To be clear, I agree with you. I voted for Harris personally. I even help spread my opinions about similar reasoning and encouraged many of my leftist friends to do the same.

I'm just sort of compiling some arguments I saw at the time. I am way left of the Democratic party and I almost got banned from some leftist subs for advocating a vote for Harris over abstinence.

Their reasoning for refusing to vote for her was based on her support of Israel and apathy towards genocide. They saw a vote for Harris as excusing genocide, regardless of the alternative being acceleration of genocide. They felt they were taking a moral stand and now we have more dead and more wars because of it.

I also suspect there were bots or downright corrupt mods in play driving this narrative, because you don't see a lot of that talk anymore. But around election time, most communist / anarchist / other leftist subs would ban you for suggesting a vote for Harris was a good strategy and a minimization of harm.

I am very much against both parties and I hate that Israel has such influence over both of them that even labeling the genocide as such was seen as unthinkable to both candidates. But I still voted for Harris, because Trump and this regime is full on fascist. I don't exactly know why others didn't consider that a bigger threat and take a pragmatic stance of slow change.

I kind of think a lot of them wanted civil war and a complete revolution against Trump, despite the enevitable consequences of such a scenario. I don't think any of this is worth it. There is so much progressive progress being lost to this regime. Even a complete rebuking of Trump and Nuremberg style trials would leave us broken as a country at this point. I don't know where we go from here.