“Do we want to put our foot down and show that we can swing an election or do we want to rubber stamp the party that has been funding our genocide in the name of avoiding Donald Trump?”
Those were the words of Amer Zahr, a Palestinian-American law professor and comedian whom I met less than two weeks before the US presidential election. We were in Dearborn, Michigan, the city often referred to as the Arab-American capital of the United States, located in the southeast part of one of the country’s most crucial swing states.
Zahr had added, “Her (Harris) losing is the only way to get the Democrats to understand us and respect us and listen to us.”
As the dust settles on the 2024 US presidential election, there will be much debate and discussion on the role of Gaza in the election. The Biden administration, in which Kamala Harris has served as Vice President, has had an undeniable role in aiding and abetting Israel’s unrestrained rampage in Gaza. How much did that hurt her chances of becoming the next president of the United States?
It is a fair question to ask, but one that needs a closer look instead of rushed judgments based on ideological positions. To be done well, the examination must include an analysis of election data, insights from the ground, and perspectives from voters for whom this issue was a deciding or clinching factor, or even a contributing one, and their strength in the key states that determined the outcome of this election. I will attempt to approach this analysis with these aspects in mind.
Israel is in the Wrong. Period.
The Protest Votes That Cost Harris Dearly in Michigan
Let’s begin by looking at Dearborn, and Michigan.
Joe Biden had won Michigan in 2020 by a margin of less than 160,000 votes. In Dearborn, a city with a population of a little over 100,000, more than half of the city’s residents identify as having Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) ancestry. The Arab and Muslim populations there, like most across the country, have traditionally largely voted blue. Four years ago, they helped Biden get elected.
This time around, many of those voters felt alienated by, and angry at, the Democratic party. In conversations prior to the election, a majority of Arab and Muslim voters I spoke to in Michigan said they would refuse to vote for Harris. When asked about how they would feel if that helped Trump return to the White House, many would say that it couldn’t get worse. Like Dr Ali Dabaja, a 43-year-old Lebanese-American critical care physician in southeast Michigan, who told me, “I don’t think it can get worse than a genocide.”
In 2024, Donald Trump won Michigan by less than 80,000 votes. In Dearborn, with its large proportion of Arab voters, Kamala Harris won only 36% of the vote and trailed Donald Trump by more than 6 percentage points. Third-party presidential candidate Jill Stein won 18% of the votes cast, thanks primarily to her position that “the US government stop supporting the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza”.
In Hamtramck, which is said to have become the US’ first majority-Muslim city a little over a decade ago, the Democrats went from Biden winning 85.4% of the votes in 2020 to Harris winning 46.2% of the votes in 2024.
In Wayne County, where Dearborn, Hamtramck and neighbouring Detroit are located, Biden secured a lead of more than 330,000 votes over Trump in 2020, more than twice the margin by which he won the state. The county, which is Michigan’s most populous and also has the highest percentage of residents identifying as being of Middle Eastern or North African descent among all US counties (7.8%), saw a drop in 5.7% vote share for the Democrats between 2020 and 2024. That’s 60,589 votes fewer, in a state that Trump has now won by a margin of less than 80,000 votes.
In a clear demonstration of how the anger over Gaza was specifically targeted at Harris, compared to Harris winning 48% of the votes in Michigan, Palestinian-American Democrat Rashida Tlaib won her House race in the state with 70% of the vote share.
Micho Assi, a 40-year-old Lebanese American in Dearborn, has worked as a Democratic community organiser for the past eight years. Yet, this time around, when she went door-knocking for the Democrats, Assi said she did not have the courage or the audacity to ask them to vote for Harris. “I tell them, ‘Use your own conscience on who you want to vote for.’” Instead, she focused on persuading them to vote Democrat in down-ballot races, with the hope of keeping the state legislature blue.
Like Assi, one in four individuals of MENA descent in Michigan have Lebanese roots. Like her, many of them have friends, relatives and family members in Lebanon, even as the country continues to get attacked by Israel.
So, did the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel bombing Gaza and Lebanon make a difference in Michigan? It surely and unequivocally did.
If you were following the coverage on election night, the results might have appeared extremely one-sided. After all, Trump won all seven of the seven key swing states. But let’s take a look at his actual victory margins in these states.
Several of these are small margins given the voting populations of these states. And these could have potentially been overcome by Kamala Harris and the Democrats.
Admittedly, there were many reasons unrelated to foreign policy that contributed towards Trump having an edge in the battleground states—Harris’ baggage from Biden’s overall unpopularity and low approval ratings, ongoing economic grievances over inflation, and a widespread discontent among large sections of voters on immigration.
In July, for instance, a Gallup report said that there had been a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who wanted a curb on immigration to the US. The report stated, “Significantly more US adults than a year ago, 55% versus 41%, would like to see immigration to the US decreased. This is the first time since 2005 that a majority of Americans have wanted there to be less immigration, and today’s figure is the largest percentage holding that view since a 58% reading in 2001.”
Though Trump and his vice-presidential pick JD Vance advanced racist anti-immigration rhetoric and conspiracy theories at certain points in the campaign, their overall emphasis on immigration seemed to resonate with a growing section of voters, and definitely energised the Republican base.
So, Gaza was by no means the only factor that helped Trump edge past Harris in the election.
Yet, despite these other issues, the margins between Harris and Trump weren’t all that much in the states where it mattered most. And a change of stance on Gaza in the months prior to the election could have prevented the Democrats from losing the support of a large chunk of Arab and Muslim voters, demographics that have largely voted blue in past elections.
This is true not just for Michigan—other swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona also have Muslims at an estimated 1% of the state’s population, according to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study a decade ago. While 1% in and of itself might seem like a small number, 1% of the 6.9 million votes cast in Pennsylvania this election would be around 69,000 votes.
