Democrats Chose to Back a Genocide and Turn Right Over Defeating Trump
By refusing to budge on Palestine, Harris and the Democrats surrendered their moral advantage, forcing them to track right and alienate their base.
Adam Johnson
The exact cause of the Democrats’ catastrophic loss last night was, of course, no one thing. The leader of the incumbent party, Joe Biden, was deeply unpopular, with disapproval ratings of 56% on the eve of the election. The public felt inflation had eaten away at modest income gains. And, of course, shadowy billionaires spread false narratives and juiced social media.
Everyone is going to have their own reasons in the coming days — no doubt many based on their own priors and grievances. But one reason why the Harris campaign was bogged down from the outset was its moral and strategic refusal to break from the White House’s deeply unpopular position on arming and funding an ongoing genocide.
Not because the issue itself was dispositive, but because it played a central role in alienating the Democratic base and compelling Harris to find votes elsewhere — a disastrous choice which appears to have lowered turnout and sowed cynicism.
As much as the pollsters and consultants in charge of Democratic campaigns may dislike the so-called “base,” the base remains an important part of social media reach, campaign volunteers, and canvassers — the evangelical core of any campaign. For Biden, when his campaign was terminal last summer, this element was almost entirely gone, and indeed, this fact was one of the motivating factors pushing to drive him out. But Harris—at least initially—made up a lot of ground in this regard, mostly through better vibes and slightly more sophisticated HR empathy-speak.
But feigned concern and vibes can only go so far. As the honeymoon of “brat summer” gave way to a codified campaign theme, it was clear not only was Gaza going to be ignored entirely as an issue — and the death machine would churn on without pause — but Team Harris would be leaning into a strategy of attempting to woo so-called “disaffected Republicans.” She made the centerpiece of her campaign Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney, the former vice president of George W. Bush. To the Savvy Commentators this made sense — obviously, winning over fence-sitting Republicans was the right call. And few in our media questioned whether this strategy had any downsides.
But, of course, it did. Going to the center has costs; it’s not a perpetual vote-getting machine. A campaign that embraces conservative themes and personalities, even while throwing out progressive policies here and there, is bound to alienate voters for whom politics isn’t just a platform for endless triangulation.
To be clear: The costs could have been worth it. The votes gained from sounding like 2012 Mitt Romney may be greater than those lost to non-voting or third-party voting among the base. But this calculus was never shown. The campaign and its major PAC allies driving the strategy, namely Anita Dunn and pollster David Shor, never had to show the math on how this gambit made sense. It was simply assumed to be true, obvious, and inevitable.
It wasn’t until there were two weeks left in the election that the New York Times even entertained the idea that, perhaps, a campaign theme built around the progeny of a deeply unpopular war criminal who, herself, had negative favorables, was not the free real estate Dunn & Co. made it out to be. “As Vice President Kamala Harris makes a broad play to the political center,” the Times would hand-wring, “some Democrats worry that she is going too far in her bid to win over moderates who are skeptical of former President Donald J. Trump. In private — and increasingly in public as Election Day fast approaches — they say she risks chilling Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class voters.”
It would be very convenient for me if what I ideologically supported — in this case, ending a genocide — also happened to be what was electorally advantageous for the campaign. The moral thing and the politically useful thing are not, of course, inherently aligned. But the inverse is also true: There’s no law of nature that says tacking right, and doubling down on a deeply unpopular and morally ruinous Gaza strategy, is the smart and savvy thing to do. The burden ought to have been on those running a $1.8 billion campaign to show how their approach made sense, but they never bothered doing this. It was just dogma — dogma few ever questioned.
But there’s a cruel reality behind the decision to track right: The campaign, once it hitched its wagon to Biden’s policy of unqualified support for genocide in Gaza, really had no other choice. In 2020, the Biden campaign tentatively rode the progressive wave of the George Floyd protests, anger about Trump’s racist border policies, Covid activism, and anti-war protests against Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemen to energize the Democratic Party base to defeat Trump. It was, in retrospect, mostly lip service, and certainly no one at the time thought Biden a firebrand progressive. But the broader theme of the campaign was that everyone would have a seat at the table, even if the plate would most likely end up being empty.
Harris made no such pretensions, because any strategy that played to similar themes would have had to address the elephant in the room: the Democratic Party’s “ironclad” support for Israel’s elimination of a people in whole or in part. And this simply would not have worked. One can’t really bank on activist energy, youth turnout, and base-mobilizing when those involved — while canvassing together, or running phone banks at each others apartments, or getting drinks afterwards — have to awkwardly address the fact of genocide and their candidate’s support for it. This isn’t to say there was no activist or youth energy in the campaign — clearly there was. But those in charge quickly decided against making this their central theme and vote-gathering strategy, given the uncomfortable questions that would naturally arise from campaigning in these spaces. So Liz Cheney and her negative-2 favorables it was.
Countless pro-Democratic Party pundits tried to warn Harris. Polls were commissioned. The Uncommitted Movement very politely, and well within the bounds of loyal party politics, begged Harris to change course. But she refused. The risk, to her, was worth sticking to the unshakable commitment to “eliminating Hamas” no matter how many dead Palestinian children it required, or the degree to which images and reports of these dead children would fuel cynicism and create an opening for Trump to win.
To the extent grassroots energy was maintained, and the awkward fact of Gaza didn’t ruin the vibes more than it ought to have, this was made possible by an elaborate responsibility-avoidance PR regime of compartmentalization built up over months by the Biden campaign and a compliant media. Key to this compartmentalization were supposed “ceasefire talks” that the White House and campaign were allegedly “working tirelessly to secure,” but could never, alas, get across the finish line. Liberals were also soothed by the vaguely true-sounding refrain that Trump “would be worse for Gaza.” Turning every party advocate into a dead-eyed trolley problem expert triaging which genocide was morally preferable may have made cold logical sense, but it was hardly an inspiring message. Making it less compelling was that, by and large, it was not a position emanating from Palestinians themselves, as virtually every major Palestinian organization and the sole Palestinian-American in Congress, Rashida Tlaib, refused to endorse Harris.
But to an unmovable contingent of liberals — motivated by a combination of self-delusion and genuine and understandable fear of a second Trump term — it didn’t matter. They just wanted not to think about Gaza. It didn’t matter that the White House could simply assert a ceasefire whenever it wished, and the whole basis for the supposed “negotiations” was equal parts fictitious and internally inconsistent. These pat lines mostly worked.
Mostly. Aside from foreclosing on a progressive track that tapped into the base and emphasized turnout over converting fence-sitting Republicans, the fact of genocide in Gaza continued angering and alienating many voters not fooled by the “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire” PR regime and patronizing I See You, I Hear You rhetoric from Harris. Further research is needed to measure the exact extent this bitterness, this enthusiasm-suppressing support for genocide played a role in losing potential Democratic voters, but one thing is clear: It rotted the campaign from the beginning, made going right more or less inevitable, and loomed over every brat summer selfie, phone bank interaction, and water cooler conversation.
In late July when Harris took over the Biden campaign, she could have chosen to break from the White House, she could have chosen to follow international and US law, she could have chosen progressive energy and greater support from the base, she could have chosen life. Instead she chose genocide. And this was the inevitable outcome.
This story was published in partnership with The Real News Network.
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Adam H. Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast.
