From start to finish, Palestinians became a target, and candidates were only interested in maintaining the status quo.
Since the war in Gaza began, the threat of a protest vote — in which voters would choose to abstain from the presidential election or vote for third-party candidates who had no shot of winning — hung over Democrats’ heads because of President Joe Biden’s unconditional support for Israel and its right-wing government. When Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee, her lack of willingness to distance herself from Biden on this issue didn’t help alleviate that threat. Meanwhile, Donald Trump accused Democrats of not being sufficiently pro-Israel.
Throughout the election, pro-Palestinian voters tried to put pressure on President Biden to change course, organizing protests on college campuses across the country and forming various campaigns to punish him at the ballot box. One group, the Uncommitted National Movement, asked Democratic voters to cast their ballots for “uncommitted” instead of Biden during the primaries, and they amassed hundreds of thousands of votes — enough to secure delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
But no matter how much pro-Palestinian voters pushed candidates to give them a better vision for how to end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, none were willing to meaningfully address the concerns of pro-Palestinian voters. And for Americans who regarded Gaza as one of their top concerns, their choice boiled down to either punishing Democrats or stopping Trump. The result was an election in which neither outcome would have been a win for Palestinians.
While it’s impossible to point to any single issue to explain why Harris lost to Trump, it’s clear that Harris lost at least some voters because of the Biden administration’s stance on Gaza. And now Trump, who vowed to ban Palestinian refugees from entering the United States and said he would revoke visas from foreign students who are deemed antisemitic, is the president-elect. Voters wanted an actual plan to stop the war. Candidates weren’t interested.
When it came to which candidate had a better vision for how to end the war in Gaza, neither Biden, Harris, nor Trump offered a compelling message.
President Biden offered Israel unqualified support, sending billions of dollars in military aid. His administration defended Israel even as it committed horrific war crimes, including hospital bombings. Instead of reckoning with the rapidly rising death toll in Gaza, he cast doubt on the numbers that the Gaza Ministry of Health had put out — numbers that humanitarian groups and even the US government had deemed reliable in the past.
At times, Harris, after she became the Democratic nominee, tried calling out Israel for the staggering death toll, saying that “far too many” civilians had been killed and emphasizing that how Israel conducted itself during this war mattered.
