Uncommitted movement: Trump remains biggest threat, not Democrats
A group of Michigan-based Democratic voters who launched a historic nationwide primary ballot initiative to enact policy change on Gaza now say their best bet is to continue working through party channels.
However, that’s not to say that White House officials or Democratic Party staff have heeded their calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, an arms embargo on Israel, and a lifting of the 17-year-old blockade on the Gaza Strip.
In a virtual press conference on Thursday morning, senior leaders from the Uncommitted National Movement made it clear that they will not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the US presidency, but more importantly, that they discourage any moves that could lead to a second Trump administration - namely voting for a third party candidate.
This despite Green Party candidate Jill Stein being the favourite among Muslim-American voters in at least three swing states, and standing almost neck-and-neck with Harris nationwide, according to polling conducted late last month by the Council on American Islamic Relations.
“Unfortunately, a lot of people believe casting the third party vote is a vote of consciousness, and it's completely understandable given the context of people navigating fear and grief and betrayal,” Alexis Zeidan, co-founder of the Uncommitted National Movement, told Middle East Eye, referring to the war on Gaza.
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“But within the context of our broken electoral college system, we know that voting a third party is ultimately inadvertently supporting Trump,” she said.
Zeidan says she believes Trump will "exacerbate" the genocide, annex the occupied West Bank and punish pro-Palestinian protesters in the US.
Protest vote
"Uncommitted" stems from the option with the same name on many primary election ballots across the US. Sometimes it appears as "none of the above".
For thousands of Arab and Muslim Americans who said they felt betrayed by the Biden administration’s full-throated support for Israel, this was a way for Democratic voters to still show up at the voting booth during their party’s primary, and protest ongoing policy.
It was by all accounts a headline-making success in states like Michigan and Minnesota, where uncommitted ballots surpassed the 10 percent mark the group set as a bar. Overall, nearly three-quarters of a million Democratic primary voters checked the uncommitted box.
At a certain threshold, states can send delegates to the nominating convention who are not pledged to the nominee. The nominee - in this case, Harris - is theoretically meant to try and win them over.
That did not happen last month, when 36 uncommitted delegates from around the country showed up at the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) convention in Chicago. After months of meetings with party staffers as well as aides to Biden and Harris, key demands of the movement went unmet and the DNC refused a platform for a Palestinian American on the main stage.
Harris herself also refused to meet with members of the Uncommitted movement.
“Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her,” the Uncommitted National Movement said in a press release on Thursday.
But senior leaders in the group have no intention of abandoning a potential Harris administration.
“We believe that there are clearly pro-war hawks and Aipac people that exist within the Democratic Party that want to see us walk away. They want to have the path of least resistance,” Zeidan told MEE.
“And what we're doing right now is we're existing within the party, and we're resisting the policies that we know the party holds that are both unjust and inhumane, and for us to simply walk away means that we are giving up in this fight for a more just Democratic Party.”
Abandon Harris
Well before the Uncommitted movement surfaced, a group of largely Muslim-American voters in battleground states formed the Abandon Biden movement, now renamed Abandon Harris.
The only goal the two groups share is their get-out-the-vote effort: they both want to ensure that all Americans who are angered by the war on Gaza cast a ballot in November.
“What we feel is that being marginalised and ignored is the threat,” Hudhayfah Ahmad, a spokesperson for the Abandon Harris movement, told MEE.
The group has repeatedly said it is of paramount importance to punish the Democrats if they are to be taken seriously as an electorate. While Harris has described the situation in Gaza as “heartbreaking”, she has maintained longstanding US policy by pledging to stand behind Israel and give it the means to defend itself.
While Abandon Harris has yet to endorse one individual ahead of the presidential election, the group told MEE it is urging voters to back third-party candidates towards eventually "breaking the duopoly” of the US electoral system.
“The Democratic Party has to provide actual, substantial policy that will work to immensely benefit the lives of American citizens, as opposed to building their entire campaign on ‘look how bad that other side is'.”
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