[music]

Kai Wright: Hey, it's Kai. After what has seemed like a real long time of promises, ads, speeches, gaffes, threats, all of it, Election Day is almost here. Of course, the emotional roller coaster we've all been riding is unlikely to really, truly end once polls close on November 5th. But it will mark the end of a historic and historically fraught election season, one about as divisive and divided as you can get. Still, though, there are people who even right now, are undecided about how to vote. In one American city in particular, the indecision is largely fueled by one issue: Israel's war in Gaza. Today, we'll pay a visit to Dearborn, Michigan, with the help of our friends at the podcast Code Switch. I hope you enjoy the episode. A heads up that there is some explicit language, so listen with care and be aware of who else might be listening. Okay, here you go.

Gene Demby: What's good? You're listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby. A couple of Tuesdays ago, I was at this hookah spot in Dearborn, Michigan. It's called Mangoes on the Hill. It was bright as hell in Mango. It was real odd for a hookah bar at night. It wasn't really popping in there. It was mostly empty, which I just chalked it up to it being a Tuesday. A dozen or so people had gathered at Mangoes that night for a watch party.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were about to square off in the nationally televised debate. We've been looking for a place where people will be watching the debate, and Mangoes had it playing on their gigantic TV screen. It wasn't like anybody at that watch party was really watching. Folks were chattering and eating and looking at their phones. That is, until about 30 or 40 minutes into the debate. That's when people stopped what they were doing and craned their necks toward the TV screens. This was what the folks at this watch party had been waiting for.

Speaker 3: President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?

Speaker 4: Good question.

Gene Demby: Vice President Harris begins her answer by saying that Israel has a right to defend itself the way the United States would.

Vice President Harris: Because it is also true, far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a cease fire, and we need the hostages out.

Speaker 6: They can end it with one fucking one phone call. Sorry.

Gene Demby: As you can hear from the chatter, that Harris answer, it was not really going over too well in the room.

Speaker 7: So, she's Basically admitting that they're ineffectual. They can't do it. Yes, we're weak.

Gene Demby: The people watching this debate at Mangoes were mostly Arab Americans of different ages. A few were wearing keffiyyahs. In Dearborn, a lot of people have close family and social ties to the Middle East. This city right next to Detroit has been a solidly Democratic enclave for a few decades now. Since Hamas attacked Israel almost exactly a year ago, and Israel responded by launching an all-out war on Gaza with support from the Biden administration, that loyalty to the Democratic Party is looking wobblier. You can hear it in the people talking back to the screen.

Vice President Harris: It must when end immediately.

Gene Demby: Vice President Harris wraps up her answer to the Gaza question, and then it's Former President Trump's turn.

Former President Trump: But when she mentions about Israel, all of a sudden, she hates Israel.

Gene Demby: Trump's answer sort of spiraled in a bunch of different directions as is his want.

Former President Trump: I'll get the war with Ukraine and Russia ended. If I'm President elect, I'll get it done before even becoming president.

Moderator: Vice President Harris, he says, you hate Israel.

Vice President Harris: That's absolutely not true. I have my entire career and life supported Israel and the Israeli people.

Gene Demby: It's hard to hear, but this dude just yelled, "They're arguing over who loves Israel more." This guy, he had salt and pepper hair, and he was gesturing at the screen with a cigarette in his hand. I walked over to him with my microphone. He was sitting at a booth with some other dudes and I just wanted to confirm what he said.

Speaker 10: They're competing who loves Israel more. That's what we think.

Gene Demby: I asked him if he knew which way he was leaning towards voting in November.

Speaker 10: Donald Trump. Yes. Yes.

Gene Demby: When I asked him why he was voting for Trump, he told me it's because of the war in Gaza. Otherwise he'd be voting for Kamala Harris. In that moment right there in this bright ass hookah bar, it explains why I wanted to go to Dearborn right now. A lot of folks here are really grappling with how to vote in November when a war thousands of miles away feels so present for the people here and so personal. According to a national poll from the Arab American Institute that came out in early October, Harris and Trump are virtually tied among Arab American voters. Trump is actually leading Harris among the Arab Americans who are the most likely to vote.

