Gaza May Have Cost Dems The Election

Do not blame pro-Palestinian folks. Blame Biden

Kamala Harris got about 67 million votes but in 2020 Joe Biden got over 81 million votes. That’s a gigantic drop. (Trump got over 72 million in 2024, a small decline from his 2020 total of 74 million.) Why did the Democratic vote total drop so massively? Why did millions of Dem voters stay home? One reason is Gaza. Millions of Democrats said over and over all year that they could not vote for genocide. They told us over and over that they could not in good conscience vote for an administration that was supporting a nation that was dropping bombs on Gaza. We told them that perspective would get Trump elected and that could end our democracy but no matter how apocalyptic Trump appears to us, the symbolic apocalypse he represents is nothing compared to the actual apocalypse happening right now in a country far away. If they say ‘I can’t vote for genocide’ and your answer is to say, well, Donald Trump will be even worse, then you’re missing the plot entirely. We asked them to fight against Trump while the Biden administration refused to fight on their behalf and funded the death of children. If you still can’t understand why they could never support an administration that is currently supporting genocide then you are part of the Democrat’s problem. But you may not understand precisely because you’re American.

Gaza may have cost Kamala the election—it wasn’t just Arab-Americans protesting in the streets and on college campuses all over the country for the first half of the year. Many Jewish voters also said they could not consider voting for genocide. It’s hard for many Americans to truly understand the pro-Palestinian position because most Americans can not even imagine another country dominating ours. But imagine that you came here from another country and even though you live here and you love America, your heart is still back there in the old country. And now another country is bombing your country and America is funding this bombing and the leadership of America is saying, sorry, we can’t do anything about the bombing but you have to vote for us because the fate of this country is on the line. But the fate of your home country is already on the line. And it’s on the line because of America but America cannot do anything about it. What?

People said, here’s what Trump will do to Gaza in the future, and they may be right but the pro-Palestinian folks are saying what is the US government doing in Gaza right now? In my prior piece about the election I said that on Tiktok many people had joked that this election was like asking people to choose between consuming a food that they disliked and consuming poison and sooo many voters heard that choice and said ‘I need more information.’ As if one of the options being poison was not enough information. It was so much fun to laugh at people who seemed to minimize the danger posed by Trump. They were so stupid, right? But what many Americans aren’t seeing is that for pro-Palestinian folks, it wasn’t a food that they disliked versus poison. It was poison versus poison—or genocide versus poison. How could they pick either? Dems are like ‘But the other side is poison!!!’ and they’re like ‘But so is your side.’ Dems told them that American democracy was at stake but if the current American democracy gives you a nation that’s supporting a war against a country you love, and they can’t do anything about it, then what good is that democracy to you?

Do not blame people for standing up and holding the Biden/Harris administration accountable. Blame the administration for being unable to push Netanyahu to stop attacking Gaza during an election year. Blame Biden and Harris for not seeing how powerful this pro-Palestinian movement is. They couldn’t even give one pro-Palestinian speaker a spot at the convention.

I heard some lefty on TV rationalizing all of this by pointing out how pro-Palestinian people protested at Kamala rallies but not at Trump rallies because they knew that Kamala might listen while they knew Trump would not. That, according to this person, meant that the pro-Palestinian folks knew they could talk to Kamala but that they could not talk to Trump so they should support Kamala because they could negotiate with her when she got into office. But that does not make sense—negotiating with America about ending genocide? For people who care about Palestine, the country they love is being bombed right now. They were talking to the Biden administration and it was not listening. It was listening to other marginalized groups that were not facing a military assault but the world’s policeman was unable or unwilling to stop the killing in Gaza. But you gotta vote for us. It’s hard to blame them for saying nah.

Foreign policy played a huge part in this election but somehow Trump was seen as the candidate of peace—because, supposedly, he’s so tough nothing would ever happen while he’s in the Oval Office—while Kamala had to carry the reputation of a President who was unable to stop the war in Gaza. It’s bizarre to see the electorate think of the Dems as the bellicose party and the Reps as the anti-war party because for decades the reputations have been opposite. In recent decades, Republicans have gotten us into many more wars—the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan—while Democrats fought mostly to try to pull us out.

The Dems are not the party of war but if they aren’t the party of peace then what are they? Biden can barely influence the Ukraine War, he has no leverage over Putin, but he has a lot of leverage over Netanyahu and still he couldn’t tell him to knock it off. The problem is not that pro-Palestinian people couldn’t accept the country being bombed. It’s that this administration was unable to stop it.