Of all the shadows on the cave wall that haunted Kamala Harris’s constitutionally risk-averse campaign, the great unwashed of the pro-Hamas crowd scared them most.
Save a handful of contrived efforts to put the professional demonstrators in their place — the “I’m speaking” shtick, which never seemed to intimidate anyone — the former vice president’s candidacy was hamstrung by the fear that anti-Israel activists would cost Harris the State of Michigan and, therefore, the presidency.
Throughout her candidacy, she made supplicating appeals to what the polling suggested was one of the least sympathetic groups in the country. Even less than one week before the vote, the Associated Press reported that the campaign was still trying to figure out how to “validate protester concerns” and harness their energy for Harris’s benefit. That is quite a dispensation for a mob of misanthropes who “interrupt, heckle and, oftentimes, knock a candidate off track.”
Of course, Harris did lose Michigan, along with the other six swing states on the electoral map. And the anti-Israel activist class has tried to take credit for her defeat. But a reasonable postelection analysis via the Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn casts doubt on these self-serving claims.
“The electoral impact of Gaza was more complex than outside analysts frequently realized,” he wrote. “For every voter angry over the Israeli strikes on Gaza, there may have been another ready to back Trump if Harris seemed too critical of Israel or too forgiving of Hamas. In addition, Democrats were already losing votes among socially conservative Arab Americans because of LGBTQ+ issues.”
Ultimately, the race just wasn’t close enough for the small and geographically disperse population of American Arabs and Muslims to have a decisive role in Harris’s defeat. And yet, the so-called Uncommitted Movement, an organization that had rallied Democrats to cast a ballot for “uncommitted” against Joe Biden in Michigan’s uncontested primary last year, is still pushing the notion that Trump’s election is a result of the fact that the Biden-Harris team were just too pro-Israel for America’s taste.
“Harris left a vacuum by not visiting Michigan families impacted by US-supplied bombs to help create a permission structure for their trust while Trump visited Dearborn and filled a community in despair with lies,” a burdensome sentence composed by Uncommitted’s Layla Elabed read. “Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are horrific,” the statement continued, “but, as on so many other issues, Democrats had a chance to persuade voters they were the better alternative, and they blew it.”
One former Harris staffer responded to the accusation in a quote provided to NBC News reporter Sahil Kapur: “Deeply unserious people who want to shirk their responsibility. Clowns.”
Clowns they may be, but they’re not cowards. You can’t say the same for Harris or her team. After all, the clownishness of Elabed’s statement notwithstanding, she did attach her name to it. Harris’s staffers chose to remain anonymous. Although Democrats seemed to regard that sort of pusillanimity as best practice during the campaign, the party’s elected leaders adopted a far more confrontational posture toward that cohort after the race was lost. For reasons that remain elusive, the remnants of the Harris campaign are still quaking over the prospect of confrontation with this paper tiger.
It’s clear from the anonymous statement given to Kapur that they resent their torment, but it is a prison in their own minds and of their own making.