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      ‘They blew it’: Democrats lost 22,000 votes in Michigan’s heavily Arab American cities

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      Kamala Harris received at least 22,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years ago in Michigan’s most heavily Arab American and Muslim cities, a Guardian analysis of raw vote data in the critical swing state finds.The numbers also show Trump made small gains – about 9,000 votes – across those areas, suggesting Harris’s loss there is more attributable to Arab Americans either not voting or casting ballots for third-party candidates.Support for Democrats also fell in seven precincts around the country with significant Arab American or Muslim populations, according to data compiled by the Arab American Institute. It found a combined drop in the seven precincts, from about 4,900 votes in 2020 to just 3,400 this election.Another analysis, based on nationwide exit polling by the Council on American Islamic Relations, found 53% of Muslim Americans voted for Jill Stein. The same poll showed 21% of Muslims cast a ballot for Trump and 20.3% for Harris.The drop in Democratic support in Hamtramck, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights – three Michigan cities with the nation’s largest Arab American and Muslim populations per capita – represent nearly 27% of the 81,000-vote difference between Harris and Donald Trump’s tallies in the state.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      The number of votes Harris lost in Michigan over the White House’s Israel policy is almost certainly higher. The analysis only looked at the three population centers, not the large Arab American population scattered throughout the region. Some estimated before the election that Harris could lose as many as 90,000 votes in the state.In Dearborn, a Detroit suburb that is nearly 60% Arab American, Biden received about 31,000 votes in 2020, while Harris received just over 15,000. Trump, who campaigned in Dearborn in the election’s waning days, received about 18,000 votes, up from 13,000 last election. Meanwhile, Stein picked up about 7,600 Dearborn votes this year.Stein and Cornell West, third-party candidates who made inroads with voters frustrated with Harris but unwilling to vote for Trump, combined for about 50,000 votes statewide.Michigan is virtually a must-win swing state, and frustration here with the Biden administration’s Gaza policy was viewed as a major Harris liability. Though the issue accounts for a significant portion of Harris’s loss in the state, she also underperformed with Michigan voters across multiple demographics, and inflation was a top issue for many.But Arab American and Muslim voters who defected from the Democratic party made a “key difference” across upper midwest swing states, said the Muslims for Trump founder Rabiul Chowdhury. He said Trump and his surrogates worked in heavily Arab American areas to make amends for his past anti-Muslim record, and promised peace in Gaza and the Middle East. Harris did not, he said.“Everyone’s ultimate goal was to punish Harris and the best way to do this was to vote for Trump,” Chowdhury said.Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian American and Congress’s most vocal critic of US-Israel policy, received more than 24,000 votes in Dearborn, doubling Harris’s total. However, she only slightly outran Harris in neighboring Dearborn Heights.In Hamtramck, a city neighboring Detroit that is about 60% Muslim or Arab American, Biden received about 6,500 votes in 2020, while Harris dropped to 3,200. Meanwhile, Trump’s vote total in the city increased by about 2,000, while Stein received just over 600 votes.Trump increasing his votes in Hamtramck but not Dearborn may reflect that Yemeni and Bangladeshi American immigrants in Hamtramck are broadly considered to be more conservative than Dearborn’s largely Lebanese population, observers say. Dearborn heavily backed Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primaries, and its mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, was once among the most progressive representatives in the statehouse.Hamtramck’s mayor, Amer Ghalib, is deeply socially conservative. He endorsed Trump for the presidential election, and on Monday spoke at Trump’s final campaign rally in the state.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Dearborn Heights, a city that is about half Arab American, Biden won with more than 12,000 votes in 2020; this election, Trump won the city with 11,000 votes, and Harris received 9,000.Meanwhile, in a Houston precinct with a significant Arab American population, Democratic support fell from 520 votes to 300 votes. Democratic support in a Minneapolis precinct where Muslim or Arab Americans comprise a majority of voters fell from about 2,100 votes to 1,100 votes.Arab American pollster and Democratic National Committee member James Zogby noted the Harris campaign was repeatedly warned of the votes she would lose if she did not change course on Gaza or meet with key community leaders.“They blew it,” Zogby said. “We gave [the Harris campaign] multiple opportunities and ideas as to how to do this, and they finally started with three days out, but it was way too late in the game.”Mohamed Gula, director of Emgage, a Muslim political advocacy group, said “a lot has to change and there’s a lot Democrats would have to do” to win back Arab and Muslim voters.“There wasn’t a full belief that Trump was better than Harris – it was that the situation was not acceptable and there needs to be change, and we will take whatever comes from that and do what we need to,” he said.Chowdury said Muslim voters in 2028 will support the party that most promotes peace.“We don’t know what the future holds,” he said. “Today it’s a matter of ending the war and supporting the guy who is giving us the assurance of ending the war.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      US diplomats brace as Trump plans foreign policy shake-up in wider purge of government

