With a policy as popular as abortion, a good radicalization tactic is asking people:

• What would you lie to the cops about?
• What would you get fired for?
• What would you get arrested for?

E.g., “would you lie to the cops to protect someone who had an abortion?”

A small population also makes it easier to successfully repress budding social movements.

If there’s a silver lining, I don’t think this is limited to leftist spaces, or even to online ones.

Think it’s more that there’s too much evidence of killings, it’s gone on too long to deny, there are too many statements from Israelis at all levels to the effect of “yes we want to erase them,” and that there isn’t any plausible excuse anymore.

o7

India sticks out as a country that is not giving significant aid to Ukraine, yet lost votes.

I do think the Ukraine war has had a negative impact on incumbents, it’s just probably a smaller “that’s one more thing that sucks and I’ll blame the incumbent for” than a larger “I’m directly opposed to my government’s support of this” sentiment.

If you still think Democrats actually care about a potential mass deportation, ask yourself why Biden hasn’t simply pardoned all undocumented immigrants.

Immigration offenses are federal crimes, the president can pardon federal crimes, and you don’t actually have to be charged with anything or convicted to receive a pardon (see Nixon).

What they all have in common is that they’re incumbents. The article this appears to be from is paywalled, so we don’t know what all the data points are. There could be some countries in there that don’t support Ukraine, or that support it so little it wouldn’t be a real factor in their elections.

I’m very skeptical of Ukraine (and Palestine) having major direct impacts on the U.S. election because of how little most voters care about any foreign policy issue, sometimes even when it’s U.S. troops directly fighting.

This seems like a worthwhile observation from the comments, though:

Anything that happens in the world gets blamed on the incumbent and than amplified by politically adjacent media sources

No such thing as an “incumbent advantage” anymore given how effective constant negative coverage from oppositional media is

I think this link (pulled from “cross-posted to”) gets you there: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6192720

Still not great at navigating to and from federated instances myself.

Have the article this is from?

I think the argument that this is directly tied to Ukraine is weakened by the fact that every incumbent lost, not just the ones supporting Ukraine.

Everyone I know voted. No one I know irl felt democrats didn’t go far enough left.

Yeah, if they thought Democrats were too far right they probably were among the 11 million who voted for Biden but stayed home this time.

Harris didn’t run as a Republican and you know it.

She touted an endorsement from Dick Cheney, said she’d put a Republican in her cabinet, and said she’d pass Trump’s immigration bill.

We’d had Star Trek for two years by that point. It really was not that groundbreaking.

Star Wars came out 9 years after 2001 (edit: and the original series Star Trek doesn’t have near the realism of 2001). The visuals absolutely were groundbreaking – they still hold up, and look better than all but a handful of space movies that came out before about the 90s.

Your point with the pacing is fair, but I think about half that is an artifact of the time or a byproduct of watching it on a couch with a smartphone instead of in a theater.

for a party supposedly fighting against the rise of fascism, they didn’t try very hard at all.

They’re also still in power until late January. Settling aside the very large question of “why would you willingly hand over power to fascists?”, does anyone think they’ll do anything to even make it harder for Republicans to do all the awful things they ran on?

Biden could pardon every person charged with a federal immigration crime tomorrow, with the stroke of a pen. He could then order everyone in ICE custody released immediately and fire everyone he can in that agency. If I was seriously concerned about Republicans deporting tens of millions of immigrants, this would be the bare minimum I’d do.

Yeah, having more than half the US population vote for fascism

Far fewer than half of eligible voters voted for Trump. This election was decided by people choosing to stay home rather than vote for Harris. Trump got about 74 million votes in both 2020 and 2024, but Biden got 81 million votes while Harris got only 70 million.

Americans are not getting more fascist, Democrats are just completely failing at offering them anything positive.

Yeah, it might just be that people are too comfortable to entertain radical change. Millions sitting it out altogether instead of looking at a minor party would certainly fit with that. Looking into those Biden-to-staying-home people could be promising for the left.

“Ignore the problem, hope you get rich enough to keep ignoring the symptoms”

About 16 million, I believe.

Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump… It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real!

Except this election wasn’t decided by voters switching sides, it was decided by something like 16 million Biden voters not showing up for Harris or Trump, who himself lost about 2 million votes from his 2020 total.

For those 16 million who sucked it up and voted for Biden in 2020, the choice this time wasn’t Harris or Trump, it was Harris or staying home.

people that voted democrat in 2020 voted republican this time

Both parties lost millions of voters since 2020. Trump lost about 2 million, Harris lost about 16 million.

It wasn’t people switching parties, it was people not voting because Biden didn’t make a difference in their lives and Harris promised more of the same.