Following Donald Trump’s decisive victory in this week’s presidential election, leaders of the anti-war group Uncommitted National Movement expressed their disappointment over the results, highlighting the Democratic party’s failure to listen to its base and prioritize progressive policies. Since the movement formed last winter, its leaders have urged the Democratic party to heed their demands of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and to adopt an arms embargo on Israel, or risk losing their votes.
While a full picture of how Arab and Muslim Americans voted in the presidential election is still being captured, this election showed a shift among communities that had long formed the Democratic base. A majority of Muslim Americans voted for the Green party candidate Jill Stein at 53%, according to a nationwide exit poll of more than 1,500 Muslim Americans by the civil rights group Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), followed by 21% for Trump and 20% for vice-president Kamala Harris.
In Michigan, which has one of the nation’s highest Arab American and Muslim populations, 59% of Muslim Americans voted for Stein, according to the CAIR poll, while 22% cast ballots for Trump and 14% supported Harris. While exit poll data on Arab American voters is not yet available, a September poll for the non-profit group Arab American Institute found that they were evenly split between their support of Trump and Harris at 42% and 41% respectively.
Now, Uncommitted’s founders and supporters say that the election results reveal that the Democratic party has lost touch with its working class and anti-war voters. Their message for the Biden-Harris administration and Trump is clear, said Uncommitted leader and Palestinian American activist Lexis Zeidan: the movement is not over. While organizing for Palestinian rights under a Trump presidency will be an uphill battle, leaders said, they plan to continue mobilizing activists to apply pressure on the US government until it ends its support of Israel’s war on Gaza, where more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since last October.
“The results of the election are really unfortunate because, with Trump taking office, there’s a reality that domestically, policies are going to get worse, and people’s rights are at stake. And we know also for Palestine and the Middle East, it’s not going to get any better. It definitely didn’t have to be this way,” said Zeidan. “Dems could have been much smarter, much more strategic and they chose to stick with the status quo rather than listening to their base of voters.”
The Uncommitted National Movement spread to more than two dozen states in the spring, when more than 700,000 citizens marked their ballots “uncommitted”, or its equivalent, in state primaries to send a message to Joe Biden that he would lose their support if he didn’t push for a permanent ceasefire. It followed a campaign called Listen to Michigan, which encouraged more than 100,000 voters to vote “uncommitted” during the state’s Democratic primary in February. Thirty uncommitted delegates were sent to the Democratic national convention (DNC) over the summer.
Discontent over the US’s handling of the war on Gaza was behind the Arab American community’s historic shift from being reliably Democrat to voting Republican and third party in this election, said Tariq Habash, a former policy advisor for the Biden administration who resigned due to the US’s policy regarding Gaza. Habash, who’s Palestinian American, recently co-founded the lobbying organization A New Policy to help reform US strategy on Middle East relations.
“When you are recognized as the party that historically has fought for civil rights and fought for justice, and you allow what has happened in Gaza to happen on your watch and have failed to actually reel in the Israeli government,” said Habash, “you create a situation where you communicate to your base that is often comprised of vulnerable populations, that you are not necessarily going to fight in the interests of vulnerable populations. And I think that resonated with voters in a way that Democrats were not able to turn out the people who they normally would rely on to help them win elections.”
While the Democratic party did not meet Uncommitted’s demands, including to allow a Palestinian American to speak at the DNC, Habash sees the movement as successful for its grassroots mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people and for shining a light on the Democratic party’s shortcomings.
The movement’s leaders were split on their voting plan for the top of the ticket. In September, the Uncommitted declined to endorse Harris after her campaign failed to meet with Palestinian families or Uncommitted representatives ahead of the group’s deadline. The movement also abstained from endorsing a third party candidate, saying that casting a ballot for one was tantamount to a vote for Trump. Zeidan abstained from voting for a presidential candidate and otherwise voted along Democratic party lines down the ballot, while the co-founder and uncommitted Michigan delegate Abbas Alawieh backed Harris.
Several days before the election, some members of the movement formed an offshoot group called Uncommitted Grassroots to encourage voters to support a third party candidate.
“Over the last few months, a small group of individuals have made decisions on behalf of our nationwide movement. These individuals, without consulting our broader coalition and without being democratically chosen, changed the way that the movement operated from one that challenged the Democratic party to one that completely catered to the party’s needs at the DNC,” Uncommitted Grassroots wrote in a statement. “This was a betrayal of the true voice and core values of the countless uncommitted voters who believe that compromising on the values of peace and justice is non-negotiable.”
In response, the Uncommitted leaders said that they had always been clear that the movement was for Democratic voters seeking to prevent a Trump presidency. “If our strategy had been to abandon organizing within the Democratic Party,” they wrote on X, “we would have taken that path from the start rather than investing in the Democratic Party.”
Zeidan said that she understands the anger and frustration of Arab and Muslim American voters who cast ballots for Trump after their pleas to Biden for a ceasefire were ignored. “What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why the Democratic leadership didn’t listen to them.” For Alawieh, the US’s violent and harmful Gaza policy crosses party lines. “For those of us who are experiencing this policy violence and trying to make sense of how to respond politically, I think it is totally understandable for us to arrive at different conclusions about what the politically savvy thing might be to do,” Alawieh said. “Indeed, both parties are diametrically opposed to a pro-peace and pro-justice approach to the issue of Israel and Palestine.”
Zeidan did not provide specific details on the group’s next steps, but she said that the movement plans to continue organizing around Palestinian liberation and applying pressure on the Biden-Harris administration ahead of Trump’s presidency. “My hope is that this election is the clear demarcation for the Democratic party,” Zeidan said, “to begin to realign on what their party stands for.”
Erum Salam contributed reporting.
