My takeaway from the US elections is that electoral blackmail in response to party in-fighting can work, and work well.
Dearborn and many other heavily Muslim areas of the US had plurality or near-plurality support for Trump, along with double-digit vote shares for Stein. It’s notable that Stein supports cutting military support for Israel, which may signal a genuine preference rather than a protest vote. Many previously Democrat-voting Muslims explicitly cited a desire to punish Democrats as a major motivator for voting Trump or Stein.
Trump also has the advantage of not being in office, meaning he can make promises for brokering peace without having to pay the cost of actually doing so.
Thus, the cost of not voting Democrat in terms of your Gaza expectations may be low, or even negative.
Whatever happens, I think Democrats are going to take Muslim concerns about Gaza more seriously in future election cycles. The blackmail worked—Muslim Americans have a credible electoral threat against Democrats in the future.
Democrats lost by sufficient margins, and sufficiently broadly, that one can make the argument that any pet cause is a responsible or contributing factor. But that seems like entirely the wrong level of analysis to me. See this FT article called “Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents”, which includes this striking graph:
So global issues like inflation and immigration seem like much better explanatory factors to me, rather than things like the Gaza conflict which IIRC never made the top 10 in any issue polling I saw.
(The article may be paywalled; I got the unlocked version by searching Bing for “ft every governing party facing election in a developed country”.)
Sure, if Muslim Americans voted 100% for Harris, she still would have lost (although she would have flipped Michigan). However, I just don’t see any way Stein would have gotten double digits in Dearborn if Muslim Americans weren’t explicitly retaliating against Harris for the Biden administration’s handling of Gaza.
But 200,000 registered voters in a state Trump won by 80,000 is a critical demographic in a swing state like Michigan. The exit polls show a 40% swing in Dearborn away from Democrats, enough for “we will vote Green/Republican if you give us what we want” to be a credible threat, which I’m seen some (maybe Scott Alexander?) claim isn’t possible, as it would require a large group of people to coordinate to vote against their interests. Seemingly irrational threats (“I will vote for someone with a worse Gaza policy than you if you don’t change your Gaza policy”) are entirely rational if you have a track record of actually carrying them out.
On second thought, a lot of groups swung heavily towards Trump, and it’s not clear that Gaza is responsible for the majority of it amongst Muslim Americans. I should do more research.
You can’t trust exit polls on demographics crosstabs. From Matt Yglesias on Slow Boring:
Over and above the challenge inherent in any statistical sampling exercise, the basic problem exit pollsters have is that they have no way of knowing what the electorate they are trying to sample actually looks like, but they do know who won the election. They end up weighting their sample to match the election results, which is good because otherwise you’d have polling error about the topline outcome, which would look absurd. But this weighting process can introduce major errors in the crosstabs.
For example, the 2020 exit poll sample seems to have included too many college- educated white people. That was a Biden-leaning demographic group, so in a conventional poll, it would have simply exaggerated Biden’s share of the total vote. But the exit poll knows the “right answer” for Biden’s aggregate vote share, so to compensate for overcounting white college graduates in the electorate, it has to understate Biden’s level of support within this group. That is then further offset by overstating Biden’s level of support within all other groups. So we got a lot of hot takes in the immediate aftermath of the election about Biden’s underperformance with white college graduates, which was fake, while people missed real trends, like Trump doing better with non-white voters.
To get the kind of data that people want exit polls to deliver, you actually need to wait quite a bit for more information to become available from the Census and the voter files about who actually voted. Eventually, Catalist produced its “What Happened in 2020” document, and Pew published its “Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory” report. But those take months to assemble, and unfortunately, conventional wisdom can congeal in the interim.
My takeaway from the US elections is that electoral blackmail in response to party in-fighting can work, and work well.
Dearborn and many other heavily Muslim areas of the US had plurality or near-plurality support for Trump, along with double-digit vote shares for Stein. It’s notable that Stein supports cutting military support for Israel, which may signal a genuine preference rather than a protest vote. Many previously Democrat-voting Muslims explicitly cited a desire to punish Democrats as a major motivator for voting Trump or Stein.
Trump also has the advantage of not being in office, meaning he can make promises for brokering peace without having to pay the cost of actually doing so.
Thus, the cost of not voting Democrat in terms of your Gaza expectations may be low, or even negative.
Whatever happens, I think Democrats are going to take Muslim concerns about Gaza more seriously in future election cycles. The blackmail worked—Muslim Americans have a credible electoral threat against Democrats in the future.
Democrats lost by sufficient margins, and sufficiently broadly, that one can make the argument that any pet cause is a responsible or contributing factor. But that seems like entirely the wrong level of analysis to me. See this FT article called “Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents”, which includes this striking graph:
So global issues like inflation and immigration seem like much better explanatory factors to me, rather than things like the Gaza conflict which IIRC never made the top 10 in any issue polling I saw.
(The article may be paywalled; I got the unlocked version by searching Bing for “ft every governing party facing election in a developed country”.)
Sure, if Muslim Americans voted 100% for Harris, she still would have lost (although she would have flipped Michigan). However, I just don’t see any way Stein would have gotten double digits in Dearborn if Muslim Americans weren’t explicitly retaliating against Harris for the Biden administration’s handling of Gaza.
But 200,000 registered voters in a state Trump won by 80,000 is a critical demographic in a swing state like Michigan. The exit polls show a 40% swing in Dearborn away from Democrats, enough for “we will vote Green/Republican if you give us what we want” to be a credible threat, which I’m seen some (maybe Scott Alexander?) claim isn’t possible, as it would require a large group of people to coordinate to vote against their interests. Seemingly irrational threats (“I will vote for someone with a worse Gaza policy than you if you don’t change your Gaza policy”) are entirely rational if you have a track record of actually carrying them out.
On second thought, a lot of groups swung heavily towards Trump, and it’s not clear that Gaza is responsible for the majority of it amongst Muslim Americans. I should do more research.
You can’t trust exit polls on demographics crosstabs. From Matt Yglesias on Slow Boring:
I misspoke. I was using the actual results from Dearborn, and not exit polls. Note how differently they voted from Wayne County as a whole!