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More ignorant uninformed questions about the American presidential election!
So - Gaza? Palestine? Palestinians? Israel? Will this affect the Democratic vote, or is this just more journalists trying to spin straw into gold?:
Whatever about Michigan, on a national level is there a bunch of undecided/uncommitted voters who won't vote for Biden in the election (not going to vote for Trump or third party, but not voting as a protest on this one issue)?
If there are, are there enough to make a difference?
Or is it that it doesn't matter, the usual Democrat voters will turn out in enough numbers for a drop off in voting by a single-issue minority not to matter?
Will Gaza even be a live issue by the time the real election finally rolls round?
An election is like a giant Prisoner's Dilemma. A small group's collective decision to cooperate or defect can make all the difference in who wins. The politicians trying to get elected have to convince all their factions to cooperate and not defect. But whoever threatens to defect most convincinfly can hold the whole election hostage. And this is how power is won.
MAGA has proceded to (slowly) take over the Republican party because they are willing to defect. MAGA will vote for Trump, but not anti-Trump. People have decried MAGA for this behavior, calling them "cultlike" and other things. MAGA is blamed for election losses. But, MAGA is winning the Republican Party. And MAGA is growing, so that other factions are finding they can't threaten to defect with the same force that MAGA can.
Never Trump wants to defect from MAGA, and has tried several times to defect. But it turns out they're not really large enough to make much of a difference. They have other powers to compensate, like a lot of influence over the politicians and donors. But without a large voting bloc behind them, those powers are dwindling. MAGA is stronger than ever, and Never Trump is the weakest it's ever been.
The dynamic on the Democrat side is almost the opposite. A strong culture of "Vote Blue No Matter Who" has taken hold, because everybody agrees that a Trump/Republican victory is so bad that nobody wants to risk defecting. The result is that the Democratic base is sidelined and taken for granted. Bernie couldn't win, but neither could his voters shake Democratic politicos hard enough to extract meaningful concessions. The result: the Democratic party of 2024 is largely the same as the Democratic party of 2020, 2016, and 2012.
And Democratic voters seem to like it that way. Joe Biden is winning hundreds of thousands of votes in largely-uncontested primaries, because it seems that the Democratic base is concerned that no onesees defecting as a viable option. It's important that everyone stands firm against Trump.
So, for the Uncommitteds -- they're breaking a big taboo here. By "throwing away" their votes, they are signaling that they would rather throw Michigan to Trump than continue to support Biden without concessions. How serious of a threat is that? Some of these Uncommitted voters are surely already planning to vote for Joe in November; some are not. Negotiating how strong this force really is determines how much the party really needs to concede. The stronger the voters defect, the more the Democrats have to give them.
Of course, it may not be possible for the Democrats to concede enough. Leaning on Israel to stop the war in Gaza might bring Michigan's Uncommitted voters back into the fold, but alienate other voters. It might not be possible for Biden to do what the Uncommitted faction wants. Or Biden and his people may simply be unwilling to. (The story I'm seeing is that the people in the White House already feel that they've done a great deal for Gaza, and if only they could "communicate" this to voters, everything would work itself out.)
My surmise is that the Uncommitted faction right now is not large enough to extract real concessions. The overwhelming sentiment on the Democratic side is that defecting will lose elections, and should be punished. I don't think there will be a large-scale policy shift that will satisfy the voters.
The interesting implication is that, if one faction is already defecting, it becomes possible for other factions to defect. In the original Prisoner's Dilemma, cooperating is always the best move, unless someone defects -- in which case, defecting becomes the best move. Nobody wants to boycott Joe Biden and lose the election. But if there's already a boycott, and Biden is already guaranteed to lose, then defecting is more worthwhile for other groups. "They're getting concessions, but I'm even more important than them, and I deserve concessions too." And maybe, in this scenario, the Democratic party actually starts to move in the direction of its would-be populist base.
At the present moment, however, I don't think this is very likely.
Ironically, MAGAs aren't getting much of anything out of it, Trump didn't have to do anything for them because he has their vote anyway. For example, left a bunch of his most ardent supporters who participated in J6 to democrat mercy while pardoning scammers and rappers. He pushed for gun control, First Step criminal release and Platinum plan reparations, because what are anyone unhappy with that on the right going to do, vote for Biden?
Compare Trump to any non-Trump or pre-Trump politician: illegal immigration as top priority, new trade deals and reshoring manufacturing, no new entanglements or foreign wars. These were the big three planks of Trump's 2016 run. Alternatives to Trump included: Jeb Bush saying illegal immigrants came to the US as an act of love; Marco Rubio having tried comprehensive immigration reform; Ted Cruz supporting an expansion for H1-B visas; etc. etc.
MAGA has been quite satisfied with Trump, which is why they keep voting for him.
For your criticisms, I'm not sure MAGA cares. You seem to be describing the criticisms of some other group. "Platinum Plan" was seen by most people as empty marketing, and nobody anywhere cared about it. (It is definitely not akin to reparations.) "Gun control" is also not very compelling when I presume you're really just referring to bump stocks.
He started arming Ukraine and bombed Syria.
He made a lot of noise and got US hit by retaliatory tariffs, haven't achieved much benefit AFAIK.
That was supposed to be funds earmarked for blacks only, call that whatever you like.
It wasn't just bump stocks, he pushed for red flag laws ("take the guns first, go through due process later").
America was already entangled in Ukraine.
America was already entangled in Syria.
I could go on. I made my point, and you're not really disputing it. MAGA is quite happy with Trump, and that's why they vote for him. You, for your reasons, are not. That's fine man
It seems like an incredibly pedantic distinction to say that Donald Trump expanding US involvement in Middle Eastern and African conflicts doesn't count because the US was technically already involved. It doesn't support the notion of Trump the peacemonger.
This gets to a lot of broader technical questions: How deeply should the US be involved in the Middle East? What counts as a "war"? How much responsibility does the president have over American foreign policy vis-a-vis the rest of the foreign policy establishment? What would a different president theoretically have done? etc. etc.
Ultimately: the blob released information accusing Syria and Assad of using chemical weapons on the people of Syria. Trump responded by bombing an airport tarmac. I don't think you can call that "expanding US involvement" in the Middle East. That's the incident OP was referring to. I don't consider it a very serious accusation that Trump somehow abandoned his position to not start another war. We can compare it against all sorts of hypothetical other presidencies. And we can compare it against Obama and Bush, who both literally started wars in the Middle East.
You can call me pedantic, but, ultimately, I think your idea that Trump "expanded US involvement" in the Middle East can only be true in a pedantic sense. On the basis everyone understands, cares about, and talked about in 2016: Trump did not start any new wars. He did not perpetrate Afghistan, Libya, or Iraq. And that leaves us with boring technical questions about whether, for example, Trump allowed himself to be misled by generals who tried to prevent him from pulling out of Afghanistan. Certainly, nobody in the MAGA coalition feels all that betrayed by Trump's promises in the Middle East that he bombed an inconsequential airport tarmac in Syria (a country with which we are technically not at war, with which US foreign policy has been deeply entangled since the Obama years at minimum).
It is true in the literal, material sense that in a number of places, Trump continued or substantially expanded US military involvement in conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, e.g. US involvement in Syria under Trump was by no means limited to an isolated bombing. The US was heavily involved in the Battle of Raqqa. The Battle of Khasham saw US forces killing Russian troops. In Somalia, US involvement went from nominal to almost weekly strikes. Similarly, strikes in Yemen were massively expanded (Trump also vetoed disengagement).
Perhaps they're not as anti-interventionist as they claim? Or maybe they just don't pay much attention to foreign policy?
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