the liberal smugness about ignorant voters that we're surely going to see in the next few weeks is... actually kind of correct.

I've been contemplating this today. I think it's reasonable to say that we need someone to do some polls before we can tell for sure what caused some 12 million or so people who turned out for Biden to sit this one out. Sexism? The fact that they had more time or energy to vote in 2020. The fact that the world seemed to be falling apart way worse than it does now? Or just the fact that things seem more expensive and neither candidate seemed appealing enough to turn out for?

I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that life is harder for the dems in that they still have an onus to deliver material benefits to their voters while Republican politicians get to do whatever they want so long as it looks like winning or punishing an outgroup, and voters don't really take the time or the energy to understand why things aren't happening, who the actual source of the obstructions are. But, at the same time, the dems seemed to spend a lot of the early years of the admin tripping over their own dicks and then not executing any follow-ups. HR1 crashed and burned and that would've made it a lot easier to turn out apathetic voters, but when was the last time anyone even said anything about it? Then torched the minimum wage increase and everyone just kinda shrugged and forgot about it. Then the Supreme Court blocked student loan reform. The Biden admin had to have known that would have been a problem but evidently they were too wedded to the idea of sacrosanct institutions to think about trying to tip the balance. The stay-at-home voters probably don't remember any of these incidents, but it's possible they would have motivated a lot more people to turn out, and dems need turnout.

On the Gaza front, it's likely that didn't move the needle for a lot of people, but the ones it did move the needle for were probably important. I mentioned in a different thread that the folks who have the energy to show up and protest also have the energy to knock on doors, volunteer, donate money, everything else that you need to run a truly grassroots campaign, and Kamala seemed to go out of her way to thumb her nose at them. So they either went home or continued to spend their energy on protesting her instead of helping, and that may have eaten away at some of the margins. Although she also spent a bunch of campaign money on billboards trashing the Green Party in Michigan so there were probably some issues around efficient resource allocation within the campaign.