I think both are true. The Democrats have come to rely on fear of the Republicans to get elected, to the point of not really standing for anything other than the “not the Republicans” party. On the other hand that situation wouldn’t arise in the first place if there wasn’t such a huge population of violently regressive fascists and religious fanatics.
The degree to which Harris has threaded the needle to (appropriate) sympathy for the plight of Palestinians and calling out Israeli actions has cost her some votes among some American Jews. Not a huge number but some.
The only argument that would potentially win over disaffected Arab voters would be cutting off Israeli military aid. That would be perceived as an existential threat to Israel. That would lose many more votes, not only more Jewish ones.
It simply would be a bad calculation.
It is also wouldn’t win over all as some will blame the U.S. for things entirely out of its control. The best shot we have at helping Gaza is to give Harris the support needed that she can risk losing some votes to be more aggressive on Israel.
This all reminds me of the people who vote incumbent or challenger based on their estimation of their personal economic trajectory over the last year-ish. Feeling like you’re getting better-off? Vote incumbent. Feeling like you’re getting worse-off? Vote challenger.
It’s dumb, economically illiterate, and self-defeating, but that describes much of humanity’s decision making processes.
Nobody’s expecting them to be grateful. They can go vote in mourning clothes, with clothes-pegs on their noses to symbolize that their choice stunk. They can wash their hands afterwards Lady-MacBeth-style on YouTube or TikTok to show that they feel dirty for their choice. They can post on social media and tell every post-poll news crew that they voted not for the best candidate but for the lesser of two evils.
Voting isn’t a beauty contest, it’s a bus to get as close to your destination as you can. In this instance, if they don’t get on the figurative Harris bus in the voting booth, they may well find themselves in 2025 being loaded onto literal buses going ghod-knows-where.
The attitude of the Ds towards Arab voter anger about Gaza has basically been: “Suck it up and deal with it” - and also, “We ignore you but you still need to vote for us.”
There has been a whole “splaining” attitude about this akin to mansplaining or whitesplaining - where many Ds who are not Arabs or Gazans lecture the Arab voters and tell them that they are stupid and need to accept 40,000 of their people being killed because Trump is worse. That’s like calling Sophie from Sophie’s Choice stupid if she doesn’t want to choose one of her two kids to be killed, since not choosing would lead to both of them dying.
One of the reasons Arab voters have such a sense of betrayal is because they’d been told for decades that Democrats are the party that stands for the little guy - only to find out that when the big guy, Israel, kills 40,000 Palestinian civilians, the Ds aren’t even bothered. And it’s not like Ds even try to assuage the pain - when Harris was heckled by pro-Gazan hecklers at a speech, she didn’t say anything to ameliorate the situation in Gaza - she just simply sneered, “Keep talking like that and you’ll get Trump elected.”
In other words, “Suck it up and deal with it.”
Finally, some people imagine that the only folks who will suffer if Arabs flip Michigan (and the election itself) to Trump are…Arabs. That’s not the case at all. If Trump wins, many liberals from all walks of society will suffer. In other words, it’s not just Arab voters who are playing with fire by voting for Trump or third party - it’s also the Biden/Harris administration that is playing with fire by turning a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza. The Ds will not escape unscathed if Trump wins.
I did not mean to imply that Muslim voters are stupid, just short-sighted. They are cutting off their own nose to spite their face. I hope I was clear that I feel their frustration. But they are in an impossible situation.
Can anyone doubt that Trump would be worse for Palestinians than Harris, or even a continuation of Biden would have been?
There’s an argument to be made that Trump, the selfish me-first guy, might possibly be better for Arab voters. Because there’s a chance that Trump wouldn’t want to give aid to Israel any more than he would want to help Ukraine - “why should American dollars go to foreign countries? America first!” On top of that, a lot of his supporters are Neo-Nazis or anti-Semitic who hate Jews. So it’s possible some Arab voters are gambling on that.
They are also people who hate Muslims and Arabs. And many of whom support Israel for reasons of “Biblical prophecy”.
The argument is that Trump will be much worse for those that are actually voting. The Muslims in America. There are only 160,000 Palestinian Americans. There are almost 4 million Arab Americans. So a large part of that voting bloc isn’t directly affected but are acting in sympathy. Both candidates may not help Palestinians in Gaza. Only one has a chance to help. One candidate will actively hurt Arabs in this country and soon after he is elected.
We only talk about those that are in Michigan because it’s a swing state. Michigan is only about 5th or 6th in total Muslim population and population density. Nobody is talking about their vote in New York, California or Texas.
More likely for Muslims everywhere. Trump is just the tip of the wedge and unlikely to live long; the Christofascist dictatorship likely to come after him will want to kill the entire worldwide population of Muslims and have enough nuclear weapons to make a good try at it.
So, the American Arabs can side with the American Nazis and we can have a WWII do over!
'Cause that worked out so well for everyone the first time…
Yeah. Basically ask yourself “What would WWII have looked like if Hitler started with a bigger military than everyone else and a nuclear arsenal?” That’s the future the Republicans want.
I’ve posted about this before, but I was working in the West Bank, Palestine when Trump was elected in 2016. I and the other American on the project were really depressed by the results, but for the Palestians, it didn’t really matter. One of them told me that “ both the Republicans and the Democrats allow our genocide, but the Democrats feel bad about it. That’s I. That’s the only difference.”
I bring this up because if one truly believes that, then the only hope is for America to stop supporting in the genocide of the Palestinians is for America to no longer be in a position to support their genocide. And if one believes that, a Trump presidency is their best bet.
Not really. Partly because Israel doesn’t actually need support for it, partly because the Republicans are more likely to outright encourage it, and because that’s the outcome most likely to lead to a fascist America just destroying the whole region.
There’s a little wrinkle in that: you were talking with Palestinians in Palestine. It’s completely reasonable for the Dems and GOP to seem like a wash to them.
But Palestinians and others who immigrated to the U.S. or became refugees here presumably would like to stay here and not be deported as Trump has threatened/promised, and definitely wouldn’t want to end up in detention camps with families broken apart as Trump actually did. On that point, the two parties and the two principal presidential candidates are not a wash.
John Oliver commented on Muslim voting and has some quotes from influencers who decided to vote for Harris. I queued it up to where this is mentioned but that never seems to work here so jump to 8:03 in the video for the relevant bit:
More than 100 Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progressive Democrats and community leaders have signed a letter making the case for those reluctant to support Kamala Harris against Donald Trump.
“We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide,” the letter, published Thursday night, reads.
Well, that’s hopeful.
It’s not a show of support, it’s a show of “welp, she is probably going to win it so we need to get on the bandwagon”.