The Votes Against Harris That Never Get Mentioned

Back in August, citing a poll from June, Norman Solomon published an op-ed titled The Ghost of Hubert Humphrey Is Stalking Kamala Harris, because 61% of U.S. adults were saying they opposed sending weapons and supplies to Israel. Of course polls can be worded, conducted, interpreted, and reported to produce almost any desired result (no doubt there is a reason that most polls on weapons call them “aid” and never use the word “weapons”), but the polling has been pretty consistent, showing a growing majority in the U.S. in favor of an arms embargo on Israel. And if those people’s opinions are in any way impacted by events in Palestine, then they can only have grown stronger in recent weeks.

We cannot know whether a view on one issue will impact a vote. It would help, of course, were someone to poll people on whether they plan to vote, if so for whom, and whether their vote is being decided at least in part by the candidates’ positions on arming Israel. One poll published in May suggested that voters in swing states would be significantly more likely to vote for then-candidate Biden were he to embargo arms to Israel. A second poll from August showed the same. A third poll from September showed the same. But such polling is apparently rarely done and even less reported on.

Fortunately, pollsters have been busy polling a very limited group on those questions, and media outlets have been reporting the results widely. Unfortunately, this polling and reporting has been limited to Muslim- and Arab-Americans.

Nowhere have I seen even the barest hint at any evidence, or even any curiosity about the possible existence of any evidence, that Muslim-American or Arab-American voting behavior in this regard is different from the average, or if so, how different.

The reporting has been clear, visible, and repetitive (even when not citing any polling at all): Muslim and Arab voters could cost Kamala Harris the election over Gaza. But the vast majority of those who oppose the ongoing arming of the genocide are neither Muslim nor Arab. Even if a much smaller percentage of voters overall were withholding their votes from Kamala Harris over Gaza (and no similar number were withholding votes from Trump whose position is just as bad), that would be a larger threat to cost Kamala Harris the election than the threat from Muslim or Arab voters. But this larger threat is almost never mentioned.

In fact, there seems to be a concerted effort from all sides to suggest that allowing your concern over genocide to impact your vote really isn’t a possibility at all unless you are Arab or Muslim — as though this suggestion might win over people’s votes or at least reduce the peace movement to a small and provincial fraction of itself by teaching us all that lives should only matter to those of some particular narrow identity.

If we internalize the corporate media’s constant implication that we need to belong to a particular ethnicity or ancestry in order to oppose a particular mass-murder spree, that could end up being a more significant and disastrous outcome than any possible election results.

Understanding how difficult it is to believe that anything could be more important than an election result, let me also conclude as follows: Kamala Harris stands a good chance of losing the election over Gaza, and the people who so decide it will probably mostly not be Muslim or Arab — they will likely be people of all backgrounds who were raised to believe that genocide was simply unacceptable, and that lies — no matter how often repeated — should not determine one’s understanding of the world.