This from a typically Democratic constituency, and for a guy who's well known for demonizing immigrants and Arabs and using Palestinian as a slur. The dude behind the Muslim ban. If you take a look at the national polls across all demographic groups, it's clear that Gaza just doesn't rank among the top issues that most voters from either party care about this election. In Dearborn, though, for so many people, this is the top line issue. That matters for folks everywhere because Michigan is a crucial swing state full of swingy counties. The recent elections in the state have been squeakers.

I mean, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton here by just 11,000 votes in 2016, which is to say Trump won Michigan by less than a quarter of 1%. In 2020, Trump lost to Joe Biden in Michigan, but again, not by a whole lot, about 3 percentage points. As we get closer to a really tight election where tiny margins could decide who takes the White House, what voters do in this singular, relatively small city in the metro Detroit area could turn out to be of huge, maybe even historical consequence.

Speaker 11: There's something very comforting about being in Dearborn.

Speaker 12: Dearborn's always been a bubble where you're safe.

Speaker 13: There is this sense that you look around and people know how you're feeling.

Gene Demby: Arab Americans only make up about 1% of the American population, but they make up 55% of the people in Dearborn, where being Arab American is normal and unremarkable.

Speaker 14: This is the community that you can lean on, where you can pronounce your name Abdullah with the full pronunciation and all, and didn't have to shy away from it, where you can walk around freely with a hijab and didn't have to worry about harassment.

Gene Demby: Recently, Dearborn became the first majority Arab American city in the United States. A lot of people call it the capital of Arab America. It's home to the Arab American National Museum and the nation's largest mosque.

Speaker 15: I moved here on purpose. I wanted to be in the center of Arab America, in the heartbeat of our community.

Speaker 16: I can express myself. I can feel the grief and the pain as a Palestinian here in a way that I can't even going across the border into Detroit.

Gene Demby: In the Dearborn bubble, a lot of people have connections to Gaza and the widening conflict between Israel and Yemen and Israel and Lebanon. Among the folks I spoke to, nobody would bat an eye at somebody calling what's happening in Gaza a genocide.

Speaker 17: I think everybody's in alignment on where they stand on the issue of Gaza. That's universal and that is uncontested.

Speaker 18: This is the first time where I've been as close to a one issue voter as I've ever been in my entire life. I'm just being honest. For me, I've been so engulfed by this genocide that it's been really hard for me as of now to look past it.

Speaker 19: This community has never been a one issue kind of community, one issue vote. I heard actually someone say, if I'm going to become a one issue voter and that issue is genocide, I'm okay with it.

Gene Demby: While there seems to be a wide consensus on what's happening in Gaza, folks here have arrived at some very different conclusions about what to do about that at the polls. Dearborn is a city that overwhelmingly supports their congressional representative, Rashida Tlaib of the squad. She's the only Palestinian American in Congress, and she's cut a lonely figure over the past year, saying that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. While genocide is a legal term and one that Israel has strongly denied being guilty of, Tlaib's view was one that everyone I spoke to in Dearborn agreed with.

Like Tlaib, people here don't necessarily toe the Democratic party line. I mean, it's a Democratic place, sure, but there are socially conservative religious folks, There are small business owners who care most about business-friendly practices, and there are a bunch of young progressive Bernie Sanders supporters. In fact, two years ago, the city elected one of those Bernie Sanders supporters mayor, making him the first Arab American and first Muslim mayor in Dearborn's history.

Abdullah Hamoud: Abdullah.

Gene Demby: Nice to meet you, Abdullah.

Speaker 20: Abdullah.

Abdullah Hamoud: Abdullah, yes.

Gene Demby: Abdullah Hamoud was just 31 when he was elected. When I described him to my wife, I told her he looked like one of those dudes in my Instagram feed in ads for stylish golf wear, freshly lined beard, dope but sensible white sneakers. He was born in the city, and he also told me how special it was to have grown up there. He described Dearborn to me the way a lot of people did as a haven.

Abdullah Hamoud: I remember growing up, when I was a teenager, my mom told me, never leave the city of Dearborn or go out unless you have your cousin or your friends or your brothers with you.

Gene Demby: Mayor Hamoud told me, though, that his sense of safety there changed somewhat after 9/11. He was about 11 at the time of those attacks.

