(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . #GenocideJoe Threatens To Break Biden In 2024, and We Can't Let That Happen [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-02-05 I’ve made some comments in recent weeks about how deeply the US’s unflinching support for Israel is hurting Biden from the left. Well, on Sunday, Politico published Forget No Labels. Biden’s Third-Party Peril is on the Left and noted that Biden adviser John Anzalone was confronted by a Michigan student who warned him that voters are “not going to vote for Genocide Joe.” NBC News is noting that only 15% of voters under 35 approve of Biden’s handling of the crisis, and he is getting roasted on X, TikTok, and other social media for it. Here’s one on X with over 6k likes and nearly 300k views: Biden’s official acts on Palestine are a currently a dealbreaker for a growing number voters. How many is unknown but these are precisely the young voters Democrats are looking to for the “generational shift” to a large majority. These folks labeling Biden as #GenocideJoe are frustrated with our government’s actions in giving weapons to Israel over 75 years, and in the present moment, they find in Biden a singular responsible party. The goal of this diary is not to shame those voters (voter shaming is not an effective GOTV strategy) but to call upon us to understand and to reach those voters. As counterproductive as calls to not vote for Joe Biden in 2024 are, they are growing too big for elected Democrats to sit back and ignore the movement happening in the streets. These calls are not just coming from the radical left political blogs (that’s not a slur but a point being made) and the folks that get the Green Party to 0.5% in any election. These calls to vote against Biden are also starting to come from more mainstream areas like Arab-American constituencies in Michigan: A growing chorus of community leaders say [Biden’s] handling of the war in Gaza and Islamophobia at home jeopardize his path to victory in the Electoral College, with many Muslim American and Arab American voters saying they plan to either stay home next November, vote for a write-in or a third-party presidential candidate, or simply leave the top of the ticket blank. And while the election is more than a year away, these warnings are coming not just from usual suspects — such as never-satisfied activists on the restive left — but Democratic elected officials, nonpartisan community leaders, Muslim get-out-the vote groups and even some of Biden’s biggest Arab American validators. “It literally may dissuade enough voters to sit back in the next election and watch Donald Trump control the presidency, watch the Republicans control the Congress and also know that conservatives will have control of the Supreme Court,” said Wa’el Alzayat, the CEO of Emgage, the country’s largest group focused on turning out Muslim American voters. Democratic leadership appears to not be taking the movement seriously, either in public dialogue or in policy and diplomacy. Nancy Pelosi, my rep back when I lived in San Francisco, recently doubled down on the suggestion that protesters were “connected to Russia” — which I am sure a solid third of her constituency sees as an insensitive snub. I honestly can’t understand how Pelosi can say “we must stop the suffering” and “a ceasefire is Putin’s message” in the same sentence. The voters and activists who are furious with the administration on this issue see that the only way to stop the suffering, to stop the hunger crisis currently unfolding, is to have a ceasefire in short order. Biden’s recent executive order to sanction violent Israeli settlers and his divergence with Bibi over a two-state solution may be too little and too late. It’s going to take a real breakthrough on this issue — a massive number of saved lives — for people to put down the #GenocideJoe label. I personally think that, despite Biden’s lifelong support for Israel, it it unfair to pin the President’s reelection on Palestine when the majority position — no, supermajority position! — over the last 75 years has been to send arms to Israel. And as for replacing public officials who “aren’t responsive to their constituencies” — I would also make a face and say: Replace with what? With Donald Jerusalem Embassy Trump? I am skeptical that TFG, or anyone in the GOP, will offer an effective harm-reduction strategy in Palestine. The GOP, whose Middle Eastern policy differences are “Bomb-Bomb Iran” vs. “Bring Back the Messiah.” There should be no illusion of the danger of this line of thinking after TFG, his administration, right-wing governors and talking heads set in motion an estimated half million excess covid deaths following reports on April 7, 2020 that people of color were bearing the brunt of the pandemic. Officials who saw that report and thought, as Tucker Carlson declared, that the most important thing was “to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this” (the public health shutdowns) by sending people back to work. No illusion that a party whose members casually declare that “immigrants should be given rides on Pinochet Air, defend against their use of razor wire in the Rio Grande to maim migrants, offer their “thoughts and prayers” after each mass shooting… that an administration that sent riot cops to clear a path for him, and under which unmarked vans apprehended protesters in Pittsburg and Portland… and not to mention January 6 (which they tried to blame on the radical left)… as Thom Hartmann has put it recently on this site, we now know how Hitler did it. From the movement perspective, voting may be about choosing your foe — the context of the struggle. To many Democratic activists, that might sound bizarre — “But we’re the good side! Young people love our policies!” And yes, generally, we do prefer Democratic policies! But what I mean is a movement voter must also see that they prefer Democratic governments to protest against, influencing politics through Constitutionally-protected assembly. We heed the instructions of FDR, to “Go out and make me do it.” Regarding human rights, we see police under Democratic mayors arresting the homeless, and see Democratic administrations continue to ship the bombs that land on hospitals and children in Gaza and elsewhere. We see the generally tepid support of progressive legislation as frustrating evidence, confirmed by a Princeton study, that the US functions as an oligarchy and voting makes little difference. Third party voting is usually justified as an individual moral concern against these failures of both parties. As a climate activist, I voted for the Green Party in 2000-2004 (from safe California) but have voted for Dems consistently beginning with Obama. I would love to have a political system where we use Ranked Choice Voting - and I am also wise enough to see that on a national level, we don’t have that system and the math gives us Red or Blue. It terrifies me that I see enough consideration for the many third party tickets out there — the People’s Party (Cornel West), Green Party (Jill Stein, again), and even RFK Jr. We cannot afford to write off these voters. Look at our vote margins in Georgia and Pennsylvania in 2020: Data compiled from ballotpedia.org/… Thank goodness for the Libertarians in 2020... 10,457 votes or .2% in Georgia. About 80k or 1.2% in Pennsylvania. Without those two states alone, the GOP wins 2024. Same goes for PA & MI. And we know that 2024 is not your average election and is a crucial decision point for democracy. Dems need to be listening to what’s happening on the ground with leftist movements in Atlanta, Philly, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and other crucial cities in swing states. I worry that enough Cop City protesters and sympathizers in Atlanta exist that easily 10,000 votes from 2020 will not be voting this year. I worry that the Muslim community in Michigan will be inconsolable on this issue, and that they will be right to be so. We face a number constituencies who are feeling everything from fires-of-justice anger to deep mourning. Democrats will need to have a more empathetic approach if we have any chance of winning back their votes. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are not entitled to their votes. They must be earned. I would love to run on faith that the post-Dobbs women’s vote will decimate the GOP’s totals this year. I’ve seen figures of running up 4% above 2020 in special elections. But as i’ve noted above, the extraordinary turnout in these swing states was 12-20% higher than 2016. And just as the Green Party took enough votes to shift the election in 2016 (only one of many factors in TFG’s win that year), the Libertarians were our deciding factor in 2020. Given how unified the Republican party seems behind TFG… it feels like a mistake to ignore any community of concern that is threatening not to vote for Biden. While I would love to see the Liz Cheney wing of the Republican Party help the Libertarians pull a Perot this year… I will never forget the fact that there were 3,000,000 more Trump voters in 2020 than in 2016. I see voting as an act in the collective struggle - not of one’s individual morality — and I’m convinced that the South Carolina voters who set Biden toward victory in 2020 - many of them involved in the civil rights “Good Trouble” — also saw their votes this way. Keeping the coalition together to re-elect Biden is going to take us all seeing voting in this way, and I hope we all do — because it’s too damn close not to. 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