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      The US foreign policy establishment is set for one of the biggest shake-ups in years as Donald Trump has vowed to both revamp US policy abroad and to root out the so-called “deep state” by firing thousands of government workers – including those among the ranks of America’s diplomatic corps.Trump’s electoral victory is also likely to push the Biden administration to speed up efforts to support Ukraine before Trump can cut off military aid, hamper the already-modest efforts to restrain Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza and Lebanon and lead to a fresh effort to slash and burn through major parts of US bureaucracy including the state department.Trump backers have said he will be more organised during his second term, often dubbed “Trump 2.0”, and on the day after election day US media reported that Trump had already chosen Brian Hook, a hawkish State Department official during the first Trump administration, to lead the transition for America’s diplomats.And yet analysts, serving and former US diplomats and foreign officials said that it remained difficult to separate Trump’s bluster from his actual plans when he takes power in January. What is clear is that his priority is to bin many of the policies put in place by his predecessor.“I’m skeptical that the transition process will be super-impactful since the natural instinct of the new team will be to toss all of Biden’s foreign policy in the dumpster,” one former senior diplomat said.“If you go back to 2016, Mexico didn’t pay for the wall. And, you know, it doesn’t look like there was a secret plan to defeat Isis,” said Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security thinktank. “Some of these things didn’t turn out the way that they were talked about on that campaign trail and we go into this without really knowing what the president’s proposal will be for all of this – and what he will do.”One clear priority, however, is to target many of those involved in crafting US foreign policy as part of a broader purge of the US government.Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F, a designation that would strip tens of thousands of federal employees of their protections as civil servants and define them instead as political appointees, giving Trump immense powers to fire “rogue bureaucrats”, as he called them in a campaign statement.Within the State Department, there are concerns that Trump could target the bureaus that focus specifically on issues that he has attacked during his reelection campaign such as immigration. In particular, he could slash entire bureaus of the State Department, including the bureau of population, refugees and migration (PRM, which resettled 125,000 refugees to the US in 2022 alone), as well as the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, which has focused on the violation of the rights of Palestinians by Israel.Project 2025, a policy memo released by the conservative Heritage Foundation, suggested that Trump would merely reassign PRM to shift resources to “challenges stemming from the current immigration situation until the crisis can be contained” and said it would demand “indefinite curtailment of the number of USRAP [United States refugee admissions program] refugee admissions”.But the blueprint, authored by Kiron Skinner, a former director of policy planning at the State Department during the first Trump administration, went further, suggesting that Trump could simply freeze the agency’s work for a complete reevaluation of its earlier policy.“Before inauguration, the president-elect’s department transition team should assess every aspect of State Department negotiations and funding commitments,” a section of the memo said. After inauguration, Skinner wrote, the secretary of state should “order an immediate freeze on all efforts to implement unratified treaties and international agreements, allocation of resources, foreign assistance disbursements, domestic and international contracts and payments, hiring and recruiting decisions, etc” pending a review by a political appointee.“Everyone is bracing [themselves],” said one diplomat stationed abroad. “Some [diplomats] may choose to leave before he even arrives.”Trump has also vowed to “overhaul federal departments and agencies, firing all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus”.As Joe Biden enters his lame duck period, the administration will focus on trying to push through $6bn in aid that has already been approved for Ukraine, as well as exerting whatever leverage remains in his administration to find an unlikely ceasefire in Gaza.At the same time, they will have to calm a nervous world waiting to see what Trump has planned for his second term.“I think they’re going to do everything they can to make the case that the United States needs to continue to aid Ukraine, and they’ll have to spend a lot of time, I’m sure, dealing with nervous Ukrainians and nervous Europeans,” said Fontaine. At an upcoming G20 summit in Rio, the current administration was “going to try to reassure the rest of the world that a lot of the things that they have done over the past four years are going to stick into the future rather than just be kind of undone”.“And,” he added, “we’ll see what the reaction to that is.” More