Abdullah Hamoud: I'll never forget that day my mom picking me up from school from Woodworth. She observes a hijab. Car cut us off and flicked us off and said, go back to your countries. We just rushed home. Everybody was scared on that day.

Gene Demby: He said because people from all over understood the city as a place where lots of Arabs and Muslims live, Dearborn became something of a target.

Abdullah Hamoud: We grew up where we used to have the Arab American Festival on Warren Avenue, which drew about a quarter million people over a weekend. It got shut down years ago. It's because we used to have these protesters who would come with pigs' heads on spears with signs that said, "We have dipped our bullets in pig's blood so that when we shoot you, you go to hell."

Gene Demby: He told us in those post 911 years, the city became a Democratic enclave since Dearbornites laid the responsibility for all this rising Islamophobia at the feet of the Republican administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Let's just back up a little bit because you might be wondering, how did this small Midwestern city in a notoriously cold state become the capital of Arab America? Okay, we got to do explanatory common time. I'll just crack my neck. Can somebody cue up some music real quick?

[music]

Thank you, Jess. In the 19th century, the first migrants from Syria and Lebanon came to the Detroit area. They were mostly Christians. The next big wave, though they came in the 20th century. Henry Ford had set up this gigantic auto plant in Dearborn, which, as we know, borders Detroit. Those job prospects lured migrants from all over the place, like the American south, but also immigrants from Europe and from Arab countries. The Arabs who came this time, they were mostly Muslim. You have the city with good paying union jobs in the factories. Yes, yes, but also, as time went on, residents built mosques, they opened up halal restaurants and butchers.

A critical mass developed of people who spoke Arabic, albeit with different dialects and accents. Arabic adorned the signage of a lot of the stores and the cafes. Mayor Hamoud's family is Lebanese, and he said that his mother grew up in refugee camps there during the civil war decades ago. Much of his family is still in Lebanon. Lots of Dearbornites have stories like this. Coming here to flee violence and war. It's often violence and war in which the United States is deeply implicated.

Abdullah Hamoud: I often say that Dearborn is obviously the home to a blossoming and growing population. We're the result of not only the automotive industry, but poor foreign policy decision making. Each time there's been a poor foreign policy decision that has been made by individuals in the White House that has led to war abroad, you saw migration coming to what they thought, what we know to be a welcoming and safe place in the city of Dearborn.

Gene Demby: He said the city saw new immigrants from Iraq in the wake of the Gulf war in the 1990s and then again when the US invaded that country in 2003. A wave of Yemenis came to Dearborn after the US armed Saudi Arabia, who then attacked Yemen and killed tens of thousands of people there.

Abdullah Hamoud: Each time you have seen war and atrocity across the Arab diaspora, you saw migration come over.

Gene Demby: He said his constituents care about the US's posture toward Gaza and Lebanon and Yemen, and they follow it closely on the news, but also in their family WhatsApp groups, and people have been holding rallies there in light of Israel's attacks on Lebanon.

Speaker 21: A huge show of support in Dearborn tonight. Hundreds of people coming out for a Stand with Lebanon rally.

Speaker 22: The rally a reminder of how the violence in the Middle East continues to impact people here at home.

Speaker 23: The death toll in Lebanon has climbed to more than 1,000, including US citizen and Dearborn community leader Kamel Jawad, who was in the country helping people evacuate.

Speaker 24: Yet another rally in Dearborn Wednesday night in support of the Lebanese people as this community comes together and demands a ceasefire.

Speaker 25: Cease fire now.

Crowd: Cease fire now.

Gene Demby: Now the mayor of the capital of Arab America has found himself in an unlikely spot. He's the chief executive of a city of about 110,000 people and also right in the middle of this heated discourse over US foreign policy. A lot of people have recognized that because things have lined up in this very particular way, you got a critical mass of reliably Democratic leaning voters who might defect from the party or stay home in November, concentrated in a crucial county in a state that's up for grabs, the Arab American voters here are holding a lot of cards right now. Now you are thrust in the center of this national international conversation around Gaza and Palestine. People are looking to you specifically to see what you're going to do. I'm just curious about what it feels like to be holding all that weight.