Again, not all those votes would have been lost by Harris, but all of these numbers taken together give a sense of the scale of impact that the widespread disaffection for the Democrats among Arab and Muslim communities across the country likely caused.
In September, polling conducted by the Arab American Institute found 42 percent of Arab American respondents supporting Trump and 41 percent supporting Harris. Compare this against the AP’s Votecast survey in 2020 which pegged Biden as having received 63% of Muslim votes overall that year.
Not Just Arab and Muslim Voters
The Gaza impact wasn’t limited to just Arab and Muslim voters. As early as March 2024, a YouGov poll commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) showed that 62 percent of respondents who voted for Biden in 2020 agreed with the statement, “The US should stop weapons shipments to Israel until Israel discontinues its attacks on the people of Gaza,” while just 14 percent disagreed. Twenty-four percent of self-identified Biden voters remained unsure at the time. There were several such polls that showed similar results.
In another insightful YouGov poll conducted in July and August and commissioned by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding Policy Project, respondents in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel.
In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said so, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. In Arizona, 35% said they’d be more likely, and 5% said they would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they’d be more likely, and 5% said they would be less likely.
If Harris intended to win over other votes, including those from members of the Jewish community, by refusing to publicly place any conditions on her support for Israel, it is worth noting that an election day poll showed that 62% of Jewish voters surveyed would support the United States withholding shipment of some weapons to Israel until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agrees to an American proposal for an immediate ceasefire. 66% of Jewish voters surveyed said they would like to see US sanctions against far-right ministers in his cabinet. The election survey was conducted by GBAO Strategies on behalf of J Street, a pro-Israel lobby.
At college and university campuses across the country, as pro-Palestine protests continued over the greater part of the past year, large numbers of young protesters have been non-Muslim, non-Arab students. There has been a sizeable section of Jewish pro-Palestine protesters as well, part of groups such as Jewish Voice For Peace (JVP). The politics of many of these young American voters who protested for Palestinian rights run contrary to a lot of the values that Donald Trump stands for, and the rhetoric he espouses.
In recent elections, Democrats have relied heavily on the support and turnout of such young, university-going voters to not just vote for them, but also to get out the vote. Getting young voters energised has been key to the Democrats’ mobilising efforts, and they have played a crucial part in ‘get out the vote’ initiatives and in improving the Democrats’ ground game.
In 2020, the National Election Pool’s exit poll showed 60% of voters aged between 18 to 29 years to have voted for Biden. In 2024, that number dropped to 54% for Harris.
I was at Howard University in Washington, DC on election night, the venue where Vice President Kamala Harris was expected to make a speech had the results gone well for her. There, I met a young woman voter from Connecticut who goes to college in DC, trudging out of the watch party hosted by the Harris campaign, as the results began to clearly favour Trump.
On being asked where she thought the Harris campaign had gone wrong or things it had faltered on, 20-year-old Hailey Nims immediately responded, “Not reaching out enough to Arab voters with the war in Gaza.” Even if Gaza wasn’t her top issue for the election, she empathised with those for whom it was.
As a recent graduate who has covered campus protests in Columbia University and elsewhere in New York over the past year, the developments in Gaza played a role in the relative reduction of young voters being overly enthused about the Democratic party in this election. (Remember, while New York is a blue state that is of lesser significance to the outcome of a presidential election, American students at these campuses hail from different parts of the country, and many choose to vote in their home states.)
Broken down by education and race, white voters with college degrees favored Biden in 2020 (51%) and Harris in 2024 (52%) similarly. But Harris’ support among voters of colour with college degrees went down by 5 percentage points compared to Biden, from 70% in 2020 to 65% in 2024.
A Campaign of 'Joy'
There were many things about the responses by the Biden-Harris administration and the Harris campaign to the crisis in the Middle East that angered voters for whom this was an election issue, voters who took strong opposition to the manner in which Israel has attacked Palestine, Lebanon and other countries in the region over the past year.
Their hollow assurances of “working tirelessly towards a ceasefire” while continuing the supply of seemingly unconditional military aid to Israel. Their refusals to censure Israel despite the growing reams of evidence of the Israeli army conducting gross violations of human rights. The Biden administration saying “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting” aid, even though the US government’s own two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance had made conclusions to the contrary in their assessments.
Former US president Bill Clinton going to Michigan and making statements like “I got news for (Hamas)—(Israelis) were there first, before their faith existed” and “Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians. They’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.” Kamala Harris attempting to silence pro-Palestine protesters at one of her rallies in Michigan by saying, “You know what—if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that—otherwise, I’m speaking.”
The list goes on, as does the endless stream of photos and videos from Gaza on social media, showing in graphic detail the everyday death and destruction caused upon the Palestinians. There were voters who cared deeply about Gaza who woke up to those images, and went to bed with them in mind, only to be told by the candidate who currently serves as Vice President of the United States that her administration was doing all it could to end the killing, while it sent across the bombs that did the killing. And in the midst of this all, Kamala Harris chose to run a campaign supposedly focused on ‘joy’.
Did she really expect all of those opposed to her government’s actions in the Middle East to come out and vote for her?
Whether it was the India Shining campaign of the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2004 or Harris’ campaign of joy in 2024, gaslighting voters—be it on foreign policy or their economic conditions—is a strategy that will invariably hit upon electoral hurdles. And on 5 November 2024, it did just that.
The writing, one could argue therefore, was truly on the wall all along this election cycle. If only one cared to look.
(Meghnad Bose is an award-winning multimedia journalist based in New York. He is a former Deputy Editor of The Quint. Views are personal)
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