Many, many polls showed this very clearly. 77% of Democrat voters wanted an arms embargo, and over 30% of 2020 Biden voters in key battleground states said that this issue was serious enough to affect their vote.
> A Harris organizer who worked on youth turnout said that senior campaign officials gave them an order: When they sent out mass volunteer or fundraising emails and people replied by asking about Gaza, they were told to mark it as “no response.” The result? They seldom ended up engaging with voters on that issue.
- https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/uncommitted-le...
So yeah, if there was one thing wrong with Harris, that would be it. That one issue would have changed the result, and as far as single issues go, I call genocide a pretty big one. It's kinda the biggest.
Far from the only issue though - campaigning with Dick Cheney was pretty fucking stupid, for one thing. Then there was promising to be harsher on immigration than Trump. Promising the world's "most lethal" military (we already are?) while trying to gaslight broke Americans into believing the economy was great. In general, trying to pick up right wing votes was a heinous 'strategy'.
Hamas is a hardline theocratic political party based on a very conservative interpretation of a religion. That means they're anti-free speech/press/religion/assembly, anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-free enterprise, anti-secular jurisprudence, and anti-representative government. Neither of the Palestinian Territories have had meaningful elections in over a decade. They're utterly unwilling to discuss any sort of deviation from their foreign policy agenda in good faith.
And yet, that's who many people on the political left-of-center see as the "freedom fighters" of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Is Israel blameless? Absolutely not. They've committed numerous war crimes and atrocities since October 7th. On the other hand, they have shown with Jordan and Egypt that if their neighbors agree to leave them alone, they'll do the same in turn.
Fatah isn't that much better.
Honestly it's a different flavor of the same kind of authoritarianism that many on the right in the US dream of. And with Trump, they're much closer to implementing this, albeit with a different religion. If the idea behind the 2024 election in the US was to prevent more people from coming under authoritarian rule on a global scale, the left in the US failed miserably. And I say that as someone on the political left.
It's the same story we're seeing in the west though, from Hungary to America to Turkey to the UK. Strongman comes along and correctly says "your life sucks", then says "it sucks because of this group of people"
Run with that message for generations, throw in members of "this group of people" actually killing your friends and family, and it's easy to see how that message works.
Oh, absolutely. But the way to solve that is to realize that it was authoritarianism that started the problem.
If the Arab states had been willing to talk about the concept of a Jewish state in the Middle East immediately after WWII, this probably doesn't happen. Instead a bunch of authoritarian rulers (most of them monarchs) decided to send troops to try to snuff out the founding of the new state. "I was put here by God; what I say goes" was their entire experience, and they tried applying it to the geopolitical disagreement in their region.
A bunch of countries who more-or-less sat out WWII were up against the survivors of industrialized state-backed efforts to wipe out their people during the bloodiest war in human history. As we know, the former lost, and with it, any real chance of establishing a meaningful state for the Palestinian people on their terms.
There's two ways to handle a loss: you can accept it on reasonable terms, or you can keep digging a hole. Egypt and Jordan eventually came around to reasonable terms. So far, those terms have held over multiple governments and decades on both sides.
If the continued method taken by Hamas (and by extension, Iran) is going to be that of violence, particularly against a state they have to know, deep down, that they can't beat, then there's not too much else to be done other than keep the region from falling further into chaos. That, whether it is right or wrong in the minds of American voters, means blunting the impact of enemy action against Israel. It's one of the bloodiest examples of realpolitik.