It seems like having policies that make people want to vote for Democrats would deliver more immediate and lasting results than allowing American conditions to continue deteriorating and hoping our opponents receive the blame.

Oof, I just watched it, and I can immediately see why it was effective. Yeah, “Willie Horton,” is a good comparison.

What do you mean? I’m brainstorming for the next election!

Hey, it’s never too early to start alienating voters for 2028!

Hmm, I like the energy here, but it might be a little aggressive, even for the Democrats. Remember, the tone you want to hit with Muslim voter outreach is, “Condescending paternalism as you explain what’s best for them,” not, “death wishes mixed with xenophobic dog whistles about their welfare babies.”

YUP. She ran a campaign that was focused on middle-class ideas, but very low on working-class ideas. If you’re struggling to buy groceries, starting a small business is as unattainable as purchasing a yacht, no matter what kind of tax credit you’re offered. I didn’t see the ad you’re talking about, but I got that exact feeling when I heard she was campaigning with Liz Cheney.

Woah, infantilizing the population of a majority Muslim town for having their, “feefees,” hurt, even though they’re the ones most likely to personally know someone who is a victim of the violence in Gaza? That’s the boldest outreach strategy yet!

That’s a good point! Don’t ask if people voted for Harris. Assume they didn’t! It’s important to attack anyone who might even just empathize with these voters, otherwise that empathy might lead then to question the DNC’s decisions!

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right, and I think that’s why he’s been so effective at winning over people who have gone to Trump. We can argue over whether or not the political class would ever let him have been the nominee, much less allowed hid agenda to pass, but I think his policies are very clear to everyone: higher minimum wages, higher taxes on billionaires, Medicare for everybody. People find that much easier to understand how that will improve their life tomorrow instead of a small business tax credit program.

Ooh, I like this one! Using cynicism to mask a, “lesser of two evils,” argument, while still ignoring how emotionally devastating it would be to vote for someone who is materially supporting the slaughter of your people? This one could be the 2028 platform!

Focusing only on the outcomes of the actions, while not examining the circumstances that led to the actions? Yes! That will make sure this never happens again!

Yeah, that’s certainly how I feel.

Yes, that’s good! Let’s pretend it’s not our problem that they didn’t vote for the Democrats, even though we clearly cared about the outcome of the election! And if we blame them for the alienation they feel, we never have to examine what the party could have done differently! It’s brilliant!

Yeah, boil it down to trite moral lesson! That’s perfect!

Lots of great voter outreach in the comments here! Keep telling them they deserve to see the genocide of their people! If you alienate them enough, they’ll definitely vote for you next time!

Edit: I wanted to thank everyone for all the great ideas for Muslim outreach in future elections! I can tell by the downvotes that not all of you liked what I had to say, but if I learned one thing from the Harris campaign, it’s that you can’t care what a community thinks of you, no matter how many votes it costs you!

The only reflection I am able to accomplish is to look at the GOP and say “Worse, tho”.

OK, but so far, that hasn’t been a very effective electoral strategy. I think we should try something else.

Well, I would disagree with a lot of that. The average voter may not understand policy nuance, but it’s not just vibes based. Trump made a case for being anti-war. He won the first Republican primary in no small part by being the only person on stage to say that the Iraq War was a mistake. He promised to bring the troops home from Afghanistan and then set a withdrawal date (and then changed it several times, and eventually set it to after his term ended so that Biden would get all the bad optics). I think Trump is a manipulative liar, but his supporters have concrete examples of things he’s said and done that make them think he’s anti-war.

The economy was the number one issue for voters, and I don’t think voters’ reaction was vibes based either. Democrats almost always improve working class conditions more than the Republicans, but look at what happened during the Biden administration; inflation went way up, the interest rates went way up, and what the best jobs market for workers in the last 40 years got nuked. People might not understand why that happened, but they know what happened.

From where I’m sitting, the solution is to go so big that voters can’t misinterprete where you stand. Biden and Harris could have gone after the price gouging that was responsible for so much of the inflation during their administration, but instead, it was a footnote on the campaign. They could have come up with some kind of endgame for Ukraine other than, “send them as many weapons as they need indefinitely.” They should have taken a more confrontational stance with Netanyahu, since he was actively sabotaging the peace process while holding out for a Trump administration.

But again, let’s just say I’m entirely wrong: voters are idiots, they understand nothing, and their decisions are based entirely on vibes, not reality. The question remains the same; what do we do? Because right now, the strategy seems to be offering them incremental, technocratic solutions, then insulting them when they don’t understand how they’re better than Republican lies. And it doesn’t seem to be working.

Saying they’re the party of complacency isn’t really accurate. Obama may not have started any new wars (although there’s an argument to be made that his operations in Somalia represented a new, unsanctioned war front), but he didn’t get us out of Afghanistan, kept joint military operations going in Iraq, and created a massive, unaccountable robot assassination program that killed thousands of people, including U.S. citizens. That’s wasn’t an act of complacency, it was expansion.

To me, the difference in Democrats’ and Republicans’ positions on military use can be best summerize by how Obama and Trump reported drone deaths. Obama reclassified every adult male in a target zone as an enemy combatant so that he could artificially lower the number of civilian casualties. Trump just stopped reporting the numbers. One is obviously better than the other, but I wouldn’t call either anti-war.

But let’s say you’re right; the Democrats are mostly anti-war, but they’re too complacent with the status quo, and Trump voters are all idiots who can’t tell the difference. What are we gonna do about it? 51% of the electorate went to Trump. Are the Democrats going to stand up to the military industrial complex to make their anti-war stance so clear even an idiot could see it? Or are they just gonna lose forever?

I mean, yeah, this guy is wrong for thinking Trump will keep us out of wars, and the idea that you would vote for someone you think it like Hitler to stop new wars is both contradictory and morally reprehensible. But I’ve heard this take before (well, except the Hitler part, that’s bat-shit insane) and it might be worth reflecting why a lot of the electorate no longer sees the Democratic party as the anti-war party. That’s a big shift that’s occurred in my lifetime, and it’s worth examining.

It may have been a factor in Michigan. Their are about 300 Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan, an estimated 200K of which are registered to vote, and Uncommitted vote had about 100K votes in the primary, which is less than Trump’s margin of victory. There’s going to be a lot of nuance examining how the anti-Genocide voters might have affected the electoral map, and I’m not sure we’ll ever get a straight answer.

It doesn’t matter to people who share these memes, though. They don’t like looking at the numbers. In their head, they have an image of a young, entitled white kid with a Genocide Joe sign who just wouldn’t listen to reason. An analysis would probably show that person is more likely to be Arab or Muslim with close ties to the Palestinian community, and that knowledge would make them uncomfortable.