let me talk abt this for the first and last time because i still see people repeating this everywhere and i think people miss a really significant aspect of what happened this past year
arab votes didn't actually swing to trump in any notable way despite trump openly appealing to and campaigning for the arab and muslim community. most people understood this was a cynical move, and the "leaders" he paraded around are people who would have voted for him anyway and he simply did not give them a reason not to. some people also wanted to curry favor with him because they would need favorable connections in the event that he did win (this is called the arab despot approach).
but i think people who aren't arab or muslim don't understand what the democratic party actually did here
kamala and her staff rejected repeated offers from arab leaders to campaign for the dems. they sidelined rashida tlaib, their only palestinian rep, who still held GOTV campaigns and encouraged people to vote dem without explicitly endorsing harris because the entire biden admin iced her out once her people started being genocided. they also refused to appear with arab leaders and even elected officials who did endorse harris. they simply did not want their campaign to be perceived as a campaign arab or palestinian voters would endorse.
this is because the democratic party understood that they were campaigning on murdering muslims and arabs, and being associated with them might give the impression to the neocons they were courting that they were soft. this wasn't an accident, this was a calculation they made. they wanted to spurn those communities in order to win the votes of those who hate them and those who profit from their deaths.
there's a reason they didn't let a palestinian onstage at the DNC, there's a reason they sent bill clinton and ritchie torres to michigan, and there's a reason kamala could not express sympathy for palestinians without being careful to say "the greatest tragedy was october 7th" first. all the charades about the ceasefire and the two-state solution are for israel's benefit before they were for electoral benefit, because from the outset the democrats had made the decision not just to ignore muslim and arab voters, but to campaign on their suppression.
this is what people scolding arab and muslim voters miss: the dems were hoping to gain votes by spurning these communities both domestically (when it came to crushing and defaming pro-palestine supporters, michigan arabs, americans killed in palestine, lebanese americans they left stranded in lebanon) and abroad (they were campaigning on a more lethal military and launched a regional war in the middle east). biden's decision to support israel's insane escalation was not just incidental and ideological, it was part of a cold calculation made by the biden admin after 2022 to tie american economy and political power to interventionism regardless of global consequences, even as the atrocities mounted.
this wasn't something kamala could've (or was willing) to stop once the ball was rolling. this is a bipartisan consensus that underwrites the logic of the US as a world power. trump probably can stop it because he has the kind of mandate that allows him to make unilateral decisions like that, but he won't because he's not interested in it, hates iran, and he's well-paid by zionist and arab leaders who both have an interest in "reshaping" the middle east, as jake sullivan put it.
in the most cynical view, kamala didn't need to campaign on it the way she did. the US war machine remains unchanged and is usually not championed by democrats in such stark neocon terms. but kamala, as a woman of color facing accusations of "woke" wanted to double down on it so people understood she meant it. in other words, she was vice-signalling. kamala campaigned on the strength of this war machine, and demonstrated that by not giving an inch to the ideological enemies of this war machine—arabs, muslims, palestinians and their allies. her campaign in and of itself was designed to target these communities, from the cynical "what has palestine done for black people?" khive campaigns to "i'm speaking" to "if you don't like it, go vote for trump and see how you like the muslim ban." and you know it worked because even when she lost her supporters continue to vilify them and are openly calling for further violence against them and identifying them as traitors, backstabbers, and enemies.
islamophobia in the west is openly accepted, even hegemonic, and it's not potentially going to result in hate crimes, lynchings and deportations: it's already reached and passed that point long ago. but it also resulted in much worse. the US and the west have killed millions of muslims and arabs across the years. the US is currently carrying out a genocide of indigenous palestinians as we speak. i'm not speaking speculatively about the warnings of fascism, i'm speaking historically about the atrocities already committed against whole nations. hrw released the report of ethnic cleansing in gaza today and ohcr finally admitted israel's actions in gaza are consistent with genocide. this means the genocide has already been carried out for a while, which genocide conventions, US law, international humanitarian law, all the protestors since last october, and the international court of justice were supposed to prevent from happening ever again—but joe biden and his admin prevented any of that from stopping israel.
in this campaign in particular, kamala was running not only on the strength and triumph of the crimes previously committed against those people, but on the promise of crimes to be committed against those people, and the assurance that the domestic objection to those crimes will be thoroughly ignored. and she demonstrated that by ignoring that voting base. if they had tried to court them, it would have undermined her whole campaign. on the other hand, it undermined nothing for trump, who (for all of his flaws and open support for it) was not the one personally carrying out a genocide the past year.
once you understand this, you understand it wasn't a matter of "kamala promised a ceasefire and trump wanted to finish the job" or "vote blue no matter who." if you are not part of this community or the region that kamala was campaigning on destroying, you missed the point of her campaign. she wasn't trying to win their votes despite biden's genocide, she wasn't doing her best with things out of her control, and she wasn't making promises she wouldn't keep like trump. she was campaigning against us. for many other demographics, this was a campaign of faux joy and vague promises of protecting democracy. for the arab and muslim communities, this was a campaign where "protecting democracy" necessitated their families being slaughtered live on everyone's timelines and smearing the voters who had the audacity to ask for it to stop.
but to their credit, most of them still didn't vote for trump. they didn't believe him. they just sat it out. what else can you do? not only is the person running part of the admin killing your cousins, but they're also campaigning on excluding and vilifying you even if you want to vote for them.
i've said this before but a great majority of the people organizing for palestine were previous dem canvassers and local organizers. they arrested their own campaign infrastructure over the year and smeared them as hateful antisemites. they pretended they had only targeted arabs and muslims and 'hamas supporters' and kept the fact that most of those protestors were antizionist jews, students of color and regular kids out of mainstream media. their youth vote tanked but they still continue to pretend the genocide was not a factor in their loss.
despite that they make sure to stress that muslim and arab voters "voted for trump to punish harris" even though exit polls and election data show otherwise. this simply wasn't true, and she lost in all seven swing states. this is because she ran a campaign that vilified arabs and muslims, and the narrative now demands it. liberals want them perceived as having "punished" the american populace so the american populace punishes them while the US continues to massacre our region.
she lost, but her hateful campaign lingers. i think a lot of people find comfort in saying "you'll get what's coming to you" or "trump is gonna turn gaza into a parking lot" because violence against these communities is the status quo. they're scared of the uncertainty of what trump will do to america, but they're comfortable with what he might do to us. because that's some semblance of normality in an unstable time. america will change and trump will put your institutions to the test, but at least killing arabs will stay the same. and that was, in short, kamala harris's campaign pitch.