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      Harris vows at Michigan rally to ‘do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza’

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      Kamala Harris pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population two days out from the election.Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Biden in 2020, helping him to a narrow victory over Donald Trump. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the vice-president’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, and polling suggests that these voters are gravitating towards Jill Stein, the Green party candidate.With Harris and the former president essentially tied in Michigan, a drop in voting numbers for either could be critical, and Harris made a clear appeal at the beginning of her speech.“We are joined today by leaders of the Arab American community, which has deep and proud roots here in Michigan, and I want to say this year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon,” Harris said.“It is devastating, and as president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.”Speaking at the Michigan State University campus, Harris repeated her campaign promise to “turn the page on a decade of politics driven by fear and division”. Harris did not mention Trump by name in East Lansing, as she gave an address that struck a hopeful tone for the future.“America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow American not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.“We are ready for a president who knows that the true measure of a leader is not based on who you beat down, it is based on who you lift up.”

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      Harris was making her fourth stop of the day in Michigan, having earlier spoken at a church in Detroit and stopped by a barber shop in Pontiac. The state is key to her chances of success, but the result is likely to be close. Trump won Michigan by about 10,000 votes in 2016 as he demolished Democrats’ “blue wall”, and Biden also carried the state by a narrow margin in 2020. Trump is holding his final rally of the campaign in Michigan on Monday night, but Harris was defiant.“We need to finish strong. So for the next two days we still have a lot of work to do but here’s the thing: we like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work,” she said.“And make no mistake, we will win.”It was a raucous atmosphere at the rally, Harris’s final stop in Michigan before Tuesday’s vote. She repeatedly had to pause for loud chants of “Kamala, Kamala” from a diverse crowd who seemed enthusiastic about voting for her“I feel more energized and more excited in this election than I have in a while,” said Latonya Demps, 40, a small business owner and a Michigan State alumna.“I’m very excited to vote for Harris. As a woman she speaks for my rights and the rights of women that we have fought for for a very, very long time: the right to choose, the right to have equity and access, also freedom for all of us in terms of climate change, in terms of our economy, the type of neighbors we want to have, the families that we want to raise, I think she represents the values that are really important to me.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis week Democrats have fought to counter the gains made by Stein among Arab American and Muslim American voters in Michigan, with the Democratic National Committee launching a series of ads on Instagram and YouTube aiming to discourage people from voting for Stein and Cornel West, who is running as an independent and is also a critic of Israel.The ads highlight recent comments by Trump that he likes Stein “very much”, because: “She takes 100% from [Democrats].” The pro-Democrat organization MoveOn has also been running a “seven-figure” ad campaign this week, which it said was designed to appeal to people who are yet to decide on a candidate and “third-party curious voters”.Polling on the issue has yielded inconsistent results. Last week a national survey of Arab Americans, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit, found 43% supporting Trump compared with 41% for Harris, and 4% backing Stein, while a survey of Muslim Americans, by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of American Muslims, found that 42.3% plan to vote for Stein, 41% for Harris and 9.8% for Trump.Despite that uncertainty, Harris supporters left buoyant on Sunday night.“She’s going to be the first Black woman president that we’ve had. She’s actually going to fight for our rights. She’s fighting for women’s reproductive rights, she’s also fighting for the middle class, for entrepreneurs, and business owners like myself,” said Zay Worthey, 19.Worthey said he was “100%” confident that Harris will win the White House on Tuesday.“Because she has something that Donald Trump doesn’t: community,” Worthey said.“She’s really working and fighting for the people of America, and Donald Trump is just only working for the people of the rich.” More

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      Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declines to endorse Kamala Harris

