Mitchell Plitnick
Mondoweiss / November 9, 2024
The cause of Kamala Harris’ disastrous failure in the 2024 presidential election will forever be debated, but there are good reasons to believe the Israeli genocide in Gaza played a significant role.
Why did Kamala Harris lose the 2024 presidential election?
There is no shortage of answers to this question, most of them self-affirming and offered up to serve whatever agenda the pundit in question is trying to advance. That is certainly what you’re seeing now on CNN and MSNBC.
Voters who want something better in future elections than the awful choice we had this year must try to be more honest. But that honesty should not be false modesty either. We need to accurately assess our strength and power, not overstate nor understate it.
The question of the United States’ Middle East policy is not a simple one. There can be no doubt that Mideast policy, especially regarding the genocide in Gaza, played a profound role in this campaign. But can we say that Harris lost this race because of Gaza?
Disappearing votes
The most telling fact in this race is the drop in voter turnout. Trump is currently about 700,000 votes short of his 2020 tally, and when the smoke clears, he is likely to be right around the 74.2 million votes he got four years ago.
But Harris as compared to Joe Biden in 2020 is a different story. She currently has just over 69 million votes. That number may grow a bit when the counting is done, but it is going to be well short of Biden’s 81.2 million votes in 2020.
Where did the votes go? Not to the Green Party, which only increased its tally by about 300,000 votes. No, those were voters who didn’t vote in the presidential race at all.
Donald Trump is the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004 and the first non-incumbent to do so since 1988. That’s despite the very real threat of authoritarianism he brings, his history of sexual assault, his dozens of felony convictions for corruption, and all the debacles of his prior presidency that are too numerous to list here.
So was it because of Gaza ?
Many academic articles and books will doubtless be written about the 2024 election. Theories will emerge, but the cause of Harris’ disastrous failure will forever be debated. Still, there are good reasons to believe the Middle East in general and Gaza in particular played a significant role.
When voter turnout is this depressed, it is not due to apathy, but to disillusionment. This lack of turnout for Harris doesn’t mean people don’t recognize the threat Trump represents; it means they don’t see Harris as the right answer and they resent being forced to choose not just the lesser evil, but a candidate so distasteful that voting for her is inconceivable, even if the alternative is worse.
There’s more than one issue that reflects how terrible a candidate Harris is and how downright horrible her campaign was. These include immigration, the economy (where she repeatedly told people struggling to pay their rent how good they have it in this “Bidenomics paradise”), her embrace of war criminal Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, and other points. We also must not discount the effect misogyny and racism might have had on some voters.
But no factor was so stark as Gaza and the approach to Israel. That doesn’t necessarily mean Gaza was the decisive factor; indeed, no single factor was decisive, and several, had they been different, might have led to a different outcome. But Gaza became a symbol for all of them.
Harris made it clear from the outset that she had no intention of moving away from Biden’s genocidal policies in Gaza. While her marketing team kept filling social and mainstream media with whispers suggesting she was really trying behind the scenes to modify those policies, in public she didn’t just double down on the policies, she used Biden’s talking points, often even quoting Biden’s or Antony Blinken’s common lines verbatim.
While the bipartisan Washington foreign policy blob largely backed all-out support for Israel, Democratic voters wanted a ceasefire and certainly wanted the United States to stop supporting the devastation in Gaza. That disconnect was at least as important as objections to the policy itself.
Voters are nervous about the Mideast conflict. They are worried about it spreading, drawing the U.S. in and possibly then also involving the other major powers in NATO, Russia, and China, giving them two wars that are scaring them. The possibility of confrontation with China over Taiwan only adds fuel to this fire, and the Democrats have shown themselves to be a warmongering party.
When people protested the continuing support for Israel’s genocide, Harris’ response was “I’m speaking.” It’s hard to imagine a better example of Democrats showing themselves as self-important, uncaring, and entitled than that response. In effect, Harris told everyone who cares about Palestine to just shut up about genocide and defer to her.
Harris undermined her own appeal
Harris’ consistent defense of genocide undermined the messages she was trying to win with.
Harris’ main campaign point was how awful Donald Trump is going to be. She’s not wrong, even when it comes to Middle East policy. But it’s a meaningless argument when the ostensibly “lesser evil” is a full partner in the most brutal, sadistic, and massive genocide of the 21st century. That’s a lesser evil that is too awful to support.
Harris’ policy strengths were women’s rights and LGBTQIA rights. The latter was downplayed throughout her campaign even though Trump was going after sexual and gender minorities in the most hateful way imaginable.
