The more time passes since President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential election, the more Democrats’ initial euphoria over his exit subsides. Supporters of his replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, are acknowledging that victory is far from certain. Heading into what will likely be her only debate with her Republican rival, Donald Trump, Harris was trailing by a point in a New York Times/Siena College poll. While many observers lauded the Vice President’s September 10 debate performance, her main liability among undecided voters, according to the poll, is that they know too little about her policy positions.
Harris’s debate performance was less about illuminating those positions than shining a light on her opponent’s flaws. None of those, however, are likely to sway his diehard supporters, a fact that is shaping Democrats’ electoral strategy. In a September 1 statement, the Harris campaign cautioned that the election “will be decided by a small number of undecided voters,” especially in battleground states.
An early September poll from the health policy organization KFF showed the economy and abortion as the issues most important to voters across the board. Yet despite ranking lower among Americans’ priorities, immigration and the Middle East have outsized importance with undecided voters in battleground states. That’s especially true in Arizona, a border state, and in Michigan, home to the country’s largest Arab American population. How the Harris campaign is courting undecided voters in each state says a lot about the degree to which Democrats are willing to sacrifice progressive principles to hold onto the White House.
Speaking in Arizona on August 9, Harris recalled her time as a California prosecutor to boast about targeting transnational gangs and smugglers. By leaning into a hard-line immigration agenda, Harris is doing more than courting voters fixated on “unchecked” immigration at America’s Southern border. Earning those votes may be the only way to offset hemorrhaging of support from voters who are upset over the Democrats’ refusal to pressure Israel into ending its war on Gaza.
Michigan, in particular, has become a flashpoint for opponents of Israel’s U.S.-backed war, which prompted more than 100,000 Democratic primary voters to cast “uncommitted” ballots in February rather than support the Biden-Harris ticket. With Biden gone, these voters had hoped for hints of a policy shift from Harris, who had called for a ceasefire on numerous occasions, most recently during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, D.C., in July. To press her on Gaza, supporters of the Uncommitted National Movement sought to secure a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) after Harris became the Democratic presidential contender.
The uncommitted delegates had planned to use the podium to bring attention to a U.S. law prohibiting the transfer of weapons to military units engaged in “gross violations of human rights”—a charge leveled at Israel for its wholesale destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, assassination journalists and humanitarian workers, and use of artificial intelligence to target, maim, and kill tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Instead, uncommitted delegates were denied at the DNC, and their chosen speaker, Georgia state Representative Ruwa Romman, was forced to deliver her remarks on the sidelines of the event. In a press conference outside the convention, Romman reporters, “I do not understand why being a Palestinian has become disqualifying in this country.”
The DNC speakers line-up illustrated how far progressive politics had sunk down on the party’s agenda. In 2020, the Democrats made a point of relentlessly critiquing Trump’s draconian policies, including his Muslim ban, for political points. At prior gatherings, so-called DREAMers—beneficiaries of the Obama-era Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program—were given airtime at the podium. This year, as Vox pointed out, DREAMers had all of fifty seconds to make their case for DACA protections.
That kind of marginalization might not be as extensive as what Romman and her fellow uncommitted delegates experienced, but it stems from the same disregard aimed at Palestinians. As Erika Andiola of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights told Amy Goodman in August on Democracy Now!, Harris’s approach has made immigration “about security, about criminality”—not about the people most affected by U.S. policies in Latin America or, indeed, the Middle East.
The Harris campaign’s strategy of embracing far-right policies in order to take votes away from Trump in swing states could easily backfire. This calculation may win over a handful of conservative voters who are worried about immigration and are unsure about Trump, but it’s already coming at the cost of alienating a once-solid base of progressives, including those who want to stop the annihilation of Gaza. The danger here is not that this group will cast ballots for Trump; it’s that they’ll not be motivated enough to turn out for a candidate that’s looking more and more like a Republican.
Harris’s refusal to make a shift from Biden’s near-total backing of Israel’s war has left Palestinian Americans and their supporters seeing little daylight between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. With many of these voters casting uncommitted ballots in the spring, their support for Harris remains far from certain, even if many of them reside in the very battleground states that her campaign needs to win.
On September 10, after the debate, Abbas Alawieh, a co-founder of the Uncommitted National Movement, wrote on X that “Harris’s comments on Gaza continue to offend voters appalled by Netanyahu’s U.S.-funded killing campaign,” adding that the Democratic candidate’s statements “offer nothing new and perpetuate the murderous status quo.” That sentiment is a far cry from the optimism Alawieh and others expressed before the convention. In July, Alawieh, who was a DNC delegate from Michigan, said he held out hope that Harris would “articulate a Gaza policy that is different.” The Uncommitted National Movement, said Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, also in July, was “trying to save” the Democratic party, which had ignored popular opposition to Israel’s war among the party’s ranks.
That opposition is not limited to Michigan, either, or to Arab American voters. A June 2024 Data for Progress poll showed that 70 percent of Democrats support withdrawing military aid to Israel if it rejects a U.S.-brokered ceasefire proposal. As early as December 2023, polls showed more than 70 percent of Democrats supporting a permanent end to Israel’s assault. That helps to explain why, across the country, more than 650,000 Democrats of all backgrounds cast uncommitted, blank, or third-party votes in the party’s primary rather than support Biden.
If some of these voters had been looking for signs that Harris would break with Biden on Gaza, their hopes may have been permanently dashed on September 8, when her campaign released a long-awaited policy platform. Branded “A New Way Forward,” the set of proposals is anything but, hewing closely to Biden’s track record and promising that Harris would “always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” To opponents of Israel’s war on Gaza, that means more weapons transfers to prosecute what leading Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg has described as “undoubtedly” a genocide.
The ongoing slaughter of innocents in Gaza may matter less to most Americans than the economy or reproductive rights, but opponents of Israel’s war remain determined to hold the Biden Administration accountable for its refusal to press for an end to it. That this vocal minority resides in must-win states such as Michigan means that the Harris campaign may soon have no choice but to change course on Gaza. The latest polling numbers alone, which show Harris and Trump neck and neck, would suggest as much. After all, the number of Michiganders voting “uncommitted” in February (more than 100,000) was only slightly less than Biden’s margin of victory over Trump in the state in 2020.
For Palestinians and their supporters, ending the daily assault on Gaza—and, increasingly, on the neighboring West Bank—is about much more than winning the next election. It’s about saving lives and, with them, the possibility, however slim, of a more peaceful future.