The Buck Stops with Her
Kamala Harris' callousness towards Gaza has put her election at risk
I am anxiously writing this mere hours before the polls open on Election Day. If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to make your voice heard at the ballot box, both to vote against Trump and to support the worthy candidates and issues in your local downballot races.
If Donald Trump loses the election, he has said he will blame me. At an event in September ostensibly oriented towards fighting anti-Semitism, Trump told the crowd that “The Jewish people would really have a lot to do with it if that happens.” It should go without saying (though these days it apparently does not) that when a man who saw “very fine people” at a white-supremacist rally and featured a joke about us hoarding money at a marquee campaign event lays the groundwork to blame the Jewish community for a political failure, it comes across as a threat. It is terrifying to think that such a person has a chance of coming into power again, full stop.
So too would a Kamala Harris loss be blamed on people like me: Pundits and party leaders are already champing at the bit to pin a potential Harris loss on frustrated younger and left-of-center Americans. Well, hopefully not me specifically — I voted for Harris, even while living in a state where my Presidential vote does not really matter, and despite the Democrats’ open contempt for their non-Zionist Jewish constituents. Although maybe still me, as critiquing Harris’ platform yet still voting for her is enough to invite vitriol from a party that expects not just progressives’ support but their reverence.
There are many reasons why the perennial tension in asking skeptical citizens to support the lesser of two evils is particularly acute this election cycle, but the biggest and most obvious is the war in Gaza. Joe Biden has been complicit in the horrors the Israeli government has committed in Gaza (and the West Bank and Lebanon) for the last 13 months. With Harris by his side, Biden has provided unconditional rhetorical and material support for the immiseration of the Palestinians and their regional neighbors. Harris has not demonstrated any meaningful separation from her would-be predecessor on this issue. You can understand why even people who abhor Trump may not turn out for a candidate who condones genocide. Especially among Arab-American voters, who could tip the balance in the crucial swing state of Michigan.
Setting morality aside — a mindset I hope is widely discarded once the election is over — Harris’ refusal to push for a lasting ceasefire and arms embargo represents a deliberate choice not to meet a potentially significant voting bloc where they are. However frustrated you may be with those who will not support Harris because of Gaza, the Democrats could have won their votes if they had compromised on an issue that they knew was so important to their desired coalition partners.
Her campaign has shown not just ambivalence towards those who are pushing for an end to the war, but antagonism. Harris playing up her endorsements from and even campaigning with the Cheney family isn’t helping the perception that she is unbothered by violence in the Middle East. No one can seriously believe that Trump, who made a “Muslim ban” one of his top Presidential priorities and nearly started a war with Iran, would be any more sympathetic to the Palestinians, but it’s damning that his campaign sees an opening to pretend he would be less hawkish than Harris. Sending Ritchie Torres, a politician best known for being so stridently pro-Israel that he sees himself as an arbiter of who is really Jewish (despite not being so himself), to assure the state with the highest proportion of Arab-American residents that Harris personally blocked a Palestinian speaker from appearing at the Democratic National Convention reads like part of a Producers–esque plan to lose Michigan.
We have no counterfactual of an alternate timeline where Harris showed more respect for the Palestinians’ humanity, so we can’t prove that her steadfast support for the Israeli military (or any single issue) has been a net-negative for her campaign, let alone a decisive one. But we can make some inferences. We know that Americans support a ceasefire and oppose giving the IDF billions of dollars in military aid. That voters would be more likely to support a Democrat who called for an arms embargo, including when asked about Harris specifically. That she is trailing a third-party candidate among Muslim voters when the alternative is literally Donald Trump. That Biden’s margin of victory in Wisconsin four years ago was less than half the Uncommitted protest movement’s support in the state this April. And as
has noted, while foreign policy is usually not seen as holding broad electoral salience, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was the clearest inflection point for when questions about Biden’s perceived competence achieved widespread salience. It is reasonable to surmise that the war continuing and expanding on the Democrats’ watch is a drag on Harris’ numbers, even among those who are more concerned with an abstract sense of global instability than the humanitarian impact.In dismissing all this, Harris is betting either that her hawkish approach will ultimately win her more votes than it costs her, and that the race starting to tighten right around when she started courting the Cheneys is an unfortunate coincidence; or that she may take an electoral hit for it, but not one big enough to hand the White House to Trump. Any analysis or critique of Gaza-related non- or protest-voters’ impact on this election must start with the context of this campaign strategy.
I’ve heard other Harris supporters rationalize her position on Gaza by saying she cannot contradict Biden. To which I would ask: Why not? Harris is her own person. She holds the second-highest office in the country and is seeking a promotion to the top job. She has had no problem calling Biden out for his antiquated worldviews in the past. How would the January 6 insurrection have turned out if Mike Pence had deferred to his President’s agenda? Keeping Trump out of office is far more important than protecting Biden’s ego or maintaining the party-line façade that the current administration is doing everything they can to protect civilians and end the war.
I would be thrilled to feel silly about this essay. As I write this, I am cautiously optimistic that Harris will win, and thus that the concern will be moot. (At least from a campaign perspective. The moral implications of supporting genocide are a very different matter.) If she loses, Gaza may not be the only reason why, and we will have far more urgent matters to attend to than pointing fingers. Still, recent history shows that there are loud voices within the Democratic Party who will blame the voters rather than the candidates who fail to represent their constituents’ interests, or who hubristically plant the seeds of their own defeats. In a lower-case-d democratic society, that’s the opposite of how political accountability ought to work.
I hope Harris’ gambit works, that enough skeptical left-leaning citizens turn out to defeat Trump, and that those who have vowed to push Harris towards a more-humane approach to Gaza after the election make good on that promise. But whatever happens this week, staking the election on voters’ willingness to compartmentalize such suffering was not inevitable. By refusing to both do the right thing and heed the will of the people, the Democrats are playing chicken with the future of our republic. May this particular bird not come home to roost.