Kamala says she'll "end the war in Gaza"
For opponents of Israel's genocide, sticking to principles gets results. But for Harris, her flip-flop is a sign of desperation.
For days I’ve had the feeling they were going to be this dumb. With less than 36 hours to go before the polls open on November 5, election day, Kamala Harris traveled to Michigan where she finally said, “I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza.”
Harris is desperate, but it shows that sticking to your principles gets results. This flip-flop is a testament to voters in Michigan who refused to be shamed into supporting a candidate who for months has given full backing to Israel’s genocide of Gaza, as I have described in previous articles.
Many leftists surrendered to Democrats without demanding anything in return. But in Michigan, Muslim and Arab voters refused to be shamed or browbeaten into voting for the party that was massacring their families, communities, and nation.
An Oct. 3031 poll of 1,449 “verified Muslim voters” nationwide found that 42 percent planned to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, 41 percent for Kamala Harris, and only 10 percent for Donald Trump. In 2020, Biden garnered 65 percent of Muslim voters nationwide.
But with most of the estimated 300,000 Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan rejecting Harris in droves for her genocide apology, she surrendered.
This is a genuine victory given the Democrats were so anti-Palestinian just months ago Harris wouldn’t let even an anti-Hamas, pro-Israel Palestinian speak at the DNC in Chicago.
But waiting until a few minutes before midnight to call for an end to the war in Gaza is dumb. The Harris campaign thinks voters will suddenly forget how Democrats slaughtered Palestinians and then Lebanese in their homelands and dehumanized them in the United States for a year. They think voters will forget all the lies and gaslighting coming out of the White House. They think voters will forget how Biden and Harris violated U.S. laws in arming Israel, covering up war crimes, and enabling shocking atrocities.
Many voters will see through Harris’s words as a cynical ploy. She has lost their trust and cannot win it back by saying, “I’m drowning, give me a hand.”
There are other reasons this move could backfire. Based on the 2020 turnout, nearly half the voters, some 75 million, have cast an early ballot in the 2024 election. No one knows how many of them might have voted for Harris if only she had only spoken up one or two months ago. It might be in the hundreds of thousands, and now all those votes are lost to her.
Harris’s last-minute conversion risks turning Zionist supporters against her. She isn’t able to sell her new position so late to them, nor can she use it to blunt Trump’s relentless attacks on her as a warmonger wreaking havoc across the world. It’s too late to have much of an impact on the media either, perhaps except for negative press.
I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think the new position is a sign Harris is going to lose Michigan and the election. Her campaign knows the negative consequences I have laid out and probably many more, and they still decided to do it. That may be because their internal polling and get-out-the-vote operation are all flashing red lights. They decided they needed a Hail Mary play to scare up a lot of votes fast.
What’s even more troubling is this flip-flop may be aimed at other states. Analysts have been warning for months that Muslim and Arab voters could be decisive in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia on top of Michigan given their numbers and how tight all these states are.
Harris’s shift is a victory for the Palestine solidarity movement, and done in the dumbest way possible by the Democrats.
And more importantly Arun, when she loses (and I suspect she will given this is 'too little too late' as you've also pointed out), it will be a clear indicator that her unequivocal support for the Gaza genocide was the driving factor behind her defeat. It could be a watershed moment in terms of loosening the grip that AIPAC et al have on the duopoly, as for the first time a presidential candidate would've failed to win the Oval Office despite backing Israel unconditionally. Of course a stronger indicator of this would be Harris' failure coupled with the Greens breaking the five percent threshold.
That said, I don't expect the Dems to attribute such an outcome to Gaza, so it will be crucial to vocalise the direct causal relationship post November 5th as voting data becomes available.
Humphrey waited until September before coming out for ending the Vietnam war. And he was considered a liberal that caused to the Dixiecrats to switch alliance. His polling improved after that but he still lost by the narrowest margins because the war remained unpopular. The war was a political football, Nixon going into the election sabotaged the peace talks to prevent Humphrey from winning, once in he would escalate into Laos and Cambodia. Muslim voters have their eye on history, on “the largest purveyor of violence in the world”, lead by the lying duopoly.