Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake by Kamala Harris

I write here, for The Guardian, that the Harris campaign’s inability to change course on Gaza was a fatal error certainly for Palestinians and quite likely, as we now see, for Americans, too.

Could Kamala Harris have won the election if she had promised to change course in Gaza? It’s impossible to know, of course, but there’s reason to think so. Instead, Harris hewed far too closely to Biden’s position, alienating large numbers of voters along the way. The result? We can expect the catastrophe for the Palestinian people to continue, while we learn to live with a much more dangerous Donald Trump, a man whose far-right agenda threatens many of us in and out of the United States.

What seems to have doomed Harris most was not so much traditional Democrats casting votes for the Republican Trump, though there was some of that. In fact, party loyalty, at around 95% for both parties, was basically the same as in 2020. Rather, Harris’s shortcomings point to the rank-and-file of the Democratic party not coming out to vote and to more first-time voters casting Republican ballots. We don’t have the final voter tally yet, but so far Harris has amassed just over 68m votes, compared with Trump’s 72m. Biden, by contrast, earned over 81m votes in 2020. By the time the final numbers are in, it’s likely that Trump will have won more than the 74m votes he had in 2020, and Harris will have been the first Democrat to lose the popular vote in 20 years.

Some of those lost votes surely must be attributable to Harris’s weak position on Palestine. A significant majority of young people sympathize with Palestinian rights, according to the Pew Research Center, and young people are also highly critical of Biden’s policies on Palestine. Meanwhile, reporting from around the nation indicates that voter turnout among young people in this election was low. The Chicago board of elections noted that 53% of registered voters between the ages of 18 and 24 cast a ballot, well below the city’s average turnout of 58%. And compared with the 2020 election, Trump doubled his support from first-time voters there…

Read the rest here.