Vice President Kamala Harris had just 107 days as a presidential candidate to change the minds of hundreds of thousands of “uncommitted” Democratic primary voters nationwide, many of whom voted in protest of President Joe Biden and his administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
But leaders from the Uncommitted National Movement and the “abandon Harris” campaign say they felt Harris didn’t do enough to distance herself from Biden or outline how she’d handle the war differently.
And now, they’re closely watching President-elect Donald Trump’s early moves on the Middle East and specifically on Gaza to see what comes next.
“There’s been many ways in which Harris chose the path of Liz Cheney and the donor class on a range of issues, and abandoning working families in places like Dearborn, who make up the people Democrats claim to be fighting for,” said Uncommitted National Movement co-founder Layla Elabed, a Palestinian American activist and the sister of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. “And I think at the same time, Trump came in and fed a community that was grieving and in despair with lies and false promises.”
Trump ultimately ended up carrying Dearborn, Michigan, a majority-Arab American city, by more than 6 percentage points — a massive swing from Biden’s nearly 40-point win there in 2020. But most Dearborn voters also voted against Trump, who got about 43% support in a deeply split field.
Elabed decided not to vote at the top of the ticket this year and focused instead on down ballot races.
“We provided Democrats with a pathway for victory and a way to unite the party and they spent 10 months ignoring us and berating us,” Elabed said.
When Elabed and other leaders from the Uncommitted National Movement briefly met Harris in person last summer, she told the candidate she wanted to be able to vote for her and asked Harris to talk with activists about how to change her policy toward the Middle East. She said Harris seemed receptive in that moment, but another official meeting never panned out.
“She never came to Dearborn. She never came to speak to families that were first-hand impacted by our US policy decisions that ultimately killed their family members,” Elabed said.
About a month before the election, Harris met with Muslim and Arab American community leaders in Flint, Michigan ahead of a rally there. Also in October, her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz held a virtual meeting with a Muslim organizing group called Emgage Action.
A former Harris campaign official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal campaign deliberations, said that after Oct. 7, the vice president spoke to Palestinian Americans who were in Gaza when the war started and who had to be evacuated as well as with doctors who had returned from Gaza. Harris herself described speaking with those who lost loved ones in Gaza during remarks in December 2023.
Elabed said she feels crushed by the reality of four years of the Trump administration’s policies toward Israel.
“I’m absolutely devastated. I’m devastated for our country. It makes me so angry and frustrated that it didn’t have to be this way, because all of — we provided the warning signs on a silver platter,” Elabed said.
Bryarr Misner, who grew up Christian, converted to Judaism, and later to Islam, worked as a campaign manager for the Abandon Harris campaign in Pittsburgh. Unlike Elabed, he ultimately voted for Trump. And he expressed similar frustration about a lack of access to members of Harris’ team, which he said felt demeaning.
“We tried negotiations. We tried to reach out, to no avail. You know, they never reached out,” he said, adding later, “We went through multiple avenues to try to be heard, and instead we were ridiculed.”
Misner said it was a difficult decision to vote for Trump. He said the point of the Abandon Harris campaign was to punish the Democrats for supporting Israel during its war in Gaza, which the campaigners view as a genocide, and he hopes the Trump campaign will be more willing to negotiate with group leaders. (Israel’s government and the U.S. government have rejected accusations of genocide.)
“President Trump, he continuously came and he was in the community. While I don’t believe that he’s going to enact policies that will benefit the community, he at least showed that he was willing to show up for the community,” Misner said.
The former Harris campaign official said groups like the Abandon Harris movement demanded that Harris call for an immediate arms embargo and her campaign wasn’t willing to do so.
Palestinian American policy analyst and writer Abdelhalim Abdelrahman said there were similar feelings of inaccessibility and unresponsiveness in Michigan.
