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Episode: In Michigan, Arab Americans weigh the power of a vote

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:41:42

Episode Shownotes

We travel to Dearborn, aka the "capital of Arab America." The Dearbornites we met said that the war in Gaza is the key issue on their minds as they consider how to cast their ballots. What these voters ultimately decide could have huge consequences for the whole country.Learn more about

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Summary

In this episode of Code Switch, the hosts explore the voices of Arab Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, amid the ongoing Gaza conflict. Many community members are reassessing their political loyalties, with a significant shift towards Donald Trump due to his stance on the war. The community is uniting around Congressman Rashida Tlaib's progressive views and grappling with the moral implications of their votes, reflecting a pivotal moment as they navigate their influence in this crucial swing state ahead of the elections.

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Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
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00:00:16 Speaker_03
Just a heads up, y'all, this episode contains some salty language, which means it's going to be some cussing. What's good? You're listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby. So a couple of Tuesdays ago, I was at this hookah spot in Dearborn, Michigan.

00:00:32 Speaker_03
It's called Mangos on the Hill, and it was bright as hell in Mangos. Like, real odd for a hookah bar at night. It wasn't really popping in there. It was mostly empty, which I just chalked it up to it being a Tuesday.

00:00:45 Speaker_03
But a dozen or so people had gathered at Mangos that night. for a watch party. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were about to square off in the nationally televised debate.

00:00:55 Speaker_03
And we've been looking for a place where people will be watching the debate and Mango's had it playing on their gigantic TV screen. But it wasn't like anybody at that watch party was really watching.

00:01:06 Speaker_03
Folks were chattering and eating and looking at their phones. That is, until about 30 or 40 minutes into the debate. That's when people stopped what they were doing and craned their necks toward the TV screens.

00:01:27 Speaker_03
This was what the folks at this watch party had been waiting for.

00:01:31 Speaker_08
President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?

00:01:37 Speaker_03
Vice President Harris begins her answer by saying that Israel has a right to defend itself the way the United States would.

00:01:45 Speaker_09
Because it is also true, far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers, what we know is that this war must end. It must, when, end immediately.

00:02:00 Speaker_07
And the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal and we need a resolution now.

00:02:06 Speaker_03
As you can hear from the chatter, that Harris answer, it was not really going over too well in the room.

00:02:13 Speaker_07
So she's basically admitting that they're, like, ineffectual. They can't do it. Yeah, we're weak.

00:02:18 Speaker_03
The people watching this debate at Mangos were mostly Arab-Americans of different ages. A few were wearing keffiyehs. In Dearborn, a lot of people have close family and social ties to the Middle East.

00:02:33 Speaker_03
This city, right next to Detroit, has been a solidly democratic enclave for a few decades now.

00:02:39 Speaker_03
But since Hamas attacked Israel almost exactly a year ago, and Israel responded by launching an all-out war on Gaza with support from the Biden administration, that loyalty to the Democratic Party is looking wobblier.

00:02:54 Speaker_03
You can hear it in the people talking back to the screen. Vice President Harris wraps up her answer to the Gaza question, then it's former President Trump's turn.

00:03:07 Speaker_08
When she mentions about Israel, all of a sudden, she hates Israel.

00:03:11 Speaker_03
Trump's answer sort of spiraled in a bunch of different directions, you know, as is his wants.

00:03:18 Speaker_12
It's kinda hard to hear, but

00:03:39 Speaker_03
This dude just yelled, they're arguing over who loves Israel more. So this guy, he had salt and pepper hair and he was gesturing at the screen with a cigarette in his hand. So I walked over to him with my microphone.

00:03:50 Speaker_03
You know, he was sitting at a booth with some other dudes and I just wanted to confirm what he said.

00:03:55 Speaker_00
They're competing who loves Israel more. That's what we think.

00:03:59 Speaker_03
And I asked him if he knew which way he was leaning towards voting in November.

00:04:03 Speaker_00
Donald Trump. Yes, yes.

00:04:05 Speaker_03
When I asked him why he was voting for Trump, he told me, it's because of the war in Gaza. Otherwise, he'd be voting for Kamala Harris. And that moment right there in this bright-ass hookah bar, it explains why I wanted to go to Dearborn right now.

00:04:19 Speaker_03
Because a lot of folks here are really grappling with how to vote in November, when a war thousands of miles away feels so present for the people here and so personal.

00:04:31 Speaker_03
According to a national poll from the Arab American Institute that came out in early October, Harris and Trump are virtually tied among Arab American voters. Trump is actually leading Harris among the Arab Americans who are the most likely to vote.

00:04:44 Speaker_03
This from a typically democratic constituency and for a guy who's well known for demonizing immigrants and Arabs and using Palestinian as a slur, you know, the dude behind the Muslim ban.

00:04:57 Speaker_03
If you take a look at the national polls across all demographic groups, it's clear that Gaza just doesn't rank among the top issues that most voters from either party care about this election.