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      Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declined to endorse Kamala Harris at a union rally in Detroit, where the war in Gaza is the top issue for the largest block of Arab American voters in the country.Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, is the only one of the so-called leftist “Squad” that has not endorsed the Democrat candidate. The other three members – Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York – endorsed Harris in July.“Don’t underestimate the power you all have,” Tlaib told a get-out-the-vote United Auto Workers rallygoers. “More than those ads, those lawn signs, those billboards, you all have more power to turn out people that understand we’ve got to fight back against corporate greed in our country.”Tlaib’s non-endorsement of Harris comes as a voter survey published on Friday suggested that 43% of Muslim American voters support the Green party candidate, Jill Stein.After Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Democrats blamed Stein voters for the loss of Michigan and Wisconsin to the Republican candidate. Some Democrats fear that the same scenario could play out again next week.Earlier this year, during the presidential primary campaigns, about 100,000 Michigan voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” as a mark of protest against the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the cross -border Hamas attack in October last year that killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages, mostly civilians.Israel’s attack on Gaza has since killed more than 40,000 people, with many of them women and children. In Lebanon, where Israel has now invaded to fight with Iran-backed Hezbollah, more than 2,897 people have been killed and 13,150 wounded, the country’s health ministry reports. A quarter of those killed were women and children.The US has been a staunch ally of Israel during the fighting, continuing to send arms to the country and limiting its public criticism of Israeli actions.Tlaib has been critical of the Democratic party’s position on the growing and bloody conflict, saying it was “hard not to feel invisible” after the party did not include a Palestinian American speaker at its convention in Chicago in August.In an interview with Zeteo, the news organization founded by former MSNBC host (and Guardian contributor) Mehdi Hasan, Tlaib said the omission “made it clear with their speakers that they value Israeli children more than Palestinian children”.“Our trauma and pain feel unseen and ignored by both parties,” she added. “One party uses our identity as a slur, and the other refuses to hear from us. Where is the shared humanity? Ignoring us won’t stop the genocide.”Harris has faced continued protests on the trail, as demonstrators call for her to break with President Joe Biden and support an arms embargo on Israel. Harris has said Israel “has right to defend itself”, and that Palestinians need “dignity, security”.Confronted by a protester in Wisconsin two weeks ago who accused the Jewish state of genocide, Harris said: “I know what you’re speaking of. I want a ceasefire. I want the hostage deal done. I want the war to end.”At a rally in Dearborn earlier on Friday, Tlaib the criticized Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who has been endorsed by the Muslim mayors of Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck.“Trump is a proud Islamophobe + serial liar who doesn’t stand for peace,” Tlaib posted on X. “The reality is that the Biden admin’s unconditional support for genocide is what got us here. This should be a wake-up call for those who continue to support genocide. This election didn’t have to be close.” More

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      ‘I had to get out’: the US military officers filing for conscientious objector status over Gaza

