Harris and Gaza: Why She Lost

Electoral defeats upend the saying: victory has many fathers, defeat is an orphan.  In the case of Kamala Harris’ defeat, there are many fathers.  One important one is Gaza.  Peter Beinart published a NY Times op-ed arguing that opposition by young people and African-Americans to US policy there, played a major role in her loss:

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Over the past year, Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers… has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation….The outrage has been particularly intense among Black Americans and the young…

A June CBS News poll found that…voters under the age of 30 opposed them [arms sales to Israel] by a ratio of more than three to one…Among Black voters the figure was 75 percent…

…Exit polls — from CNN, The Washington Post, Fox News and The Associated Press — suggest she suffered a sharp decline among voters under the age of 29 compared with Mr. Biden’s result in 2020…She did slightly worse than Mr. Biden among Black voters. One exit poll, from Fox News and The Associated Press, suggests she did significantly worse.

Biden won 81-million votes in 2020, the most for any presidential candidate in US history.  Harris secured 72-million. Even though this was comparable to Hillary Clinton in 2016, it wasn’t enough.  Harris didn’t only lose the election to Trump. She lost her own voters.  They didn’t necessarily vote for Trump, though some Latino and Black men did.  She lost them because they stayed home–or voted for everyone else on the ticket but her (as I did); because she didn’t represent change; because she didn’t stake out an independent agenda; because she waged a cautious campaign, instead of a bold, daring one.

Approximately 42% of eligible young people voted.  In 2020, 52% voted. 60% of young people voted for Biden in 2020. 55% voted for Harris. Hillary Clinton had a 19 point margin over Trump in 2016 among young people.  Biden rose to 25%. But Harris only scored an 11-point advantage.  She lost in the margins. But the cumulative margins for all age groups and ethnicities, made all the difference.

As Michigan goes, so goes the nation

There are 400,000 Arab-Americans in Michigan, an important battleground state crucial to Democratic victory in presidential elections.  They are an important ethnic bloc in the state’s elections. The Arab American Institute (AAI) found that the Democrats’ share of Arab-American support in 2024 slid precipitously from an 65% over the past 30 years, to 38% in this election.  Harris lost 22,000 votes over Joe Biden’s 2020 results, in the largest Arab-American communities in Michigan.

In Dearborn, the city with one of the largest Arab-American populations in the US, the GOP presidential candidate won for the first time in 25 years. Biden had won handily in 2020 with 69% of the vote. Harris–36%. Much of the vote she lost went to Jill Stein, who won an extraordinary 18% of the Dearborn tally; undoubtedly a protest against Biden administration Gaza policy.  In 2020, Biden won Michigan by 160,000 votes. Harris lost to Trump by 80,000.

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There are a multitude of reasons why she lost Michigan, and was defeated in the overall election.  But the collapse of the Arab-American vote is the major reason she lost the state.  This, of course is not why she lost the election.  But that, added to left-Democrats’ overall voter dissatisfaction with Gaza policy–goes a long way to explaining her defeat.

Multiple polls of US public opinion show strong opposition not only to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but to Biden’s support for it.  An AAI poll showed 77% of Harris voters favored a call for an immediate ceasefire.  Biden has refused to do so.  64% of Harris voters want the next president to apply stronger pressure on Israel to end the Occupation and create a Palestinian state.  Biden has largely abandoned this approach during his term.  53% of Harris voters said Biden administration Middle East policy is too one-sided favoring Israel. 65% believe the US should restrict military aid to Israel if it violates human rights and targets civilians in Palestine and Lebanon.  Biden has refused.

Harris defense of Israel cost her

Harris had an opportunity to set out a more independent policy.  Instead she doubled down.  In every speech which addressed these issues, she emphasized her unshakable support for Israel.  She offered little for the Palestinians being slaughtered there, aside from bromides about being heartbroken at the suffering.  She claimed she was “doing everything possible” to end the war and free the Israeli hostages.  While she refused to do anything concrete.

The US supplied $20-billion in weaponry to Israel.  Our bunker buster bombs assassinated Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s key leaders.  We uttered not a word.  We demanded Israel facilitate humanitarian aid to starving Gazans. Israel ignored us.  We pressured Israel to agree to a ceasefire. Netanyahu sabotaged talks at every turn while Biden stood by helplessly.

Where was Harris? She objected to none of it.  Not a word about pressuring Israel. Nor even a word of criticism.  She did this despite strong Democratic support for major changes in US policy; despite findings that undecided voters in swing states were six times more likely that other voters to be motivated by the Gaza war:

Despite overwhelming evidence that the Democratic Party’s most devoted constituents wanted to end sales of weapons to Israel, the Biden administration kept sending them, even after…Netanyahu…expanded the war into Lebanon. And not only did Ms. Harris not break with Mr. Biden’s policy, she went out of her way to make voters who care about Palestinian rights feel unwelcome. When antiwar activists interrupted a speech of hers in August, Ms. Harris snapped, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.” At the Democratic National Convention, her campaign rebuffed a plea from activists to let a Palestinian American speak from the main stage. And just days before the election, the Harris surrogate Bill Clinton [falsely] told a Michigan crowd that Hamas had forced Israel to kill Palestinian civilians by using them as human shields.

Trump took notice and promised to end the war. This was an empty promise of course, worth no more than the thousands of similar promises he’s made to numerous voting groups.  But no matter.  Enough voters believed him to win over the those of Dearborn.

This race was Harris’ to lose.  Her defeat was largely to due to her base refusing to come out to vote for her.  They were not motivated.  They were not enthused. While Trump’s base was fueled by hate and grievance, eager to take revenge of Democrats for their imagined crimes.

She ignored popular opinion for one reason: the billionaire pro-Israel Democratic donor class…and the Israel Lobby.  She had seen evidence of the fate of Ivy League presidents who offered insufficient opposition to pro-Palestine protests on their campuses.  The GOP in league with the donor class excoriated them publicly and four presidents resigned as a result.  Harris understood that this would likely happen if she broke with Biden.  She made a gamble that maintaining the pro-Israel support was more important overall than retaining the support of the Party’s left-wing. And she paid for it.

I will concede that this wasn’t an easy decision.  Either way, she would face strong opposition.  But losing the left was disastrous.  One doesn’t know what would have happened if she’d done the opposite. But we do know what happened with the choice she did make.  Future Democratic presidential candidates will learn from her mistake or suffer her fate.