Well, the election is finally here, and the scenario that has been painfully obvious for some time may be about to take place: In a tight election, the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous policy of supporting Israel’s genocide for over a year, a policy that is significantly unpopular among Americans in general and Democrats in particular, might cost them the votes needed to hang onto the White House.
In no place has this dynamic been more likely to play out than in Michigan. Michigan is a key swing state, central to the election of a Democrat, and will be decided by a slim margin. It is also home to the largest concentration, perhaps half a million, of Arab Americans. Should that vote go largely in one direction, it could have an outsize impact on whether the state, and consequently the presidency, is awarded to a Democrat or a Republican.
But before we go further, it is crucial to understand that voters alienated by the Biden-Harris genocide policy are not only Arab and Muslim Americans, they are all sorts of people from all faiths and backgrounds. The uncommitted vote in Michigan, which was a product of a campaign during the primaries to signal to Democrats that voters could bolt over their genocide policy, pulled thousands of votes from all over the state, not just in the Dearborn area, which has a major concentration of Arab American voters.
Polls show us time and again that younger people and people of color, key constituencies in the Democratic base, feel more strongly about this issue than other groups. That does not mean that all young voters or voters of color will hold back their support for Harris when ballots are cast, but it could mean that a sliver of them do. If one looks only at voters of color, just 10 percent of them is more than the entire Arab and Muslim American eligible voter population. If you add in 10 percent of voters under 30, then the numbers are even higher. Given this, it is probably more accurate to speak about a different category of voter. We can call it the Palestine voter. The Palestine voter is not necessarily Palestinian or Arab or Muslim. In fact most of them are probably not, but rather they are voters who are attuned to the suffering of Palestinians and outraged over it enough to cast their ballot based on it.
If it seems hard to understand the Palestine voter, it is likely because Palestine voters have been living very different lives from most Americans over the past year. These voters likely exist in a unique information environment where they are seeing firsthand news reports from the ground in Gaza in their social media feeds that most Americans are not seeing because American media is failing to accurately capture the scale of suffering and destruction U.S. policy is enabling in Gaza, or worse, making excuses........