00:05:09 Speaker_03
In Dearborn, though, for so many people, this is the top-line issue. And that matters for folks everywhere, because Michigan is a crucial swing state, full of swingy counties. The recent elections in this state have been squeakers.

00:05:23 Speaker_03
I mean, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton here by just 11,000 votes in 2016, which is to say Trump won Michigan by less than a quarter of one percent.

00:05:34 Speaker_03
In 2020, Trump lost to Joe Biden in Michigan, but again, not by a whole lot, about three percentage points.

00:05:40 Speaker_03
As we get closer to a really tight election where tiny margins could decide who takes the White House, what voters do in this singular, relatively small city in the metro Detroit area could turn out to be of huge, maybe even historical, consequence.

00:05:59 Speaker_15
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00:07:30 Speaker_04
There's something very comforting about being in Dearborn.

00:07:34 Speaker_11
Dearborn's always been a bubble where you're safe.

00:07:37 Speaker_04
There is this sense that you look around and people know how you're feeling.

00:07:43 Speaker_03
Arab Americans only make up about 1% of the American population, but they make up 55% of the people in Dearborn, where being Arab American is normal and unremarkable.

00:07:54 Speaker_06
This was the community that you can lean on, where you can pronounce your name Abdullah, you know, with the full pronunciation and all, and didn't have to shy away from it, where you can walk around freely with a hijab and didn't have to worry about harassment.

00:08:09 Speaker_03
Recently, Dearborn became the first majority Arab American city in the United States. A lot of people call it the capital of Arab America. It's home to the Arab American National Museum and the nation's largest mosque.

00:08:22 Speaker_07
I moved here on purpose. I wanted to be in the center of Arab America, in the heartbeat of our community.

00:08:27 Speaker_00
I can express myself. I can feel the grief and the pain as a Palestinian here in a way that I can't even going across the border into Detroit.

00:08:38 Speaker_03
In the Dearborn bubble, a lot of people have connections to Gaza and the widening conflict between Israel and Yemen and Israel and Lebanon.

00:08:46 Speaker_03
And among the folks I spoke to, nobody would bat an eye at somebody calling what's happening in Gaza a genocide.

00:08:53 Speaker_06
I think everybody's in alignment on where they stand on the issue of Gaza. That's universal. And that is uncontested.

00:09:00 Speaker_05
This is the first time where I've been as close to a one-issue voter as I've ever been in my entire life. I'm just being honest, for me, I've been so engulfed by this genocide that it's been really hard for me as of now to look past it.

00:09:12 Speaker_04
This community has never been a one-issue kind of community, one-issue vote. But I heard actually someone say, if I'm going to become a one-issue voter and that issue is genocide, I'm okay with it.

00:09:25 Speaker_03
And while there seems to be a wide consensus on what's happening in Gaza, folks here have arrived at some very different conclusions about what to do about that at the polls.

00:09:39 Speaker_03
Dearborn is a city that overwhelmingly supports their congressional representative, Rashida Tlaib of the Squad.

00:09:45 Speaker_03
She's the only Palestinian American in Congress, and she's cut a lonely figure over the past year, saying that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.

00:09:54 Speaker_03
And while genocide is a legal term, and one that Israel has strongly denied being guilty of, Tlaib's view was one that everyone I spoke to in Dearborn agreed with. And likely, people here don't necessarily toe the Democratic Party line.

00:10:08 Speaker_03
I mean, it's a Democratic place, sure, but there are socially conservative religious folks, there are small business owners who care most about business-friendly practices, and there are a bunch of young, progressive Bernie Sanders supporters.

00:10:21 Speaker_03
In fact, two years ago, the city elected one of those Bernie Sanders supporters mayor, making him the first Arab American and first Muslim mayor in Dearborn's history.

00:10:29 Speaker_06
Abdullah. Nice to meet you. Abdullah. Abdullah. Abdullah, yeah.

00:10:34 Speaker_03
Abdullah Hamoud was just 31 when he was elected. When I described him to my wife, I told her he looked like one of those dudes in my Instagram feed and ads for like stylish golf wear, you know, freshly-lined beard, dope but sensible white sneakers.

00:10:48 Speaker_03
He was born in the city and he also told me how special it was to have grown up there. He described Dearborn to me the way a lot of people did. as a haven.

00:10:58 Speaker_06
I remember growing up, when I was a teenager, my mom told me, never leave the city of Dearborn or go out unless you have your cousin or your friends or your brothers with you.

00:11:04 Speaker_03
Mayor Hamoud told me, though, that his sense of safety there changed somewhat after 9-11. He was about 11 at the time of those attacks.

00:11:13 Speaker_06
And I'll never forget, that day, my mom picking me up from school, from Woodworth, and she observes a hijab. Car caught us off and flicked us off and said, go back to your countries. And, you know, so we just rushed home.

