Democrats Blow Their Chance to Block Trump’s Resurgence

By early Wednesday morning, multiple news outlets were projecting Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

Trump’s return to the White House is expected to bring a radical, right-wing agenda that could result in deporting millions of immigrants, curtailing the rights of transgender people, further restricting reproductive rights, and rolling back environmental protections amid accelerating climate catastrophes. 

Unlike 2016, when his victory over Hillary Clinton came as a shock to many Americans, Trump was no surprise in 2024. The Democratic Party had the benefit of four years to ensure that this would not happen again. Yet as in 2016, Democrats appear to have failed to win over the electorate in a race against a uniquely unpopular candidate — this time one with multiple impeachments, indictments, and criminal convictions.

The short-lived Biden campaign and subsequent Harris campaign opted to try to beat Republicans at their own game, by tacking rightward on issues such as immigration, criminal justice, and climate. After President Joe Biden dropped out, the Democratic Party rejected calls to stop providing arms to Israel’s war on Gaza. Instead, Harris touted the endorsements of conservatives such as Liz Cheney. The strategy was a ploy to woo moderates and conservatives wary of a second Trump term, but it may have alienated key voting blocs. 

“Even aside from this genocide, it’s been difficult to get Harris to take a firm stand on other things I’m concerned about like trans rights; having some sort of meaningful, humane immigration reform; and taking a stand on climate change,” Meghan Watts, a North Carolina voter told The Intercept last week. She was deciding between Harris and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. She ended up leaving the presidential section of the ballot blank on Tuesday.

Throughout the war, the Biden administration has demonstrated an unwillingness to change its policy of arming Israel, with little to no guardrails in the face of mounting evidence of human rights violations in both Gaza and in Lebanon. After a year of protests against the war on campuses across the country, there was early optimism from voters that Harris might alter course after she took over the ticket.

With the Uncommitted movement amassing pledges from hundreds of Harris delegates to push the campaign toward an arms embargo, there seemed to be momentum heading into the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. However, the party blocked the movement at every turn, and Harris refused to give any assurances her policy toward the war would differ from Biden’s. 

Polls have consistently shown that placing restrictions or limits to the weapons the U.S. sends to Israel is popular among Americans, and even more overwhelmingly, among Democrats. But Harris continued to ignore calls to do so, culminating in the Uncommitted Movement deciding not to endorse her. 

“Vice President Harris and her team failed to take the opportunity to empower the Uncommitted Movement to endorse her and to mobilize voters for her reelection,” said Abbas Alawieh, a co-founder of the movement, in September after announcing the non-endorsement. He ended up voting for Harris with hopes voters would continue to push her on an arms embargo and ceasefire. 

Democrats will spend years debating which issues specifically turned voters away from Harris and toward Trump — was it the war, inflation, America’s racism and misogyny, or other factors entirely? But as the party studies its defeat, it must also reckon with how it approaches voices of dissent within its ranks.

Reem Abuelhaj, a Pennsylvania organizer with No Ceasefire No Vote PA, a group pushing for an arms embargo pledge from Harris, said she worried that a vote for Harris would set a precedent that the Democratic Party can ignore its constituents who voice dissent over human rights violations. She decided to hold out until Election Day with hopes that Harris would make a last-minute change in policy. Such assurances never came. 

“I entered the voting booth and found myself unable to stop crying,” Abuelhaj told The Intercept on Tuesday evening. “All I could see was the face of a child in Jabaliya” — a city in northern Gaza — “holding the body of their younger sibling who was killed over the weekend. I voted down the ballot but left the top of the ticket blank.”

Some of her friends and family joined her, unable to get themselves to cast a ballot for Harris. Others who did vote for Harris cried or felt physically sick, she said. One friend said she had voted for Harris “but prayed for forgiveness afterward.”

“This was a day of grief and devastation,” Abuelhaj said.

When Trump takes office, U.S. policy will swing to the hard right. Jesse Myerson, a community organizer in New York, summarized the situation that the left, and a large percentage of the American public, is likely to face under a second Trump administration.

“The onslaught of attacks that [Trump’s] administration is going to unleash against queer and trans Americans, immigrants, Muslims, people of color, Jews, anyone whose reproductive rights are under attack, anyone who’s on the front line of climate catastrophes — those are going to require that we play defense on a whole host of issues, and that is going to reduce the capacity that we have for fighting against this genocide. And honestly, given the Project Esther plans, there’s going to be even more direct attacks on the movement for Palestinian human rights than there are right now,” Myerson told The Intercept last week.

“The possibilities for forward motion, slim as they would be under Harris, would be completely obliterated under Trump, and force such a defensive posture that I think we would just lose ground in huge incomprehensible ways.”

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