But her stance on women’s rights, which was prominent throughout the campaign, was undermined by Harris’ approach to Gaza. How, people asked, can she legitimately argue for reproductive freedom, for the right for women to control their own bodies when she is supporting a military onslaught that has made it impossible for women to get pre- or post-natal care, to care for themselves while pregnant, or to care for newborn infants? Worse, how could she argue for women’s rights when she was so enthusiastic about killing civilians in Gaza that she was depriving women of the most basic right: the right to live?
Harris tried to sell a “campaign of joy,” contrasting it with Trump’s campaign of grievances and hate. For the sycophantic “Blue no matter who” crowd, this might have been effective. But for the voters she was trying to win over, Harris’ message was tone deaf. Where was the joy in Palestine? How can we claim to rejoice in our politics when the politician we are supposed to be backing is a full partner in genocide? That is unacceptable to anyone with a conscience.
But I thought voters don’t vote based on foreign policy ?
Those of us who have made foreign policy our careers know very well that Americans rarely pay any attention to our foreign policy and never vote on that basis unless U.S. troops are being killed overseas in significant numbers, as they were in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam.
Gaza and Palestine haven’t precisely changed that. While Palestine solidarity activists certainly weighed Gaza and Lebanon very heavily in their voting, few people, relatively speaking, voted based solely on the genocide in Gaza.
But, because of the depth of American involvement, the horror of the brutal massacres Israel is committing on a daily basis, and, crucially, the extent to which people can see this unfolding on their phones, Gaza became a symbol for the lack of substance among the Democrats and their manifest policy failures. The Democrats’ response to the horror their own constituents have expressed at what we are doing in Gaza produced a revulsion that alienated many voters.
Protests against the genocide have included much more visible participation and statements of support from national groups, like the NAACP and trade unions. AIPAC has become the symbol of everything wrong with American politics, lobbying, and campaign financing.
Kamala Harris’s campaign completely missed this reality. The result was that her support among 18-29 year old voters dropped from Biden’s 60% in 2020 to 55% while Trump’s support surged from 36% in 2020 to 42% this year, largely on the strength of how many voters in that age group simply didn’t vote for either candidate.
Everything about Harris’s attitude toward Palestine and Palestinians contributed to a broader sense of hopelessness. Palestine solidarity activists could vote for Harris, but she sent the message that nothing would improve even if they did. So they didn’t.
Gaza was the most visible issue that created the frustration and disillusionment with the Democrats that suppressed turnout in support of Kamala Harris, but it was not the only one. Democrats’ draconian stance on immigration was another factor. The minimization of the struggles that people have making ends meet from month to month, where Democrats kept telling those people that they were too stupid to understand how good the economy really was and burying the reality that it was still very bad for the majority of Americans was likely the single biggest factor.
Gaza became the symbol for all of these failures. In no regard was Harris’s unwillingness to listen to her own constituents clearer. The 77% of Democrats who want a ceasefire also know the United States can get one by demanding it from Israel on pain of stopping the arms flow. Harris’s gaslighting on this issue, claiming that they were “working for a ceasefire” when it is quite clear they are unwilling to take any substantive action toward one, highlighted her shallowness on other issues.
More than that, it highlighted a dearth of ethics and empathy for unimaginable suffering. That was supposed to be what differentiated her from Trump. Instead, Harris demonstrated that she was just as cynical and heartless as Trump is, she just wasn’t going to be so open about it.
Harris was unwilling to even pretend to care about the people of Gaza or about the votes of Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab Americans.
It would have been a simple matter to accommodate the Uncommitted Movement and have a moderate Palestinian speaker at the DNC. Some pro-Israel groups might have objected, but it would have gone away quickly, and no one was going to cut off their donations, much less divert them to Republicans, in response. But Harris said no.
Harris was handed an opportunity by Biden’s own Secretaries of Defense and State when they issued their letter warning Israel to get into compliance with U.S. law. Of course, everyone knew it was a bluff and Israel, rather than ignoring it, doubled down on its barring of food and humanitarian aid in Gaza.
But Harris could have made a public statement supporting the statement and say that as president she would expect all countries to abide by these provisions of U.S. law. Most of us would be extremely sceptical of the truth of such a statement, but it would at least have provided some hope that she might at least be a little better than Biden.
Harris wasn’t interested in giving the slightest nod to progressives. She refused to even hint that there might be a reason to vote for her beyond her not being Trump when it comes to the Middle East. That refusal was a symbol for her failures on other issues that have personal resonance for many American voters.
So she didn’t get the progressive votes that she made no effort to secure, and she lost. Gaza was far from the only reason. But it was a meaningful part of the explanation, and it was emblematic of the train wreck of a campaign that left us with an authoritarian president that presents a danger to the entire world.
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy; he is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