00:11:27 Speaker_06
You know, everybody was scared on that day.

00:11:30 Speaker_03
And he said because people from all over understood the city as a place where lots of Arabs and Muslims live, Dearborn became something of a target.

00:11:39 Speaker_06
You know, we grew up where we used to have the Arab American Festival on Warren Avenue, which drew about a quarter million people over a weekend. It got shut down years ago. And it's because we used to have these protesters who would come

00:11:50 Speaker_06
with pig's heads on spears, with signs that said, we have dipped our bullets in pig's blood so that when we shoot you, you go to hell.

00:12:00 Speaker_03
He told us in those post-911 years, the city became a democratic enclave, since Dearbornites laid the responsibility for all this rising Islamophobia at the feet of the Republican administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

00:12:16 Speaker_03
But I guess let's just back up a little bit, because you might be wondering, how did this small Midwestern city in a notoriously cold state become the capital of Arab America?

00:12:27 Speaker_03
Okay, we got the explanatory comment time, so I'm gonna just crack my neck. Can somebody cue up some music real quick? Thank you, Jess. In the 19th century, the first migrants from Syria and Lebanon came to the Detroit area.

00:12:42 Speaker_03
They were mostly Christians. The next big wave, though, came in the 20th century. Henry Ford had set up this gigantic auto plant in Dearborn, which, as we know, borders Detroit.

00:12:53 Speaker_03
And those job prospects lured migrants from all over the place, like the American South. but also immigrants from Europe and from Arab countries. The Arabs who came this time, they were mostly Muslim.

00:13:05 Speaker_03
And so you have the city with good-paying union jobs in the factories, yes, yes. But also, as time went on, residents built mosques. They opened up halal restaurants and butchers.

00:13:14 Speaker_03
A critical mass developed of people who spoke Arabic, albeit with different dialects and accents. And Arabic adorned the signage of a lot of the stores and the cafes.

00:13:25 Speaker_03
Mayor Hamoud's family is Lebanese, and he said that his mother grew up in refugee camps there during the civil war decades ago. Much of his family is still in Lebanon.

00:13:35 Speaker_03
Lots of Dearbornites have stories like this, coming here to flee violence and war, and it's often violence and war in which the United States is deeply implicated.

00:13:43 Speaker_06
I often say that Dearborn is obviously the home to a blossoming and growing population, and we're the result of not only the automotive industry, but poor foreign policy decision making.

00:13:54 Speaker_06
Each time there's been a poor foreign policy decision that has been made by individuals in the White House that has led to war abroad, you saw migration coming to what they thought, what we know to be a welcoming and safe place, the city of Djerba.

00:14:06 Speaker_03
He said the city saw new immigrants from Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War in the 1990s, and then again when the U.S. invaded that country in 2003, A wave of Yemenis came to Dearborn after the U.S.

00:14:17 Speaker_03
armed Saudi Arabia, who then attacked Yemen and killed tens of thousands of people there.

00:14:23 Speaker_06
Each time you have seen war and atrocity across the Arab diaspora, you saw migration come over.

00:14:30 Speaker_03
He said his constituents care about the U.S. 's posture toward Gaza and Lebanon and Yemen, and they follow it closely on the news, but also in their family WhatsApp groups.

00:14:39 Speaker_03
And people have been holding rallies there in light of Israel's attacks on Lebanon.

00:14:44 Speaker_02
A huge show of support in Dearborn tonight. Hundreds of people coming out for a Stand with Lebanon rally.

00:14:50 Speaker_11
The rally, a reminder of how the violence in the Middle East continues to impact people here at home.

00:14:57 Speaker_01
The death toll in Lebanon has climbed to more than 1,000, including U.S. citizen and Dearborn community leader Kamel Jawad, who was in the country helping people evacuate.

00:15:08 Speaker_14
Yet another rally in Dearborn Wednesday night in support of the Lebanese people as this community comes together and demands a ceasefire. Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!

00:15:23 Speaker_03
So now, the mayor of the capital of Arab America has found himself in an unlikely spot. He's the chief executive of a city of about 110,000 people, and also right in the middle of this heated discourse over U.S. foreign policy.

00:15:39 Speaker_03
And a lot of people have recognized that because things have lined up in this very particular way, you know, you got a critical mass of reliably Democratic-leaning voters who might defect from the party or stay home in November, concentrated in a crucial county in a state that's up for grabs.

00:15:54 Speaker_03
The Arab-American voters here are holding a lot of cards right now. So now you are thrust in the center of this national, international conversation around Gaza and Palestine and people are looking to you specifically to see what you're going to do.

00:16:12 Speaker_03
I'm just curious about like what it feels like to be sort of like holding all that weight.

00:16:16 Speaker_06
Yeah, you know, it's not something you run for when you run for the mayor of the city. You run to make sure your garbage is picked up on time. And here you are at the center of a foreign issue that's been impacting your residents' lives directly.

