Detroit • For weeks, the signs did not look good for Kamala Harris in Michigan. Literally. A digital billboard on the side of a barn, which I saw while driving to Grayling, read, “Willie Brown Endorses Kamala,” a farmer’s snarky reminder of a chapter of Harris’ life — when she briefly dated the speaker of the California Assembly — that I’m pretty sure she’d prefer voters forget.
Even in Detroit, usually friendly territory for Democrats, I bumped into haters. The leader of a well-to-do neighborhood association told me that the way Harris got nominated resembled “entrapment.” And, at a street fair, I chatted with Tamika Daniels, an activist who was working to register formerly incarcerated people to vote. Daniels expressed skepticism about Harris because the vice president had once been a prosecutor.
There was no sign of such skepticism at the Harris rally near the Detroit airport last Wednesday, where roughly 15,000 excited people waited hours to see her. The crowd included recovering Republicans who had never been to a political rally before, United Auto Workers members in matching red shirts and Black sorority sisters dressed head to manicured toe in pink and green. Some of them mentioned experiencing the same magic they’d felt during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run, as they pondered the possibility of breaking another barrier — this time, the first female president. “I missed out on Obama,” Sheila Sigro, who runs the Wayne County beauty pageant, told me. “I didn’t want to miss out on history again.”
Those comparisons are both inspiring and worrying. Inspiring because it does matter that such barriers are broken, and worrying because it can tempt Democrats to focus on style and symbolism over substance. This risk is most evident, and most significant, on the issue of the Gaza Strip. There is perhaps no issue that divides the Democratic Party more than the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s retaliation following the brutal attack by Hamas on Oct. 7. If the Harris campaign is unable to address this thorny issue in a way that feels like substance, then Democrats may not get the unity they’ll need to win in November.
Nowhere is this question more salient than Michigan, a must win-state and home to one of the largest Arab American communities in the country. Arab Americans turned away from the Democratic Party in large numbers, outraged that President Joe Biden was spending their tax dollars to buy bombs that were killing their loved ones. To turn this outrage into political power, two Detroit-based Democratic organizers, Abbas Alawieh and Layla Elabed, co-founded a movement in Michigan to convince people to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries as a way to show their displeasure with Biden and demonstrate their electoral strength. It quickly grew into a national effort.
More than 100,000 Michigan voters cast “uncommitted” ballots — not enough to change the outcome of the primary, since Biden had virtually no competition — but enough that the party could not afford to ignore them. Alawieh says 30 members of the Uncommitted National Movement, including himself, earned delegate spots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week. The group is pushing for the DNC to allow Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a doctor who recently spent two weeks in Gaza, to address the convention, which seems like the least the party can do to show they take the suffering of Palestinians seriously. In Michigan, a state that Donald Trump won by a little more than 10,000 votes in 2016, these voters could be crucial. One of the biggest questions of this election is whether Harris can win any of them back.
For some, there’s probably nothing she could do to earn forgiveness. Floyd Merwan Beydoun, a UAW member, got his hopes up briefly after Harris began her presidential campaign, when he saw a clip of Harris saying that too many lives have been lost in Gaza. But then he saw her repeating the old mantra about Israel’s right to defend itself after Israel killed a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, and Beydoun was done. He says he’s voting for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. “I know she doesn’t have a chance,” he told me. But he’s voting for her anyway because she “believes in peace.”
The founders of the uncommitted movement say they want to help Harris get elected. But unless she gives them a significant policy win, they will not be able to justify their support, nor will they be able to mobilize their communities to vote.
“I want to be right there with my fellow Democrats, oozing enthusiasm about Tim Walz and what’s the latest with the campaign,” Alawieh told me. But as he gets campaign updates, he says he is “simultaneously getting updates from my family members in Southern Lebanon who are checking in on each other because of the last bomb that dropped.”
Calling for a cease-fire, which Harris has done, is not enough.
“We’ve seen a huge shift in language — when she talks about Palestinian right to self-determination,” Elabed told me. “But Palestinian children can’t eat words. Words are not going to make their limbs grow back.” She wants Harris to commit to an arms embargo that might actually force Israel to moderate its behavior.
That demand is a tall order, since pro-Israel groups are also a major force in Democratic politics. Calling for an arms embargo would spark outrage and dramatically change long-standing American policy toward Israel.
Harris has said she does not support an arms embargo, but Alawieh hasn’t given up. He used to serve as chief of staff for Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri — an unapologetic supporter of Palestinian rights — and before that, he was legislative director for Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first Palestinian American to serve in Congress, who is also Elabed’s sister. During those years, he said, he worked with Harris’ staff in the Senate. “I know that she has relationships with Arab Americans and Muslim Americans and Palestinian Americans,” he told me.
But this request comes at a time when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is targeting some of the most outspoken defenders of Palestinian rights. Bush, Alawieh’s old boss, lost her primary race on Tuesday to a challenger who got a boost from an AIPAC-supported super political action committee that spent more than $8 million on the race.
Earlier this year, at the height of the campus protests about Gaza, meeting or at least acknowledging protesters’ demands wasn’t just the right thing to do, it also appeared to be the politically savvy thing for Democrats to do. That notion is looking shakier now, as two members of Congress who supported Gaza protesters, Bush and Jamaal Bowman of New York, lost primary challenges.
Some Democrats, in the name of unity, wish that the Gaza protesters would simply shut up. Nonetheless, protesters continue to heckle the Harris campaign, fueled by the righteous fury that bubbles up after each new report of tortured prisoners, buried babies, and soldiers celebrating the destruction of homes in Gaza. Harris managed to quickly dismiss them when they interrupted her rally speech in Detroit, but she will not be able to so easily dismiss the shocking reality against which they are protesting. Failing to adequately address protesters’ valid outrage could cause Democrats’ newfound party unity to quickly unravel.
How can Democrats speak of the importance of freedom — as Harris does so eloquently — while turning a blind eye to the imprisonment of Palestinian civilians in a strip of land that has become a living hell?
How can Democrats insist that “America is not for sale” to billionaires — as speakers did at that rally — and not be disturbed by the role that money played in knocking Bush out of a congressional seat?
How can the party uphold equality as a treasured value while defending a system that renders Palestinians as a permanent underclass? These questions must be wrestled with at the convention, and until a more humane answer is found.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
