- cross-posted to:
- world
- cross-posted to:
- world
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich welcomed President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral victory Monday, saying that “the time has come” to extend full Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank.
He made the comment a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a recorded statement that he has spoken three times with Trump since the election and that they “see eye to eye on the Iranian threat.
It does in the very least in swing states, as the polls show. Yet we see a net positive in both swing states and the general populous with a conditional aid policy.
It does among the affected populations. Which makes sense. But to the average voter without any skin in the game, it didn’t crack the top 10.
You’re trying to compare votes gained vs votes lost due to a policy shift in conditional military aid. We see a positive shift both generally, and very much so in swing states. If we’re comparing voters who would vote against Harris compared to voters who would vote for Harris with this change, we see that there would be enough of a positive shift to at least flip the swing states. We saw that there is less than 300k Jewish Americans nationally that would vote against Harris if there was conditional aid. The votes that would be gained by Arab Americans and the Uncommitted movement would far outweigh that, especially in swing states. The argument that the decision to not do conditional military aid was because of the Jewish American vote does not hold.
You can apply all the maybes and the shoulda, coulda, woulda’s you want to try to make your point, but the math simply does not work in your favor. Not even close to it. You are grossly overestimating the size of the Arab/Muslim/Palestine population and their supporters, underestimating the size of the Jewish community and where their support lies, and grossly over-representing the effect of the general population, where this issue didn’t even crack the top 10.
And I just want to restate for the record: I agree with you. We are on the same side here. But supporters of Gaza are simply grossly outnumbered by the Jewish population and those who support Israel, and if Harris had supported Gaza, she’d have lost a million more votes. That’s got nothing to do with which side is right or wrong, or zionism, or judaism, or which side is morally right. It’s just math. There’s more of them. It’s that simple. The entire situation was a lose-lose situation for Biden the day Israel decided that schools and hospitals somehow became valid military targets. From a political standpoint, Harris chose the least politically shitty option.
We just went through the numbers, no she would not have lost millions more votes. She would have gained net votes and enough to secure the swing states. Her decision not to cost her the election. We see the results of her not switching to conditional aid and it was Trump winning every swing state.
You can feel free to believe whatever you want, and I’m obviously not going to convince you otherwise. The math just does not agree with you. Outside of Michigan, the number of pro-Palestine people would barely qualify as a rounding error let alone be enough to swing a single other state. You are grossly over-estimating their voting power at literally every level. The subsection of Jews that even consider this a top issue to begin with outnumbers the total number of voting Palestinians and their supporters more than 5 times over. Your numbers just do not add up no matter how much you really, really stretch things to make them.
So let’s see how you came to the number that millions of Jewish Americans would vote against Harris if she was in favor of conditional military aid in order to create a permanent ceasefire.
79% of them voted for Harris. Or just shy of 4.6 million voters
25% considered Israel a major policy item. Or just shy of 1.15 million Harris voters.
You think that since 25% consider Israel a major policy item that they all must be against conditional aid. Is that true? I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. This statistic means that it is a prominent issue for them, not how. Let’s say it’s the #1 issue for them to make things easier.
Now let’s look at how Jewish Americans views on a conditional ceasefire
52.5% support withholding military aid compared to 23% to disagree with that decision.
What’s 23% of the 1.15 Million that consider Israel a top issue? 230,000 Jewish Americans.
Even if we assume all of these Jewish Americans are Democrat, which we have no way of confirming one way or the other, let’s compare that to the uncommitted movement. Total uncommitted in the Primary was 706,591 (Which may have been undercounted). On average, general turnout is twice that of primary turnout. Which would reflect over 1,400,000 uncommitted votes in the general as an estimate. Considering how widespread anti-genocide sentiment is, I would expect more than that. But it’s not like we have any data, other than the current results.