00:16:29 Speaker_06
In this case, it's family members who are being displaced and killed in Lebanon, Yemen, and obviously the unfolding genocide in Gaza. And so that's why we were very vocal about where we stood.

00:16:40 Speaker_03
The Biden campaign, and then the Harris campaign, really wanted his endorsement.

00:16:46 Speaker_03
Their hope was that his rubber stamp might allay the anger and ambivalence that people in Dearborn and beyond felt about the party in the White House, at least enough to vote for their candidate.

00:16:55 Speaker_03
In August, in fact, when Vice President Harris was in Michigan campaigning, she had a closed-door meeting with the mayor. But there were other voices ringing louder in Mayor Hammoud's ears.

00:17:06 Speaker_06
Many of the conversations I have with family and close friends is they don't want the guilt of bubbling in a presidential candidate who becomes our president, and the genocide continues.

00:17:19 Speaker_06
And then they live with the fact that, well, I bubbled for this candidate thinking that, well, I did it on domestic issues, but each and every single day I'm watching people who look like me, sound like me, with names like me, being absolutely obliterated with my US taxpayer dollars.

00:17:34 Speaker_06
That is the conversation that I hear more than any at every dining room table I sit at.

00:17:43 Speaker_04
People just want to see the killing stop. It's as simple as that.

00:17:47 Speaker_03
That's Reema Mirway.

00:17:49 Speaker_04
And the way that people are feeling is that they have no voice in this. It almost feels like, you know, you're kind of standing on the side screaming, trying to get someone's attention, and they just keep walking as if they can't even hear you.

00:18:04 Speaker_03
Rima is one of the people who runs the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, or ACCESS.

00:18:10 Speaker_03
It's an organization that was started on the poor side of Dearborn way back in the 70s to help Arab immigrants find their footing in the United States. She told me yet again that this place is unique, even a bubble.

00:18:21 Speaker_03
Her family is ethnically Lebanese, but she was born in Senegal, and she came to the U.S. in her teens.

00:18:27 Speaker_04
I never lived in the Middle East, and my mom was also born in Senegal. And so when I came here, people would ask me where I'm from, and I would say, I'm African-American. And people would look at me like, what? I know, they would give me that look.

00:18:38 Speaker_04
You should see his face right now.

00:18:40 Speaker_03
She said she didn't initially get that she was an African-American with the connotations that has in the States.

00:18:45 Speaker_04
It wasn't until being in Dearborn then I really immersed myself in the culture here. And that's how I became Arab-American.

00:18:51 Speaker_03
I was going to say, that's so fascinating. So you came to Dearborn and became Arab-American. I did.

00:18:55 Speaker_04
I came to Dearborn and became Arab-American. Yeah.

00:19:00 Speaker_03
Today Rima lives in a town nearby and she told me that when she leaves work in Dearborn and steps out of the airlock into the wider world, she feels more acutely what it means to leave the bubble.

00:19:12 Speaker_04
It almost feels like a twilight zone in that I just sometimes want to say, Like, do you know what is happening right now? There are genocides happening around the world. Do we care about that? Is there even a space to acknowledge that?

00:19:29 Speaker_04
Not even do anything about it, but just acknowledge that.

00:19:32 Speaker_03
Like immigrant enclaves all over the country, a lot of people in Dearborn just sit out elections. Rima's organization, among other things, helps people who are eligible to vote get registered.

00:19:43 Speaker_03
And here, Rima said, people who do vote tend to do so in person, you know, same day.

00:19:50 Speaker_04
In this cycle, she said, I am now seeing people are very motivated. We have had a record number of people who want to do absentee ballots. We've never seen this community engage as much with absentee ballots. People want to show up to the polls.

00:20:08 Speaker_04
How they're going to vote is another story, but people are very motivated to be at the polls to show how they're feeling.

00:20:20 Speaker_03
Coming up, a progressive environmental organizer in Dearborn explains how she's feeling and why she's urging people to make sure Kamala Harris loses in November and Donald Trump wins.

00:20:31 Speaker_11
It is no longer a question of, how can you win me back? It is a question of, how can I hold you accountable for the lives lost? Because that is not something I'm willing to forgive.

00:20:44 Speaker_02
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00:22:12 Speaker_03
Gene, just Gene this week, code switch. We've been talking to people in Dearborn, Michigan, the so-called capital of Arab America, and a traditionally Democratic enclave in a swing state, which looks to be much more split this election.

00:22:30 Speaker_03
That's because of how angry so many folks are about how the Biden administration, and by extension, Kamala Harris, has handled the war in Gaza. That's put people like Dearborn's mayor, Abdullah Hamoud, in something of a bind.

00:22:46 Speaker_06
You want to be inspired to come out to the ballot box come November. Nobody wants to come out out of fear or cast a vote for the lesser of two evils. It's not inspirational, especially in the greatest country in the whole world.