Abdullah Hamoud: It's not something you run for. When you run for the mayor of the city, you run to make sure your garbage is picked up on time. Here you are at the center of a foreign issue that's been impacting your residents' lives directly. In this case, it's family members who are being displaced and killed in Lebanon, Yemen, and obviously the unfolding genocide in Gaza. That's why we were very vocal about where we stood.

Gene Demby: The Biden campaign and then the Harris campaign really wanted his endorsement. Their hope was that his rubber stamp might allay the anger and ambivalence that people in Dearborn and beyond felt about the party in the White House, at least enough to vote for their candidate. In August, in fact, when Vice President Harris was in Michigan campaigning, she had a closed door meeting with the mayor, but there were other voices ringing louder in Mayor Hamoud's ears.

Abdullah Hamoud: Many of the conversations I have with family and close friends is they don't want the guilt of bubbling in a presidential candidate who becomes our president, and the genocide continues. Then they live with the fact that, well, I bubbled for this candidate thinking that, well, I did it on the domestic issues. Each and every single day, I'm watching people who look like me, sound like me, with names like me being absolutely obliterated with my US taxpayer dollars. That is the conversation that I hear more than any at every dining room table I sit.

[music]

Reema Mirway: People just want to see the killing stop. It's as simple as that.

Gene Demby: That's Reema Mirway.

Reema Mirway: The way that people are feeling is that they have no voice in this. It almost feels like you're standing on the side screaming, trying to get someone's attention, and they just keep walking as if they can't even hear you.

Gene Demby: Reema is one of the people who runs the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, or ACCESS. It's an organization that was started on the poor side of Dearborn way back in the '70s to help Arab immigrants find their footing in the United States. She told me yet again that this place is unique, even a bubble. Her family is ethnically Lebanese, but she was born in Senegal, and she came to the US in her teens.

Reema Mirway: I never lived in the Middle East, and my mom was also born in Senegal. When I came here, people would ask me where I'm from, and I would say, I'm African American. People would look at me like, "What?" I know. They would give me that look. You should see his face right now.

Gene Demby: She said she didn't initially get that she wasn't African American with the connotations that has in the States.

Reema Mirway: It wasn't until being in Dearborn then I really immersed myself in the culture here, and that's how I became Arab American.

Gene Demby: I was gonna say, that's so fascinating. You came to Dearborn and became Arab American.

Reema Mirway: I did. I came to Dearborn and became Arab American.

Gene Demby: Today, Reema lives in a town nearby, and she told me that when she leaves work in Dearborn and steps out of the airlock into the wider world, she feels more acutely what it means to leave the bubble.

Reema Mirway: It almost feels like a twilight zone in that I just sometimes want to say do you know what is happening right now? There are genocides happening around the world. Do we care about that? Is there even a space to acknowledge that? Not even do anything about it, but just acknowledge that?

Gene Demby: Like immigrant enclaves all over the country, a lot of people in Dearborn just sit out elections. Reema's organization, among other things, helps people who are eligible to vote get registered. Here, Reema said, people who do vote tend to do so in person, same day. In this cycle she said:

Reema Mirway: I am now seeing people are very motivated. We have had a record number of people who want to do absentee ballots. We've never seen this community engage as much with absentee ballots. People want to show up to the polls. How they're going to vote is another story, but people are very motivated to be at the polls to show how they're feeling.

[music]

Gene Demby: Coming up, a progressive environmental organizer in Dearborn explains how she's feeling and why she's urging people to make sure Kamala Harris loses in November and Donald Trump wins.

Speaker 28: It is no longer a question of how can you win me back. It is a question of how can I hold you accountable for the lives lost, because that is not something I'm willing to forgive.

Gene Demby: Stay with us.

[music]

Kai: Let's get back into this episode of Code Switch, reported from Dearborn, Michigan, home to America's largest Arab American population. I'll turn it back over to Code Switch host Gene Demby to tell us how that community is wrestling with an election overshadowed by war in the Middle East.

Gene Demby: Gene, just Gene this week, Code Switch.

[music]

We've been talking to people in Dearborn, Michigan, the so-called capital of Arab America and a traditionally Democratic enclave in a swing state which looks to be much more split this election. That's because of how angry so many folks are about how the Biden administration and by extension Kamala Harris has handled the war in Gaza. That's put people like Dearborn's Mayor Abdullah Hamoud in something of a bind.

