ant4456 all you've done there is show that you don't understand politics. people "care" about a lot of things. obviously. but when we're talking about
politics people only actually "care" about things if it will matter to their vote. there is not a politician in America at any level from local up to federal who represents my positions on every issue. I'm actually pretty confident there isn't a single politician in America I would agree with on everything related to Israel/Palestine alone without getting into every other issue. I still find someone to vote for in each and every election and make compromises.
I would have preferred to have seen a polling question where people could pick 3 issues rather than only #1 or where people specifically said whether the issue would swing their vote, but foreign policy isn't making top 3 for almost anyone anyway. "foreign policy voters" practically speaking do not exist. they will only exist when voters feel they already live in a substantially perfect society themselves, i.e. never.
This is an example of one of the many reasons that representative democracy is a fundamentally flawed system, but we've yet to come up with a better one! you can end up with many perverse outcomes where when talking about Issue #10 a majority of people prefer X but because that is a weak preference and a position on the issue won't actually change their vote, and there's also a very vocal group who instead prefer Y and that WILL change their vote, Y wins out. X voters are already captured by virtue of other issues and their opinion on issues #1-9 mattered more. The way this discrepancy is most easily reconciled is by forcibly isolating that one issue #10 to direct democracy by the public, i.e. a ballot measure at the state or local level, where abortion rights and marijuana deciminalization routinely win, even sometimes in red states. No analogous process exists at the federal level. Sometimes this is good sometimes this is bad. The American public (and every country's public) at large is woefully uneducated about many things and if we had direct democracy on many things there'd be a lot of other outcomes I'm sure you wouldn't like. I don't think I need to probably search too hard to find issues that you disagree with the majority of the American public on.
S.A.C. Martin putting aside the fact that, again, none of this matters to the American voter when they go to the ballot box and therefore it doesn't matter to the candidates (i.e. they have to get elected first, then even assuming there are international repercussions, they deal with them after taking office), you also fundamentally misunderstand the relevance of US support for Israel on the global stage. It very well may be an embarrassment to US ambassadors to Europe and they may well get scolded by their counterparts, but please name one G-20 country that is going to substantively change how it interacts with the US due to the US acting consistently with its historical practice. The US has essentially
always had more pro-Israel policies than the rest of the world. That support is already baked into the US's foreign relations with each and every other country in the world. Just as American voters may care about Gaza in the abstract, but it won't matter at the ballot box, few if any countries care about the US maintaining its historical support for Israel, compared to ensuring they remain on favorable terms with the US for trade, aid, intelligence, security guarantees, etc. British citizens or Japanese citizens or whatever may have opinions on this, just as American citizens do, but the British government or Japanese government will never significantly prioritize this. Moreover, they are certainly not going to do so during the election because they all realize that a second Trump presidency is far worse for their relations with the US.
If you don't like dealing with these political realities, you are in the wrong thread.