00:22:55 Speaker_06
This idea that you have to settle for a candidate.

00:22:59 Speaker_03
But Mayor Hammoud isn't really inspired by the choices before him, Harris or Trump. And so he has pointedly withheld his endorsement for November.

00:23:10 Speaker_06
Here's how I'll frame it. I don't feel pressure to endorse. Yes, I was a three-time elected Democrat in the state legislature. I'm in a nonpartisan mayorship now, but ultimately my loyalty is to the city that I represent, to the city of Dearborn.

00:23:23 Speaker_03
He said that were he to give his rubber stamp to a candidate, it would be contingent on Joe Biden, and thus his vice president Kamala Harris, changing their posture on Gaza, which, as we know, has not happened.

00:23:36 Speaker_03
But as a progressive Democrat, he also wanted to make it clear that voting for Trump — Yeah, that's just not on the table.

00:23:41 Speaker_06
— Trump is awful, and the last thing I ever want to see is a Trump presidency, you know, on the record.

00:23:45 Speaker_03
— But that doesn't really leave a clear choice at the voting booth.

00:23:50 Speaker_06
— I think for many folk come this November, the question for them is, you know, they're going to try to vote their moral conscience, whatever that means. Each person defines it for themselves. I'm not here to define it for anybody.

00:23:57 Speaker_06
You know, they have that quarrel of that moral dilemma of what to do. And again, I think apathy is the most dangerous thing. Apathy is what led to the Trump presidency in 2016.

00:24:08 Speaker_06
People talk about how Trump won Michigan by 11,000 votes over then-Secretary Clinton.

00:24:13 Speaker_03
He says that in 2016, almost 80,000 people in Michigan skipped answering the presidential question altogether on their ballots. They just left it blank.

00:24:22 Speaker_06
That is why President Trump won. That is what is dangerous.

00:24:28 Speaker_03
Mayor Abdullah is aligned with the Uncommitted Movement, but is not a part of it. You may have heard of them.

00:24:34 Speaker_03
It's an initiative that started in Dearborn earlier this year by people who had once held various jobs within the Democratic Party, both in DC and in Michigan.

00:24:43 Speaker_03
The Uncommitted Movement's plan was to show the then-Biden campaign that they were dead serious. about not voting for the president in November.

00:24:51 Speaker_03
And so what they did was they urged people who were voting in the primary to vote uncommitted on their primary ballots, essentially filling in the bubble on the ballot that meant none of the above, instead of Joe Biden.

00:25:04 Speaker_03
Their plan was to get 10,000 Michigan primary voters to do this, right? When the votes were tallied, they had more than 100,000.

00:25:12 Speaker_12
President Biden won by 81%, but 13% of Democrats voted uncommitted.

00:25:19 Speaker_16
The only real opposition he faced came from voters casting ballots for uncommitted, protesting his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

00:25:27 Speaker_19
It was breathtaking to see that over 100,000 voters voted for uncommitted in the state of Michigan. You see people saying enough is enough.

00:25:37 Speaker_03
In Democratic primaries around the country, around 650,000 people did the same thing. And this was a shot across the bow of the Democratic Party.

00:25:46 Speaker_03
And so, in the wake of the Michigan primary, the then-Biden campaign began reaching out to folks in the uncommitted movement and trying to woo Mayor Hammoud.

00:25:56 Speaker_03
But voting uncommitted in a primary to send a message to your party is a whole different prospect than doing so in a close general election with Kamala Harris as one option. and Donald Trump as the other.

00:26:12 Speaker_03
But there's another camp in Dearborn that has staked out a different position about how to vote in November.

00:26:17 Speaker_11
— This is a hot spot in Dearborn. Everybody comes here.

00:26:21 Speaker_03
— Just down Michigan Avenue from the mayor's office, closer to the East End of Dearborn, we met up with Samra Lukman at a cafe called Haraz.

00:26:29 Speaker_11
— This is where I bring all my reporters for interviews. Sometimes it's at my office, but yeah.

00:26:34 Speaker_03
Samara has run for state office before, as a Democrat. She identifies as a progressive, and she told me that she wrote in Bernie Sanders' name in the 2020 general election. She just didn't feel like Joe Biden was far enough to the left for her liking.

00:26:46 Speaker_03
She spent years organizing to fight environmental racism in Dearborn, especially on her side of town, where the air is really, really bad.

00:26:52 Speaker_11
I asked her what to order. And then if you try the iced refreshers, the pomegranate or the dragon fruit are really, really, really good.

00:27:03 Speaker_03
I was meeting with Summer because she belongs to a group that was originally called Abandon Biden, now it's called Abandon Harris. That debate watch party I went to, it was organized by the Abandon Harris folks.

00:27:14 Speaker_03
The people in the Abandon camp share the same premise as the people in the Uncommitted camp, that the war in Gaza has to end. But unlike the Uncommitted folks, they were not thinking of their votes as leverage to move the Harris campaign on Gaza.