Abdullah Hamoud: You want to be inspired to come out to the ballot box come November. Nobody wants to come out out of fear or cast a vote for the lesser of two evils. That's not inspirational, especially in the greatest country in the whole world, this idea that you have to settle for a candidate.

Gene Demby: Mayor Hammoud isn't really inspired by the choices before him, Harris or Trump. He has pointedly withheld his endorsement for November.

Abdullah Hamoud: Here's how I'll frame it. I don't feel pressure to endorse. Yes, I was a three-time elected Democrat in the state legislature. I'm in a nonpartisan mayorship now, but ultimately my loyalties, is to the city that it represents, the city of Dearborn.

Gene Demby: He said that were he to give his rubber stamp to a candidate, it would be contingent on Joe Biden and thus his vice president Kamala Harris changing their posture on Gaza, which, as we know, has not happened. As a progressive Democrat, he also wanted to make it clear that voting for Trump, that's just not on the table.

Abdullah Hamoud: Trump is awful. The last thing I ever want to see is a Trump presidency, on the record.

Gene Demby: That doesn't really leave a clear choice at the voting booth.

Abdullah Hamoud: I think for many folk come this November, the question for them is they're going to try to vote their moral conscience, whatever that means. Each person defines it for themselves. I'm not here to define it for anybody. They have that quarrel of that moral dilemma of what to do. Again, I think apathy is the most dangerous thing. Apathy is what led to the Trump presidency in 2016. People talk about how Trump won Michigan by about 11,000 votes over then Secretary Clinton.

Gene Demby: He says that in 2016, almost 80,000 people in Michigan skipped answering the presidential question altogether on their ballots. They just left it blank.

Abdullah Hamoud: That is why President Trump won. That is what is dangerous.

Gene Demby: Mayor Abdullah is aligned with the Uncommitted Movement, but is not a part of it. You may have heard of them. It's an initiative that started in Dearborn earlier this year by people who had once held various jobs within the Democratic Party, both in DC and in Michigan. The Uncommitted Movement's plan was to show the then Biden campaign that they were dead serious about not voting for the president in November. What they did was they urged people who were voting in the primary to vote "uncommitted" on their primary ballots, essentially filling in the bubble on the ballot that meant none of the above, instead of Joe Biden. Their plan was to get 10,000 Michigan primary voters to do this. When the votes were tallied, they had more than 100,000.

Speaker 29: President Biden won by 81%, but 13% of Democrats voted uncommitted.

Speaker 30: The only real opposition he faced came from voters casting ballots for "uncommitted", protesting his handling of the Israel Hamas war.

Speaker 31: It was breathtaking to see that over 100,000 voters voted for uncommitted in the state of Michigan, you see people saying, enough is enough.

Gene Demby: In Democratic primaries around the country, around 650,000 people did the same thing. This was a shot across the bow of the Democratic Party. In the wake of the Michigan primary, the then Biden campaign began reaching out to folks in the Uncommitted Movement and trying to woo Mayor Hamoud. Voting uncommitted in a primary to send a message to your party is a whole different prospect than doing so in a close general election with Kamala Harris as one option and Donald Trump as the other. There's another camp in Dearborn that has staked out a different position about how to vote in November.

Sumra Lookman: This is a hot spot in Dearborn. Everybody comes here.

Gene Demby: Just down Michigan Avenue from the mayor's office, closer to the east end of Dearborn, we met up with Sumra Lookman at a cafe called Harraz.

Sumra Lookman: This is where I bring all my reporters for interviews. Sometimes it's at my office.

Gene Demby: Sumra has run for state office before as a Democrat. She identifies as a progressive, and she told me that she wrote in Bernie Sanders's name in the 2020 general election. She just didn't feel like Joe Biden was far enough to the left for her liking. She spent years organizing to fight environmental racism in Dearborn, especially on her side of town where the air is really, really bad. I asked her what to order.

Sumra Lookman: Adni Shai or the mofawar. Then if you try the iced refreshers, the pomegranate or the dragon fruit are really, really, really good.