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      For Joy Metzler, a second lieutenant in the US air force, joining the military had felt like answering a calling. An adoptee from China who was raised in a conservative Christian family, she believed she owed a debt to the United States.But the Hamas attacks in Israel last year, and Israel’s war that followed, rocked Metzler’s convictions. Within months, she filed for conscientious objector status, one of a small number of US military personnel seeking to end their service because of their moral opposition to US support for Israel.“I didn’t know Palestine was a place before October 7,” Metzler told the Guardian.“All of a sudden it felt like a light clicking on for me.”As the war in Gaza enters a second year, some disillusioned members of the US military have turned to the Vietnam war-era conscientious objector policy to terminate their military service because of religious or moral convictions.There are few avenues to express dissent in the army. Earlier this year, Harrison Mann, an army officer assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency resigned in protest of US support for Israel. In a far more extreme gesture, 25-year-old US airman Aaron Bushnell died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington in February.The conscientious objector route is a seldom-invoked alternative that few service members are aware of – though some advocates say there has been an uptick in interest in the last year.The defense department referred questions about the number of conscientious objectors to each branch of the military. A spokesperson for the air force said that it has received 42 applications since 2021 and granted 36. Applications since 7 October “are on trend with pre-conflict averages”, the spokesperson added. (The army, navy, and Marine Corps did not respond to requests for comment.)But while the numbers remain relatively low, the war in Gaza is top of mind for those service members who have considered conscientious objector status this year, said Bill Galvin, a Vietnam-era objector and director of counseling at the Center on Conscience and War, one of a handful of groups that helps military members navigate the complex bureaucratic process.Galvin said his group helps roughly 50 to 70 applicants a year, across military branches, and that there’s been more interest than usual this year.The US has subsidized Israel’s war in Gaza to the tune of nearly $18bn over the last year, and is growing more deeply entangled as the conflict spills into the broader region. The Biden administration recently announced the deployment of 100 troops to Israel to man a missile defense system in anticipation of an escalation against Iran.“Almost everyone that I’ve talked to has at least cited what’s happening in Gaza as a factor in causing them to rethink what they’re doing,” Galvin said. “Some have actually said: ‘I know that the airplane that I’m doing maintenance on is delivering weaponry to Israel and so I feel complicit.’”Metzler said she was raised to believe that Israel is “the nation of God’s chosen people” and “terrorists were morally bankrupt people, who hate us because of who we are”.When the war in Gaza started, the images of Palestinian civilians’ suffering disturbed her, but it wasn’t until Bushnell’s self-immolation that she started reading about the history of the conflict and the role of the US government in it. “A lot of the things I had been told about the US’s role in the world were wrong”, she said.The war pushed Metzler to re-evaluate her time in the air force academy. She recalled laughing with her classmates as they watched footage of people running from a drone – she wasn’t sure in which country. She felt ashamed.“I had come out of the academy glorifying the act of warfare,” she said. “There’s a certain disregard for human life that you just have to have to be a member of the military.”Metzler learned about the conscientious objector option when she met a group of veterans at a pro-Palestine protest at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she’s completing a master’s in aerospatial engineering.The defense department first introduced the objector application process in 1962. Tens of thousands obtained the status over the following decade, as the Vietnam war, and a mandatory draft, sparked a mass antiwar movement. But since then, the number of applicants has fallen drastically, with many members of the military unaware that the option even exists.“It’s not common knowledge,” said Metzler. “You don’t want to advertise to the people that are working for you that there’s a legal way for you to break your contract if you start to feel weird feelings.”For the few who embark on it, the process is rigorous and lengthy – Metzler’s application filled 19 pages and she is still waiting for final word after filing it in July. Applicants must demonstrate that they are opposed to all wars and that their beliefs about military service changed after they enlisted. They have to interview with a chaplain and with a mental health professional before an investigating officer reviews their case and makes a recommendation to a committee that decides whether to grant the status. In the past, the military has approved about half the conscientious objector applications it received.Larry Hebert, another US senior airman, said the process was “excruciatingly long”.A six-year veteran, Hebert reached what he called “a moral break” as horrific images of Palestinian children resembling his own filled his TikTok.During a leave from his service in Spain in March, he traveled to Washington and staged a hunger strike in front of the White House to highlight the plight of starving children in Gaza. He later applied for conscientious objector status, but as the wait became unbearable, he filed for voluntary separation, another avenue to legally end one’s service. When that was rejected, he took off his uniform and refused to obey orders. He was disciplined and is currently waiting to be released on administrative grounds“I had to get out,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a part of any of it.”Juan Bettancourt, a US airman who also filed for conscientious objector status earlier this year, told the Guardian that many of the service members he has spoken with have fear of speaking out but are privately appalled by US support for Israel. “There’s a lot of deep-seated criticism and moral disgust at the complicity of our government in the genocide in Gaza,” he said.Because dissenting voices are so rare, the military just tries to “brush them under the rug”, Bettancourt added, noting that Bushnell’s self-immolation was portrayed by the air force exclusively as a matter of “mental health,” Bettancourt said.View image in fullscreenThe air force spokesperson wrote in a statement that the force is committed to ensuring its members “never feel compelled to resort to self-harm as a means of protest”. She added that policies like the conscientious objector process “provide a safe avenue for individuals to voice their concerns”.But service members say voicing dissent is not easy, with a number of them incorrectly believing it’s illegal for them to do so or fearing they may get into trouble for raising questions. (Metzler, Bettancourt and Hebert all stressed they are speaking for themselves, and not on behalf of the military.)To address that, a coalition of military personnel and veterans groups have launched an “appeal to redress” campaign, modeled after an earlier one during the Iraq war, as a way for service members to register their opposition with legislators to the US’s Israel policy.Metzler, Bettancourt and Hebert have also launched Servicemembers for Ceasefire, offering resources for fellow members who are opposed to the war, including an explanation of the conscientious objector process.Metzler stresses that they are not encouraging people to leave the military – they just want those with doubts to know that they have options.“I’m not saying you have to jump ship or refuse orders,” she said. “But at the very least, pick up a book, figure out what’s going on in the world, and understand the context of what you’re doing.” More

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      How can I vote for Kamala Harris if she supports Israel’s war? Here is my answer | Bernie Sanders