00:27:30 Speaker_03
Instead, they want people to use their votes as a cudgel.

00:27:33 Speaker_11
If the Democratic Party does not wish to do the right thing, even after they have been begged to by some people, then I think it's time for us to consider punishing them and showing them an action. You're going to lose the election.

00:27:48 Speaker_11
We're going to make sure you lose. The Abandoned Biden camp is all of these people that are saying, I will never go back to him. He's already crossed that line. And I was asked by almost every reporter, is there something Biden can do to win you back?

00:28:05 Speaker_11
What could he possibly do to win you back? And my response was, he could pull a Jesus and he could resurrect all the 40,000 lives or the 30,000 or whatever it was at that time that I was being asked, and then I would consider voting for him.

00:28:18 Speaker_03
But after Biden ended his presidential run, the abandoned campaign turned their sights toward its vice president, Kamala Harris, when she became the party's new presumptive nominee.

00:28:28 Speaker_11
— As Biden himself and she has said, there's no daylight between them. And that being the case, if there's no daylight between you, then I'm going to treat you the same way I did Biden.

00:28:39 Speaker_11
I'm going to want to hold you accountable, and I want to ensure your loss. It's not just abandoning you. I want to make sure that you are not continuing to be in office.

00:28:47 Speaker_03
For the abandoned Harris folks, their votes are vessels for their anger at Democrats. And Sommer wasn't really hung up on how or for whom people voted in November. A third party candidate, write and vote, Trump, whatever.

00:29:02 Speaker_03
To her, their vote just had to be anybody but Kamala Harris. And Sommer said she didn't want people to sit the election out just because they didn't like the choices available.

00:29:12 Speaker_03
Her thinking was that people had to vote, because not voting could be chalked up to indifference, whereas a vote against Harris, that's a quantifiable thing. You can count that. I asked Samra if her plan had rubbed anybody that she knew the wrong way.

00:29:29 Speaker_11
— My mom. My mom actually wasn't even that nice about it. She said, I'll disown you if you come out and endorse Trump. Don't tell people to endorse Trump. Don't you dare vote for Trump. And she's like, she was actually mad at me.

00:29:41 Speaker_11
It wasn't in a joking way. She was really upset.

00:29:44 Speaker_03
— Summer said her mom was in her 70s. She said she's really socially conservative. And while her mother has supported Democrats in the past, she is not supporting Kamala Harris.

00:29:52 Speaker_11
But as far as, like, Trump, oh, she says absolutely not. She's not doing it. She's not moving. So I might convince her to vote Green. I might.

00:30:01 Speaker_03
— Summer feels like the people who are critical of the White House's handling of Gaza, in Dearborn, and more broadly, have this window at the polls to actually have an impact.

00:30:10 Speaker_11
— Go out there and take a stance and flex your political muscle. We have to show it. We have to do it. The goal is not 2024. The goal is 2028. That's where we'll start having both parties coming and asking us for, what can we do to win you over?

00:30:29 Speaker_03
She said the Democrats need to lose, but she also wants them to understand that people who defected from the party over Gaza are the reason for that loss.

00:30:41 Speaker_11
I think that my rage, my anger, to the point of saying I want them to lose this presidency, It stems from the betrayal, okay?

00:30:52 Speaker_11
I did not think that Democrats would allow themselves or allow their own leadership to get to the point where a genocide is happening in front of our eyes and they would do nothing but support it. They would do nothing but fund it.

00:31:06 Speaker_11
I never, never thought that that would ever be the case. I thought that the Democrats were the moral compass. The Democrats were the ones that would be the ones to stand against any injustice, whether here or abroad.

00:31:19 Speaker_11
At this point, my stance is and continues to be that it is no longer a question of, how can you win me back? It is a question of, how can I hold you accountable for the lives lost? Because that is not something I'm willing to forgive.

00:31:35 Speaker_03
Sumra and the abandoned Harris camp are urging people to use their votes as a cudgel, as a way to punish the Democrats. But the uncommitted folks have a different strategy.

00:31:47 Speaker_20
I believe my vote is not a love letter. I believe my vote is a chess move. That's Abbas Alaouiya, one of the uncommitted founders at a press conference. My family right now is frantically figuring out whether their son, their grandson, who's working on

00:32:05 Speaker_20
mobilizing people in the United States and protesting this awful genocide and aggression that is extending to Lebanon and other places. They're calling me asking, hey, do you think your protest is going to work? Because this is unbearable.

00:32:21 Speaker_20
So excuse me, if my priority is not punishing Harris, I do not care if Harris is punished. I care if our movement is well-positioned to save some lives, because some of those lives happen to be real human beings who I know.

00:32:37 Speaker_20
And if you're willing to get some satisfaction out of feeling like you punished Harris, and that will help you sleep at night.

