News AnalysisGaza didn’t cost Harris the election. But her approach pointed to a broader problem
Pro-Palestinian organizers say the problem was her focus on courting moderates, including Republicans, rather than motivating the party’s left flank
Chairs and trash sit in an empty field after the Harris election night watch party at Howard University Tuesday. Photo by Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld November 6, 2024
After failing to convince Vice President Kamala Harris to break with the Biden administration’s sustained support for Israel when she became the Democratic nominee for president this summer, prominent Palestinian American activists and their allies encouraged supporters to back her anyway.
The Uncommitted National Movement, which had galvanized some 700,000 Democratic voters to reject President Joe Biden during the primaries, called on its followers to cast “anti-Trump” votes. Rabbis for Ceasefire urged progressive Jews to vote and volunteer in swing states. Mark Ruffalo, the actor and Israel critic, warned on the day before the election that Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who courted anti-Zionists, “had no credibility or ability to be president.”
These appeals may have softened the Election Day impact of voters angry at Harris over her position on the Israel-Hamas war, given that polls have found about half of Democrats describe what is happening in Gaza as genocide. But she did bleed significant support in regions with large concentrations of Arab and Muslim voters, like Dearborn, Michigan, where Trump’s share of the vote grew from 30% in 2020 to more than 42% on Tuesday, and Stein, whose campaign uniform included a kaffiyeh, got 18%.
Allentown, Pennsylvania, a ward home to many Syrian Americans, saw support for Harris drop nearly 15% compared to the share that backed Biden four years ago.
In the end, the election was not close enough for the war to be a decisive factor. Results and exit polls released Wednesday showed Trump gaining ground over his 2020 performance in nearly every part of every state and virtually every demographic group. She is poised to lose all seven battleground states, two of them by more than 5 percentage points, and the national popular vote by about 5 million votes.
But Harris’ unwillingness to make serious concessions to voters unhappy with her position on Israel was indicative of a broader failure to make a convincing appeal to the left flank of the Democratic Party. On immigration, the economy and other issues, her campaign seemed more focused on persuading independents and moderate Republicans who do not trust Trump than with motivating the base and turning out new, young, activist voters.
“There aren’t 20 million Arab and Muslim votes,” Abbas Alawieh, one of the Uncommitted movement’s founders, said at a press conference in Dearborn, Michigan, on Wednesday morning. “This is a big problem for the Democrats that’s bigger than any one issue.”
Eva Borgwardt, a spokesperson for IfNotNow, a Jewish group that has been campaigning against the war, pointed to various polls that showed overwhelming support — and scant opposition — to the U.S. placing conditions on its military aid to Israel, something that Harris only ever hinted that she was open to doing.
“The campaign’s approach on Gaza was similar to their approach on other issues, in terms of ignoring the overwhelming concerns of the base to court a white, Republican constituency that was always very unlikely to vote for them,” Borgwardt said in an interview.
But this effort, which included embracing former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, does not seem to have succeeded. Early exit polls showed Harris winning around 5% of self-identified Republicans nationally, slightly below the number who backed Biden in 2020.
Regarding the war, part of the challenge for Harris was that she faced criticism — and potential bleeding — from both sides. Many pro-Israel Democrats worried that her expressions of outrage regarding Palestinian suffering meant she would be tougher on Israel than Biden, and Trump’s campaign worked hard to win them over.
Democratic Majority for Israel, a political action committee that seeks to root out opposition to Israel within the party, circulated a memo on Tuesday night highlighting polling that showed 67% of swing-state voters had a favorable view of Israel and said that “focusing on the small number of Muslim voters who may defect from Democrats” would have backfired for Harris.
Steve Sheffey, who writes a popular political newsletter about Israel, argued that Gaza was not a liability for Harris, and might have boosted her support among Jewish voters.
“Being pro-Israel is good politics and it’s good policy and the fact that Kamala Harris lost does not disprove that,” Sheffey said. “The vast majority of Democrats, like the vast majority of Americans, support Israel.”
It’s not entirely clear yet what percentage of Jewish voters cast ballots for Harris, or whether Israel played more of a role in their decision-making this year than usual because of the war.
The two leading Election Day exit polls showed starkly different results. Fox News, using data from The Associated Press, estimated that 66% of Jews voted for Harris, three points lower than Biden received in 2020. A poll commissioned by a consortium of national news outlets, conducted in 10 competitive states — and not including the heavily Jewish New York and California — said it was 79%. A third poll, by GBAO Strategies on behalf of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, put the figure at 71%, down from the 77% of the Jewish vote that Biden won in 2020.
Critics of Harris’ support for the Gaza war said they hope that Democratic soul-searching following Tuesday’s devastating loss would include a serious review of the party’s approach to Israel, pointing to the fact that the vice president underperformed other Democrats in areas like Dearborn where the war loomed large.
For example, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a staunch critic of both Israel and Trump, easily won the city. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Jewish Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Michigan, outperformed Harris in Dearborn by nearly 5 points and edged out her Republican opponent in the city.
“These aren’t right-wing fascist voters,” Lexis Zeidan, another leader of the uncommitted movement, said of the voters who had turned on Harris over Israel. “It didn’t have to be this way.”
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