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      I understand that there are millions of Americans who disagree with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the terrible war in Gaza. I am one of them.While Israel had a right to defend itself against the horrific Hamas terrorist attack of 7 October 2023, which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages, it did not have the right to wage an all-out war against the entire Palestinian people.It did not have the right to kill 42,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of whom were children, women and the elderly, or injure over 100,000 people in Gaza. It did not have the right to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and housing and healthcare systems. It did not have the right to bomb every one of Gaza’s 12 universities. It did not have the right to block humanitarian aid, causing massive malnutrition in children and, in fact, starvation.And that is why I am doing everything I can to block US military aid and offensive weapons sales to the rightwing extremist Netanyahu government in Israel. And I know that many of you share those feelings. And some of you are saying, “How can I vote for Kamala Harris if she is supporting this terrible war?” And that is a very fair question.And let me give you my best answer. And that is that even on this issue, Donald Trump and his rightwing friends are worse. In the Senate and in Congress Republicans have worked overtime to block humanitarian aid to the starving children in Gaza. The president and vice-president both support getting as much humanitarian aid into Gaza as soon as possible.Trump has said that Netanyahu is doing a good job and that Biden is holding him back. He has suggested that the Gaza Strip would make excellent beachfront property for development. It is no wonder Netanyahu prefers to have Donald Trump in office.But even more importantly, and this I promise you, after Harris wins we will, together, do everything we can to change US policy toward Netanyahu – including an immediate ceasefire, the return of all hostages, a surge of massive humanitarian aid, the stopping of settler attacks on the West Bank, and the rebuilding of Gaza for the Palestinian people.And let me be clear. We will have, in my view, a much better chance of changing US policy with Harris than with Trump, who is extremely close to Netanyahu and sees him as a like-minded, rightwing extremist ally.But let me also say this, and I deal with this every single day as a US senator. As important as Gaza is, and as strongly as many of us feel about this issue, it is not the only issue at stake in this election.If Trump wins, women in this country will suffer an enormous setback and lose the ability to control their own bodies. That is not acceptable.If Trump wins, to be honest with you, the struggle against the climate crisis is over. While virtually every scientist who has studied the issue understands that the climate crisis is real and an existential threat to our country and the world, Trump believes it is a “hoax”. And if the United States, the largest economy in the world, stops transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel, every other country – China, Europe, all over the world, they will do exactly the same thing. And God only knows the kind of planet we will leave to our kids and future generations.If Trump wins, at a time of enormous income and wealth inequality, he will demand even more tax breaks for the very richest people in our country, while cutting back on programs that working families desperately need. The rich will only get richer, while the minimum wage will remain at $7.25 an hour, and millions of our fellow workers will continue to earn starvation wages.Did you all see the recent Trump rally at Madison Square Garden? Well, I did, and what I can tell you is that as a nation, as all of you know, we have struggled for years against impossible odds to try to overcome all forms of bigotry – whether it is racism, whether it’s sexism, whether it’s homophobia, whether it’s xenophobia, you name it.We have tried to fight against bigotry, but that is exactly what we saw on display at that unbelievable Trump rally. It was not a question of speakers getting up there and disagreeing with Kamala Harris on the issues. That wasn’t the issue at all. They were attacking her simply because she was a woman and a woman of color. Extreme vulgar sexism and racism. Is that really the kind of America that we can allow?So let me conclude by saying this. This is the most consequential election in our lifetimes. Many of you have differences of opinion with Harris on Gaza. So do I. But we cannot sit this election out. Trump has to be defeated. Let’s do everything we can in the next week to make sure that Kamala Harris is our next president.

      Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and chair of the health education labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont, and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress More

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      Progressives must walk a fine line: end the war in Gaza and elect Harris | Judith Levine