00:32:46 Speaker_20
I can respect that for me, in order for me to try and start sleeping at night, I need to know that I'm blocking Donald Trump because his plans are very clearly to enable Netanyahu to do more murdering.

00:33:01 Speaker_03
I had to ask Samra what she thinks will happen if Trump wins. Because that's the most likely consequence if her plan to rebuke Biden, Harris, and the Democrats is successful. And just to be clear, Abandoned Harris is not officially endorsing Trump.

00:33:16 Speaker_03
They endorsed Jill Stein, a third party candidate. But Samra is personally endorsing Trump.

00:33:23 Speaker_03
Do you think that if Trump becomes president and the violence is still continuing, do you think then you will see an organized democratic resistance to the violence?

00:33:33 Speaker_11
Yes, I do. I think Democrats will, number one, learn their lesson that genocide cannot go unpaid for or unaccounted for, and they will see that losing an election is something that can potentially happen if you continue to support this genocide.

00:33:49 Speaker_11
That's the first thing. And then I think that will change some hearts. And then secondly, yes, I do think that that will come into play where they're going, you know, Trump is a villain and he's a very, he's a very easy person to make a villain.

00:34:07 Speaker_11
And so if he was to do anything in support, they would, I know they would throw it back into our faces like, look, he's supporting genocide. Look, all you protesters that cost the Democrats election, look what he's doing.

00:34:19 Speaker_11
And they may come out and actually do the things that we expected them to do when Biden was still in office. So potentially discuss an arms embargo, potentially say that Israel is violating international law.

00:34:35 Speaker_03
I'm not gonna lie, like, this felt a little, like, 12-dimensional chess to me. Like, for starters, you gotta believe that whomever wins or loses, they're gonna sort through the results and realize that they were being judged on the issue of Gaza.

00:34:48 Speaker_03
And that's just, it's asking for your vote to convey a lot of nuance and shading to the office holders on the other end of that vote. The uncommitted movement, on the other hand, is trying to work with the Democrats, and they're not really succeeding.

00:35:02 Speaker_03
Despite all the jockeying and organizing and the hundreds of thousands of primary votes supporting their cause, the Harris campaign hasn't really engaged with them directly. I mean, take, for example, the week of the party's national convention.

00:35:13 Speaker_20
The Democratic Party is actively suppressing a Palestinian American from speaking from this stage. We urge the Democratic Party to reconsider.

00:35:21 Speaker_03
The Uncommitted movement had spent months trying to secure a speaking slot on stage for one of their delegates, a Palestinian-American elected official from Georgia.

00:35:29 Speaker_03
They even organized an all-night sit-in at the convention to bring attention to that demand. And they didn't get it.

00:35:35 Speaker_17
Today, I watched my party say our tent can fit anti-choice Republicans, but it can't fit an elected official like me? I do not understand. I do not understand why being a Palestinian has become disqualifying in this country.

00:35:54 Speaker_03
In the end, the uncommitted camp didn't win any concessions from the Harris campaign. So what cards did they have left to play? All right.

00:36:06 Speaker_20
Thank you so much. Thank you to members of the press for being here with us today.

00:36:10 Speaker_03
All they had left was their endorsement. And so in late September, about six weeks out from the election, the uncommitted folks held a press conference.

00:36:19 Speaker_20
Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate. It's always been about building a movement that saves lives. That's Abbas Alawiya again. He's one of Uncommitted's founders.

00:36:34 Speaker_20
Today, the Uncommitted national movement announces that as we continue advocating for life-saving policy to end the bombing in Gaza and life-saving policy that ends U.S. support for the Israeli military's war crimes,

00:36:48 Speaker_20
Vice President Harris's unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy, or to even make a clear statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human rights law, has made it impossible for us to endorse her.

00:37:05 Speaker_20
At this time, our movement cannot endorse Vice President Harris. But they weren't officially endorsing anyone else either.

00:37:14 Speaker_20
At this time, our movement opposes a Donald Trump presidency whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing.

00:37:29 Speaker_20
And our movement is not recommending a third-party vote in the presidential election.

00:37:35 Speaker_03
They said they would not be throwing their organizational know-how and muscle or context, you know, the same organizing muscle they pointed out that drummed up 100,000 uncommitted votes in the Michigan primary, behind getting out the vote for Harris.

00:37:49 Speaker_03
They were also asking people to not vote third party because that might help Trump. So again, what options in the voting booth were on the table?

00:38:00 Speaker_10
Personally, for me, as a Palestinian American, as a mother raising Palestinian American children here, and as somebody who has family in occupied West Bank. Every time I'm asked that question, it's like I'm being asked that question at a funeral.

00:38:26 Speaker_10
And it makes it incredibly difficult.

00:38:33 Speaker_03
That is Layla Al-Abid. She's one of the co-founders of the Uncommitted movement. And as an aside, she's also Rashida Tlaib's sister.

