This is a special post for quick takes by Lao Mein. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
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.
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.
2MondSemmel
You can't trust exit polls on demographics crosstabs. From Matt Yglesias on Slow Boring:
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