Gene Demby: I was meeting with Sumra because she belongs to a group that was originally called Abandon Biden. Now it's called Abandoned Harris. That debate watch party I went to, it was organized by the Abandon Harris folks. The people in the Abandon camp share the same premise as the people in the Uncommitted camp, that the war in Gaza has to end. Unlike the uncommitted folks, they were not thinking of their votes as leverage to move the Harris campaign on Gaza. Instead, they want people to use their votes as a cudgel.

Sumra Lookman: If the Democratic Party does not wish to do the right thing, even after they have been begged to by some people, then I think it's time for us to consider punishing them and showing them in action, you're going to lose the election. We're going to make sure you lose. The Abandon Biden camp is all of these people that are saying, I will never go back to him. He's already crossed the red line. I was asked by almost every reporter, "Is there something Biden can do to win you back? What could he possibly do to win you back?" My response was, well, he could pull a Jesus, and he could resurrect all the 40,000 lives or the 30,000 or whatever it was at that time that I was being asked, and then I would consider voting for him.

Gene Demby: After Biden ended his presidential run, the Abandon campaign turned their sights toward his vice president Kamala Harris, when she became the party's new presumptive nominee.

Sumra Lookman: As Biden himself and she has said there's no daylight between them. That being the case, if there's no daylight between you, then I'm going to treat you the same way I did Biden. I'm going to want to hold you accountable, and I want to ensure your loss. It's not just abandoning you. I want to make sure that you are not continuing to be in office.

Gene Demby: For the Abandon Harris folks, their votes are vessels for their anger at Democrats. Sumra wasn't really hung up on how or for whom people vote in November. A third-party candidate, write in vote Trump, whatever. To her, their vote just has to be anybody but Kamala Harris. Sumra said she didn't want people to sit the election out just because they didn't like the choices available. Her thinking was that people had to vote because not voting could be chalked up to indifference. Whereas a vote against Harris, that's a quantifiable thing. You can count that. I asked Sumra if her plan had rubbed anybody that she knew the wrong way.

Sumra Lookman: My mom. My mom actually wasn't even that nice about it. She said, "I'll disown you if you come out and endorse Trump. Don't tell people to endorse Trump. Don't you dare vote for Trump." She was actually mad at me. It wasn't in a joking way. She was really upset.

Gene Demby: Sumra said her mom was in her 70s. She said she's really socially conservative. While her mother has supported Democrats in the past, she is not supporting Kamala Harris.

Sumra Lookman: But as far as Trump, she says, absolutely not. She's not doing it. She's not moving. I might convince her to vote Green. I might.

Gene Demby: Sumra feels like the people who are critical of the White House's handling of Gaza, in Dearborn and more broadly, have this window at the polls to actually have an impact.

Sumra Lookman: Go out there and take a stance and flex your political muscle. We have to show it. We have to do it. The goal is not 2024. The goal is 2028. That's where we'll start having both parties coming and asking us what can we do to win you over?

Gene Demby: She said the Democrats need to lose, but she also wants them to understand that people who defected from the party over Gaza are the reason for that loss.

Sumra Lookman: I think that my rage, my anger, to the point of saying, I want them to lose this presidency, it stems from the betrayal. I did not think that Democrats would allow themselves or allow their own leadership to get to the point where a genocide is happening in front of our eyes, and they would do nothing but support it. They would do nothing but fund it. I never, never thought that that would ever be the case. I thought that the Democrats were the moral compass. The Democrats were the ones that would be the ones to stand against any injustice, whether here or abroad. At this point, my stance is, and continues to be that it is no longer a question of how can you win me back. It is a question of how can I hold you accountable for the lives lost? Because that is not something I'm willing to forgive.

Gene Demby: Sumra and the Abandon Harris camp are urging people to use their votes as a cudgel, as a way to punish the Democrats. The Uncommitted folks have a different strategy.

Abbas Alawiya: I believe my vote is not a love letter. I believe my vote is a chess move.

Gene Demby: That's Abbas Alawiya, one of the Uncommitted founders, at a press conference.

