[alt text: a screenshot of a tweet by @delaney_nolan, which says, “Biden/Harris saw this polling and decided to keep unconditionally arming Israel”. Below the tweet is a screenshot from an article, which states: “In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they’d be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less likely.”]
126k Arab-Americans living in PA. As of reporting right now, Harris is losing PA by 152k votes. Obviously this doesn’t clearly indicate that this single issue would swing the election in her favor, but I wouldn’t call that “a tiny minority of no relevance to American politics”.
And the Jewish voting population of PA is more than three times that. Now, that hardly means that they’ll all vote for Isreal, but it does mean that how that group breaks has a far more outsized impact and why Haris was focused so much on things that both sides can generally agree with like conditional aid.
I would have much preferred an actual hardline leftist stance of course, but at the end of the day Gaza does not seem to have played a significant part in this election.
Sure, but I would argue a much larger chunk of that Jewish voting population is firmly in the Democratic base, and may have voted for her either way. Only one party is supporting antisemitism, after all.
Given how entrenched support for Isreal is parts of the base and moreover how conflicted much of the middle ground of the community is, I expect a lot of them would have sat the election out. Of course I think playing both sides of the street did lead to a lot of them sitting it out, but I think the hope was that an week intermediate position would allow for unity and coalition building around issues that didn’t have your party primarily fighting itself.
I hear you. I can see the view that supporting an arms embargo might have also broke bad for Dems. I guess part of my point is that this is just one of a variety of issues where Kamala fumbled the bag.