The Gaza ceasefire vindicates protest voters
Yesterday's announcement undercuts a major argument against protest voting.
A remarkable sequence of news announcements and reactions unfolded yesterday with unmistakable implications for the discourse around protest voting.
First, early in the afternoon, a new poll revealed that the Israel-US war on Gaza was the leading issue for Biden 2020 voters who did not support Kamala Harris:
The poll, which was first reported on by Ryan Grim at Drop Site News, makes clear the impact that protest voters (and non-voters) had on the election. It also sparked another round of debate over whether protest voting is an effective way to advocate for a given outcome. Those who say yes insist that it forces the Democratic Party to either adopt the stance protest voters advocate or cede those votes to another party that will take the right position.
Critics, meanwhile, say that by refusing to back Democrats, protest voters flag themselves as unreliable allies and thus undermine any influence they may have on the party’s direction. Perversely, this dynamic may even encourage the party to move away from the protest voters in reaction, since those who remain faithful to the party will tend to not agree with them.
People can debate these positions until the cows come home, but ultimately this is just an empirical question. Does protest voting in fact tend to move the party towards the protesters? Historically, the answer, I have argued, is plainly yes: there are endless examples of the major parties adopting positions that were originally advocated by protest voters. In the case of Gaza, however, the verdict had yet to come in: protest voters had made their position known, but the Democrats had yet to change course.
This, at least, was the state of the debate for a couple hours. But then, not long after the Gaza poll dropped, a new development: the Biden Administration announced that it, along with Qatar and Egypt, have secured a ceasefire.
I am personally extremely skeptical that there is anything more to this ceasefire than a bad faith PR opportunity for the US and Israel; after all, as Al-Jazeera reports, Israel has already killed 73 Palestinians since making the announcement. It also seems clear to me that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, was the prime mover of this deal. Matt Duss is right: Trump “pressed Netanyahu on it in a way that Biden clearly wasn’t willing to do”.
But let’s suppose that you are a standard liberal Democrat who believes that Joe Biden, a week before he leaves office, has just won a tremendous diplomatic victory. Where then does this leave the case against protest voting?
Isn’t this outcome the exact opposite of what Democratic loyalists predicted would happen? Protest voters abandoned the party in droves, but this didn’t take away the party’s incentive to secure a ceasefire. On the contrary, one can imagine Democrats looking at the same voting data we just learned about from the IMEU poll and concluding that if they want to avoid future defeats they’d need to capitulate to the protesters’ demands. A coalition of past Democratic voters made it clear they wouldn’t support Dems if Dems refused to secure a ceasefire, and then within a matter of months Dems secured a ceasefire. That’s how protest voting is supposed to work, right?
Ultimately it’s difficult to say what impact protest voters actually had on the political calculations of the Biden Administration. As suggested above, I think intervention by the incoming Trump Administration probably played the decisive role. Still, if you want to believe that Biden won this ceasefire, you can’t keep arguing that protest voting is counterproductive. A ceasefire means the protest voters have won.
Thanks for reading! My blog is supported entirely by readers like you. To receive new posts and support my work, why not subscribe?
Refer enough friends to this site and you can read paywalled content for free!
And if you liked this post, why not share it?