“I think the most insulting aspect of it is that the uncommitted movement and other grassroots movements here in Michigan did all they could to extend an olive branch to Kamala Harris and the Democrats, to have Kamala Harris sit down with them, listen to their pain and advocate for an arms embargo,” Abdelrahman said. “And just it was a simple request of enforcing US law, and they were rebuffed, and they were treated as criminals, and they were alienated from the supposed big tent party of the Democratic Party.”
Abdelrahman said Harris never managed to proactively present policy positions about ending the war or advocating for Palestinians to satisfy a critical part of her constituency and that her overall strategy often seemed reactionary to Trump.
“I think the biggest problem is that your messaging to Arab Americans can’t just be ‘Trump’s a fascist, Trump is Hitler. Big, scary orange man, vote for me.’ Part of being a part of the American political system is being able to separate yourself from your opponent and lay out a better vision. And she did not do that,” Abdelrahman said.
He expressed tempered optimism about Massad Boulos, Trump’s pick for Middle East adviser (and the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany).
“It really seems like Massad Boulos, the Lebanese Christian who facilitated his Arab American outreach in Michigan, is going to have a little bit more of operational freedom than people realize in this administration and I think that could help offset the likes of Mike Huckabee,” Abdelrahman said, referring to Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel. “It’s scary, but I’m not ready to jump the gun just yet.”
“I expect to see a lot of pro-Israel rhetoric, but seeing a little bit more diplomacy,” he said of Trump’s overall strategy in the Middle East.
Farah Khan, a co-chair of the Abandon Harris campaign in Michigan, said she’s been a lifelong Democrat, but not anymore. She viewed voting against Harris as a moral issue as the war continues to unfold.
“Anybody with their right mind would not go back to the Democrats, because they have not shown any change, and they’re going to have to work really, really hard to win their votes back,” Khan said.
Khan said Harris didn’t do enough to reverse course in terms of messaging or policy from the Biden administration’s handling of the war. Ultimately, she voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party.
“[Harris] says, ‘Oh, yeah, I feel bad.’ And the next day, they send billions of dollars again in weapons. I mean, you can’t even fool kids like this nowadays, let alone grown people who are your constituents, your voters,” Khan said.
“She could have at least called for a ceasefire,” Khan said. (Harris repeatedly called for a cease-fire during her campaign, including during her Democratic convention speech.) “She could have sent aid, she could have pressured Israel to let the aid in — she did not. She did nothing of that sort. And yet she kept saying that, you know, we’re working around the clock. If you’re working around the clock and this is the outcome, then we definitely don’t want you in the office.”
The former Harris campaign official pointed to Harris’ December 2023 trip to Dubai, where Harris said international humanitarian law must be respected and advocated for a two-state solution. Inside the administration, the official said, Harris pushed on humanitarian and civilian casualty issues.
The official argued that there was alignment between what Harris and the Muslim and Arab American communities were fighting for, but not enough time for people to fully understand her stance.
Khan believes many Muslim and Arab American voters picked Trump in protest — not because they liked him but because they wanted to defeat Harris and punish Democrats.
“Even in politics, humanity should be the first and the foremost thing to to be respected, to be valued, right? And [the] Democratic Party clearly, clearly, for an entire year showed us they do not care about human life,” Khan said. “They do not care about their constituents, how they feel about the massacre.”
Khan said Trump’s rhetoric about bringing the war to an end was a winning message for many Muslim and Arab American voters.
“He at least, at least came and spoke to the Muslims. He heard them and said, ‘Okay, I will finish. I will end the war in Middle East,’ even if he didn’t say, you know, a genocide, but he said he will bring peace,” she said. “And that’s what the people wanted to hear, and that’s why he got the votes.”
But she’s concerned about the possibility of Huckabee serving as ambassador to Israel.
“It is very troubling. It’s worrisome. And some of his Cabinet picks, like Tulsi Gabbard and then Mike Huckabee, have made Muslims anxious, but we still have to wait and see how things pan out, because it’s too early to say anything about Trump, and we all know that Trump only listens [to] Trump,” Khan said.