Abbas Alawiya: My family right now is frantically figuring out whether their son, their grandson, who's working on mobilizing people in the United States and protesting this awful genocide and aggression that is extending to Lebanon and other places. They're calling me, asking, hey, do you think your protest is going to work, because this is unbearable. Excuse me if my priority is not punishing Harris. I do not care if Harris is punished. I care if our movement is well positioned to save some lives, because some of those lives happen to be real human beings who I know. If you're willing to get some satisfaction out of feeling like you punished Harris, and that will help you sleep at night, I can respect that. In order for me to try and start sleeping at night, I need to know that I'm blocking Donald Trump because his plans are very clearly to enable Netanyahu to do more murdering.

Gene Demby: I had to ask Sumra what she thinks will happen if Trump wins, because that's the most likely consequence if her plan to rebuke Biden, Harris and the Democrats is successful. Just to be clear, Abandon Harris is not officially endorsing Trump. They endorse Jill Stein, a third-party candidate, but Sumra is personally endorsing Trump. Do you think that if Trump becomes president and the violence is still continuing, as you can see, do you think then you will see an organized Democratic resistance to the violence?

Sumra Lookman: Yes, I do. I think Democrats will, number one, learn their lesson that genocide cannot go unpaid for or unaccounted for. They will see that losing an election is something that can potentially happen if you continue to support this genocide. That's the first thing. Then I think that will change some hearts. Then secondly, yes, I do think that that will come into play where they're going--

Trump is a villain and he's a very easy person to make a villain. If he was to do anything in support, I know they would throw it back into our faces, look, he's supporting genocide. Or, look, all you, protesters that cost the Democrats election. Look what he's doing. They may come out and actually do the things that we expected them to do when Biden was still in office. Potentially discuss an arms embargo, potentially say that Israel is violating international law.

Gene Demby: I'm not going to lie. This felt a little like 12-dimensional chess to me. For starters, you've got to believe that whomever wins or loses, they're going to sort through the results and realize that they were being judged on the issue of Gaza. It's asking for your vote to convey a lot of nuance and shading to the office holders on the other end of that vote. The Uncommitted Movement, on the other hand, is trying to work with the Democrats and they're not really succeeding. Despite all their jockeying and organizing and the hundreds of thousands of primary votes supporting their cause, the Harris campaign hasn't really engaged with them directly. Take for example the week of the party's national convention.

[applause]

Speaker 34: The Democratic Party is actively suppressing a Palestinian American from speaking from this stage. We urge the Democratic Party to reconsider.

Gene Demby: The Uncommitted Movement has spent months trying to secure a speaking slot on stage for one of their delegates, a Palestinian American elected official from Georgia. They even organized an all-night sit-in at the convention to bring attention to that demand and they didn't get it.

Speaker 35: Today I watched my party say our tent can fit anti-choice Republicans, but it can't fit an elected official like me. I do not understand. I do not understand why being a Palestinian has become disqualifying in this country.

Gene Demby: In the end, the Uncommitted camp didn't win any concessions from the Harris campaign. What cards did they have left to play?

Abbas Alawiyah: All right, thank you so much. Thank you to members of the press for being here with us today.

Gene Demby: All they had left was their endorsement. In late September, about six weeks out from the election, the Uncommitted folks held a press conference.

Abbas Alawiyah: Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate. It's always been about building a movement that saves lives.

Gene Demby: That's Abbas Alawiyah again. He's one of Uncommitted's founders.

Abbas Alawiyah: Today, the Uncommitted National Movement announces that as we continue advocating for life saving policy to end the bombing in Gaza and lifesaving policy that ends US support for the Israeli military's war crimes, Vice President Harris's unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy, or to even make a clear statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law, has made it impossible for us to endorse her. At this time, our movement cannot endorse Vice President Harris.

Gene Demby: They weren't officially endorsing anyone else either.

Abbas Alawiyah: At this time, our movement opposes a Donald Trump presidency whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing, and our movement is not recommending a third-party vote in the presidential election.

Gene Demby: They said they would not be throwing their organizational know-how or muscle or context, the same organizing muscle they pointed out that drummed up 100,000 uncommitted votes in the Michigan primary behind getting out the vote for Harris. They were also asking people to not vote third-party because that might help Trump. Again, what options in the voting booth were on the table? personally for.

Layla Elabed: Personally, for me, as a Palestinian American, as a mother raising Palestinian American children here, and as somebody who's has family in occupied West Bank, every time I'm asked that question, it's like I'm being asked that question at a funeral, and it makes it incredibly difficult.