00:38:41 Speaker_03
What was fascinating to me was that the leaders of Uncommitted who spoke at this press conference landed in such different places on that question of how they would personally vote.

00:38:54 Speaker_20
Even leaders within our own movement will be voting different ways as it relates to this issue. Some folks within our movement will be voting for Vice President Harris, even through their pain and their grief.

00:39:08 Speaker_10
And for me, right now, I can't make the decision to vote for Vice President Harris at the top of the ticket. But I also would never vote for somebody like Donald Trump. His values do not align with my own values. And I don't believe in third party.

00:39:29 Speaker_10
Like I said, I'm a Democrat. But right now, I can't cast a vote for Vice President Harris. What we are asking our supporters and uncommitted voters to do is to register a vote that ensures we are blocking Donald Trump.

00:39:49 Speaker_10
And so voters, in some ways, will have to vote their conscience. And we are laying out on the table what is at stake if we do not block Trump.

00:40:02 Speaker_03
But Samra, the abandoned Harris organizer that I spoke with, She envisioned a very different worst case scenario.

00:40:09 Speaker_11
The worst thing that could happen is the Democrats win without our community. It's the worst thing.

00:40:15 Speaker_03
That's because if Arab-Americans abandon the Democrats, but the Democrats still win the White House, it would signal to the party that they don't really need to take Arab-American voters that seriously. So her plan requires that Democrats lose.

00:40:30 Speaker_03
And Summer said she knows that a Trump win means putting a lot of other stuff she cares about in danger, things like reproductive rights, things like environmental policy. And I point out to her that she was kind of taking this big gamble.

00:40:44 Speaker_11
If you say gamble, what am I gambling? If Trump was exactly the same as the Democrats. I've lost nothing and the genocide continues. There's nothing worse than a genocide. It's already being done. So I'm not gambling anything.

00:41:01 Speaker_11
The only thing I would be sacrificing would be the domestic policies that I really, really, truly value and espouse and have loved for all my life, from women's rights to minorities, acceptance, etc.

00:41:14 Speaker_11
the immigration policies, the corporate policies, environmental policies, I would be sacrificing domestic policies. But when I weigh all of those things against a genocide, there is no comparison to me. They're not equivalent.

00:41:28 Speaker_11
They're nowhere near each other. I would give up everything that I believe in for accountability for a genocide. Absolutely. 100%.

00:41:45 Speaker_03
What I heard in her words was someone reckoning out loud with the compromises that come with being a voter who ranks one issue over everything else.

00:41:56 Speaker_03
Since our two-party system flattens all sorts of ideological expression into this binary, yes or no, Harris or Trump, any vote is a cosign to all this other stuff on the candidate's platform that you might not be crazy about, even stuff that you actively hate.

00:42:13 Speaker_03
But it also sounded to me like the bargaining that attends grief, like trying to make sense of this horrifying, calamitous thing that happened, or is happening still.

00:42:34 Speaker_03
Everybody we spoke to, everybody we heard from in this episode, takes their voting as a given, whether it's

00:42:41 Speaker_03
The uncommitted folks, or the abandoned folks, or the mayor of Dearborn, none of them, looking at the options in front of them, say that they want to sit this election out. They all believe that their vote matters.

00:42:53 Speaker_03
And I think, tellingly, their vote seems to shapeshift depending on who's holding it, right? Summers says it's a cudgel. Abbas says it's a chess move. The mayor says it's an exercise of moral conscience.

00:43:04 Speaker_03
It seems like so many people, they're trying to push against the upper limits of what the electoral process might be able to accomplish.

00:43:11 Speaker_03
Because in November, the only mechanism they have to officially register their anguish and their anger over what's happening in Gaza and now Lebanon and Yemen is still just this crude tool, their single decontextualized vote. And that is our show.

00:43:41 Speaker_03
You can follow us on Instagram at nprcodeswitch. If email is more your thing, ours is codeswitch at npr.org. Subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:43:50 Speaker_03
You can also subscribe to the Codeswitch newsletter by going to npr.org slash codeswitch newsletter. And just a reminder, that signing up for Codeswitch Plus is a great way to support our show and support public media.

00:44:02 Speaker_03
And you get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash Codeswitch. This episode would not be possible without all the reporting help I got from Colin Jackson from Michigan Public.

00:44:15 Speaker_03
You don't hear his voice in this episode. He was in all of these conversations. We were next to each other in every single one of them. Shout out to Colin. This episode was produced by Jess Kung.

00:44:24 Speaker_03
With help from Xavier Lopez, it was edited by Allison McAdam, Courtney Stein, and Leah Dinella. Our engineer was James Willits. And we'd be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the Code Switch Massive.

00:44:36 Speaker_03
Christina Kala, Dalia Mortada, Vera Lynn Williams, Jasmine Romero, B.A. Parker, and Lori Lizadaga. As for me, I'm Gene Debby. Be easy.

00:44:51 Speaker_15
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