I would be sceptical of post-election analyses in the wake of what is seen as a shock result. For both sides, voting patterns at this point are a sort of Rorschach test – people will see what they want to see. What I offer here is a mix of instinct and conjecture (what’s new, I hear you ask). But it is based on one specific factor that doesn’t come as a shock, and which was predicted to harm the Kamala Harris campaign. We can be certain that the Democrats lost voters because of Gaza. The numbers are stark. Another certainty is that those voters will still not be heard.
In Dearborn, Michigan, the largest majority Arab American city, Joe Biden won in 2020 with around 70% of the vote. Early stats indicate that Harris received something like 40% of the vote. As concerns over the war were raised loudly and specifically, Harris not only continued to ignore and isolate these voices, but also the campaign sent Bill Clinton out to shush them. Harris never even visited the city. But guess who did? That’s right, Donald Trump. And now he’s won in Dearborn and taken all of Michigan.
“Even if he will continue this genocide at a 99% chance,” one voter who cast her ballot for Trump said, “I’m going to take that 1% chance that he’s going to stop it, as opposed to the 100% chance that it’s going to continue under Harris.”
That sentiment perfectly encapsulates a sense of a political dead end that has developed over the past year. The Democrats promised to provide stability and protect a status quo threatened by a volatile opponent, but with that promise of continuity came the certainty that nothing was going to change. Yet in relation to the war in Gaza and Lebanon, nothing changing was, to many, not an option.
Events in Palestine and the broader Middle East over 13 relentless months have driven despair and estrangement. First there is the psychological effect of the images and footage of the killing – most of all, of the children. And it’s not just the death, but the nature of it. Thousands are being mangled, torn apart, buried under buildings, their parts collected in plastic bags for burial. We are not wired to absorb such horror without sustaining profound injury and moral trauma. It changes you.
Add to that the way that the Democrats and the broader liberal establishment have responded to this shock and anger. Palestinian Americans were not even allowed a speaking slot at the Democratic national convention in August. The Muslim Women for Harris group immediately disbanded after the speaking request was declined. Other groups, such as the United Auto Workers, which had already endorsed Harris, posted a strong objection. Popular protests were smeared as “connected to Russia” by Democratic party grandees such as Nancy Pelosi. Students across university campuses were accused of antisemitism by liberal media outlets, and then their protests and encampments were stormed, and they were arrested by police.
In both the continuing killing and ethnic cleansing, and the refusal to do anything about it but at best express sorrow at the sad state of affairs, there is a personal message, one that is sent to those of Arab background: people like you do not matter. This is a message that extends to others from the global south, or those who identify with Palestinians as an oppressed, racialised ethnicity – and who, whatever their background, are alienated by the Democratic party’s unresponsiveness to their concerns.
Inspire all these feelings of trauma, erasure and contempt in people, and they start to vote in ways that are an expression of those feelings. That expression is multifaceted: rage, nihilism, disconnection, last-chance-saloon gambling. Trump may seem like a wild card, but at least with a wild card there is still a chance of an upside, of an unlikely – but still possible – positive outcome. Because these guys? Well, screw these guys. They’ve told us who they are, and who they think we are.
I am ventriloquising here, I know. But these thoughts and behaviours are understandable given the choices on offer. I saw it in the UK election, too, this insistence that voters stop being ridiculous – and focus on the fact that the other option is probably worse. But in the disorientation and anxiety that arise from seeing atrocity after atrocity on a daily basis, there is no rational calculation of what could be “worse” in the future. Only a desperation to end what is intolerable in the present.
There has been a foolish belief on the part of Democrats that you can place loyal voters under extreme duress and still expect their votes – a belief entrenched by the fact that they saw in their opponent a helpful scarecrow who is explicitly racist, nihilistic, Islamophobic, and anti-democratic. But the voters the party has lost understand that the Democrats are, implicitly, all of those things too.
This is where agency comes into what is, on the face of it, an illogical rejection of Harris on the part of voters upset by Gaza. Voting is, above all, an exercise in free will – the only free will individuals have in an electoral system dominated by celebrities, wealthy donors and a media in thrall to both. (Even Queen Latifah endorsed Harris, said one MSNBC host – and “she never endorses anyone!” – as proof of Kamala’s “flawless” campaign). Disempower voters and they will seize back that power in the only way they can, showing you that they have a choice by rejecting the status quo. The voters who switched to Trump will get the headlines, but there will probably be many who went third party, or simply stayed at home. The Democrats broke their pact with many members of the electorate, and then were shocked that voters did not unilaterally uphold it.
You will hear a lot in the next few days from liberals about how it’s time to “listen to voters”, as if voters have not been speaking loudly now for months. And if people were to finally listen, I would wager that instead of engaging with demands for a ceasefire and an arms embargo, they would still only fixate on all sorts of tangential explanations. Is Trump some sort of malign wizard who bewitched people into thinking he would deliver their wishes? Are these people credulous, sectarian or just plain wrong?
Because ultimately for the Democrats, the same moral vacuum that has enabled and allowed the slaughter in Gaza to continue is the same one that prevents them from seeing voters as ethical beings. The realpolitik attitude that weighed up Palestinian lives against loyalty to Israel is the same one that cannot conceive voters who do not also act in similarly cold and self-interested ways.
The feeling of unperturbed exceptionalism is the same one that cannot allow them to understand the sense of vulnerability, precarity and fear that the past year has given rise to. Those astonished by Trump’s win and who worry about the terrifying era that he is about to usher in will never grasp that to many, that world is already here, they’ve just not been living in it.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