[music]

Gene Demby: That is Layla Elabed. She's one of the co-founders of the Uncommitted Movement. As an aside, she's also Rashida Tlaib's sister. What was fascinating to me was that the leaders of Uncommitted who spoke at this press conference landed in such different places on that question of how they would personally vote.

Abbas Alawiyah: Even leaders within our own movement will be voting different ways as it relates to this issue. Some folks within our movement will be voting for Vice President Harris, even through their pain and their grief.

Layla Elabed: For me right now, I can't make the decision to vote for Vice President Harris at the top of the ticket. I also would never vote for somebody like Donald Trump. His values do not align with my own values. I don't believe in third-party. Like I said, I'm a Democrat. Right now, I can't cast a vote for Vice President Harris. What we are asking our supporters and uncommitted voters to do is to register a vote that ensures we are blocking Donald Trump. Voters in some ways will have to vote their conscience. We are laying out on the table what is at stake if we do not block Trump.

Gene Demby: Sumra, the Abandon Harris organizer that I spoke with, she envisioned a very different worst-case scenario.

Sumra Lookman: The worst thing that could happen is the Democrats win without our community. It's the worst thing.

Gene Demby: That's because if Arab Americans abandon the Democrats, but the Democrats still win the White House, it would signal to the party that they don't really need to take Arab American voters that seriously. Her plan requires that Democrats lose. Sumra said she knows that a Trump win means putting a lot of other stuff she cares about in danger. Things like reproductive rights, things like environmental policy. I point out to her that she was kind of taking this big gamble.

Sumra Lookman: You say gamble, what am I gambling? If Trump was exactly the same as the Democrats, I've lost nothing. The genocide continues. There's nothing worse than a genocide. It's already being done. I'm not gambling anything. The only thing I would be sacrificing would be the domestic policies that I really, really, truly value and espouse and have loved for all my life. From women's rights to minorities, acceptance, etc. The immigration policies, the corporate policies, environmental policy policies. I would be sacrificing domestic policies. When I weigh all of those things against the genocide, there is no comparison to me. They're not equivalent, they're nowhere near each other. I would give up everything that I believe in for accountability for a genocide. Absolutely, 100%.

[music]

Gene Demby: What I heard in her words was someone reckoning out loud with the compromises that come with being a voter who ranks one issue over everything else. Since our two-party system flattens all sorts of ideological expression into this binary, yes or no, Harris or Trump, any vote is a cosign to all this other stuff on the candidates' platform that you might not be crazy about even stuff that you actively hate. It also sounded to me like the bargaining that attends grief, like trying to make sense of this horrifying, calamitous thing that happened or is happening still. Everybody we spoke to, everybody we heard from, in this episode takes their voting as a given.

Whether it's the Uncommitted folks or the Abandon folks or the mayor of Dearborn, none of them, looking at the options in front of them, say that they want to sit this election out. They all believe that their vote matters. I think, tellingly, their vote seems to shapeshift depending on who's holding it. Sumra says it's a cudgel. Abbas says it's a chess move. The mayor says it's an exercise of moral conscience. It seems like so many people, they're trying to push against the upper limits of what the electoral process might be able to accomplish, because in November, the only mechanism they have to officially register their anguish and their anger over what's happening in Gaza and now Lebanon and Yemen, is still just this crude tool.

They're single, decontextualized fool. That is our show. You can follow us on Instagram @NPRCodeSwitch. If email is more your thing, ours is codeswitch@npr.org. Subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the Code Switch newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. Just a reminder that signing up for Code Switch Plus is a great way to support our show and support public media, and you get to listen to every episode sponsor free. Please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.

This episode would not be possible without all the reporting help I got from Colin Jackson from Michigan Public. You don't hear his voice in this episode. He was in all of these conversations. We were next to each other in every single one of them. Shout out to Colin. This episode was produced by Jess Kung with help from Xavier Lopez. It was edited by Alison McAdam, Courtney Stein and Leah Donnella. Our engineer was James Willits, and we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the Code Switch massive: Christina Kala, Dahlia Mortada, Vera Lynn Williams, Jasmine Romero, BA parker, and Lori Lizardaga. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.