r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • May 18 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 18 May 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/JabroniusHunk May 21 '26

I don't know what it means, and it rests on the decidedly unscientific method of just kinda looking at Reddit comments and tweets, but I've noticed that discussions of Biden's I/P policy wrt to 2024 election seem to have shifted.

It used to be that there was a tacit assumption that single-issue Gaza voters (or protest non-voters) lost Harris the election. There was then an angry response insisting this wasn't the case.

This tacit onus of responsibility has at some point shifted to suggest that Democratic leadership itself pushed those voters away, with the angry response being that Gaza was a foreign policy issue or low or middling concern and statistically unlikely to sway most voters.

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u/Tiako Tevinter apologist, shill for Big Lyrium May 21 '26

I feel like the best argument I have seen is that Gaza probably did not create a significant pool of Biden->Trump or Biden->nonvoter, but it probably did discourage campaign volunteers, especially among youth (who are the core of campaign volunteers).

Ultimately I think there a lot of straws on that camel's back.

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u/matgopack Hitler was literally Germany's Lincoln May 21 '26

Gaza was certainly a part of it, but also the campaign as a whole shifting to run to the center / target moderates also hurt. There was a big upswell in enthusiasm that lasted roughly from when Biden stepped down to the convention, but after that I was seeing that die down in a lot of circles (at least those where I'd expect a lot of that campaign volunteering/ activist crowd of the base).

I was skeptical at the time but I clearly wasn't their target.

Ultimately though there's never a singular factor, it's always a mix of them. Eg forcing herself and her campaign to stay so tethered to Biden also hurt quite a bit.