's admin knew how bad he was, and how his age was effecting him. It's not an opinion anymore, even Chris Clizza admitted it after CNN fired him.
But the DNC still tried to shove him down America's throats till the last second, then replaced him with Kamala.
If anyone deserves blame for trump, it's those people. The ones who wasted 1.5 billon dollars on a campaign and couldn't beat the hands down worst president America has ever had.
criticizing the unelected political machine who said Kamala was our only option despite being wildly unpopular.
We have FPTP for Presidential elections. We have two major parties who are in control. We have systems at state level that create and maintain gerrymandering and disfranchising certain demographics of voters. The only result was ever going to be Trump or Harris. It's the system. Everyone knows it's bad, and any changes will take effort and time, probably from the ground up. Some states have made progress but we have a long way to go.
So in the last election, there was only one way to prevent Trump, a known problem for everyone and every issue, from winning. And too many chose other routes for various reasons, and are now surprised that he won. The math and logistics of FPTP are all over the place, this shouldn't be a shock. Don't vote for one, the other will win. Period. The irony is that even though Harris might have just been Biden for another term, we can't be sure of that. Imagine a timeline where Harris barely wins, and changes many of the things being protested for. Those people would look back and think, wow, we almost missed this possibility because everyone was saying she'll be the same.
I mean, maybe and probably not. We won't ever know. We did know what we'd get with Trump though, and thanks to not enough countering his votes, we're getting even more. Yay.
You don't need to convince me...
Like I said:
voted for Kamala. But I knew it wasn’t going to matter because she had zero chance in my state. For it to go blue we need an 08 Obama type.
I don't have the power to decide the general candidate, the DNC calls it before my state has a chance to vote.
You don't need to convince me Kamala would have been better than trump, I agree and trump will directly effect my life more than most Americans.
The important part is Kamala, her campaign, and the DNC couldn't convince enough people of that.
The reason, is because Kamala had unpopular policies and little to no charisma. Yelling at people that they have to vote for the lesser evil isn't a reliable way to win elections, and even when they do, it doesn't help voters as much as they need.
So the answer to both questions is the same:
How do we stop Republicans?
And
How do we help Americans?
We run progressives.
You can stomp your feet and say you don't want to. But if you want to do what's most likely to prevent a Republican president, do everything you can to help a progressive win the primary.
Even if it's not what you personally think is best, that's what wins elections.
So if stopping Republicans is all that matter, start voting progressive
The reason, is because Kamala had unpopular policies and little to no charisma.
I think that's giving non-voters too much credit. Time and again they were saying they didn't know what her policies were, not that they were bad policies, despite the fact that she was pretty clear in communicating them.
The charisma thing was different, she HAD charisma, but it was this fake, robotic, insincere charisma (see the cocoanut tree nonsense), and when she was called out on it, she reacted poorly.
Walz had 1,000,000x the genuine, sincere, charisma, but people don't vote for VP.