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      The war in Gaza is not high among most voters’ concerns. But for many Arab Americans and protesters of the war, it is. As election day nears and the margins tighten – and with the critical swing state of Michigan, home to the largest Arab American community in the nation, up for grabs – these people are among the small, scattered constituencies that could determine the results. This makes their political strategies crucial to the US’s – and, by extension, Palestine’s – future.Some activists working to end the genocide are putting that urgent cause ahead of the other urgent cause: electing a Democrat, if only to prevent a Trump presidency. “If I’m going to be a one-issue voter and that issue is genocide, I’m okay with that,” a Dearborn, Michigan, woman told NPR’s Code Switch.For these people, Harris’s repeated assertions that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” – spoken in the passive voice and always accompanied by even louder assertions of commitment to Israel’s “self-defense” – no longer cut it. A progressive activist who is stumping for Trump in Michigan said there’s nothing the Democrat can do to change her mind. The administration’s collaboration in genocide is unforgivable; she wants the party punished. Her eyes are on the 2028 election, she said – apparently sanguine that there will be an election after the ascension of King Donald the First.In Mondoweiss this month, journalist and activist Saleema Gul interviewed a dozen members of the Uncommitted movement in a post-mortem of its campaign and failure to secure a speaking slot at the DNC this summer. The movement persuaded three-quarters of a million Democratic primary voters to write in “uncommitted” or leave their ballots blank to signal that their support for Biden, now Harris, depends on a pledge to end unconditional military support to Israel.Some of the people interviewed in the piece felt that the movement should have tried to influence the party platform in the primary process and quit there. Others believed that pushing for a speaker at the DNC distracted from organizing anti-war delegates inside the convention. After much debate, the leadership decided to endorse no one. Instead, it is urging supporters to “register anti-Trump votes” and not vote for a third-party presidential candidate. That move, wrote Gul, “has led many to believe the Uncommitted movement has prioritized shielding the Democratic Party over forcefully pushing for an end to the Gaza genocide”.The debate within the uncommitted movement encapsulates the perennial tensions in all political organizing: radical change v incremental reform; grassroots activism v establishment engagement; insider work v outsider disruption; movement-building v election-cycle campaigns. But to put “versus” between any of the above is to misunderstand political strategy: that is, to presume that organizing is either/or.In fact, you can do more than one thing at a time: organize for an arms embargo; get Harris elected; move the Democrats leftward; and build a radical pro-liberation movement.That these tactics don’t always overlap does not mean they contradict each other. Grassroots movements move politicians, not the other way around. But grassroots movements labor for decades far from the centers of influence before policy makers code their ideas and demands – watered down, of course – into bills and statutes. The more local the politician, the more open their ears are to those demands.For instance, in New York City’s safely Democratic congressional districts nine and 10, antiwar groups are asking voters to write in the name of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli tank, instead of voting for the pro-Israel Democrats or any of the other parties’ candidates. The activists want to remind the Dems that their antiwar constituents are watching, without jeopardizing the party’s chances of winning back the House of Representatives. But presidential candidates are as far from the ground as candidates get – and this year a no vote for the Democrat holds potentially catastrophic consequences.You could argue that electing a woman of color as president would be a radical step forward for the US. But Harris is no radical. In fact, presidential elections rarely lead to radical change. The big difference this time is that Trump’s election would.The anti-war movement should not cease to pressure the Harris campaign to win their votes. Her supporters should not cease persuading anti-war voters to vote for her. Right now, a door is opening for both to happen.Harris herself pushed the door ajar. In her interview with Fox News last week, she suggested for the first time that she might break with the Biden administration. “Let me be very clear,” she said. “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency.” She pledged to bring “fresh new ideas” to the Oval Office.One idea – not so fresh, but good anyway – would be to call for the US simply to abide by its own law: the Leahy Law, enacted in 1997, requires the state department to vet military forces receiving US aid for violations of international human rights law. If there’s credible evidence of such violations, the aid must be withheld.Since 2000, former US senator Patrick Leahy has been pressing the state department to apply such scrutiny to Israel, which has remained practically exempt. In May, in the Washington Post, he reasserted the necessity of doing so now, citing violations in Gaza and the West Bank. A former associate general counsel at the Department of Defense told Al Jazeera that the president has no discretion in the matter. “It’s not up for negotiation. It is a binding domestic law on the executive branch,” she said.The confirmed killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Rafah this week opens the door even wider. The US can declare that Israel has decapitated its enemy. Although the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never specified what would constitute victory, candidate Harris can credibly assert that Israel has achieved it. The US has fulfilled its responsibility to its ally. If Bibi wants to keep bombing Gaza, he’s on his own.Abbas Alawieh, a leader of the Uncommitted movement, has stressed many times that its goal is to end the genocide. He has also stressed the significance of this election, not just for the US but also for Palestine. Trump’s stated intention is to let Netanyahu obliterate Gaza, Alawieh has said. The candidate is already musing about potential luxury seaside resorts in Gaza – “better than Monaco”, he said – if, as his son-in-law has put it, Israel would “move the people out and then clean it up”.The movement to end the war must continue. It must succeed. And Trump must be defeated. Both can happen – must happen – at once.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More