How the Democrats Blew It

Kamala Harris’ Defeat in the Election

On Tuesday a 9.0 political earthquake shook the world's oldest republic. Donald Trump, who many thought would be in jail by now, is not in jail and has made one of the most astounding comebacks possibly in electoral history. 

Political scientists will study Tuesday’s events for decades to come, asking, “How did this happen?” How did Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party blow it so badly?

Two words: Joe Biden.

Brain Drain

Biden, who started his term in office with promise, eventually began to show signs of increasingly drastic cognitive decline. This eventually culminated in his disastrous performance during the televised debate with Trump on June 27. On July 21, Biden officially withdrew from the race and the Democratic National Committee closed ranks around Kamala Harris, essentially anointing her as the candidate to run against Trump.

If Biden had withdrawn from the race sooner, the primary process would have been allowed to run its course and a replacement candidate would have been chosen democratically. Instead, the appearance of Harris being selected by the Party’s elite and the DNC probably contributed to some Democratic voters staying home on Election Day or voting for third-party candidates.

That said, Harris was not a terrible candidate, and her people ran as good a campaign as possible, given the difficult circumstances. Still, Biden should have withdrawn (or been forced out) from the race much sooner, allowing for the regular primary process to take place and giving the chosen candidate more time to make their case to the American people.

Ultimately, Biden’s ego would not let him bow out of the race. Eventually, he had to be threatened with being forced out, but it was already too late by then.

It’s the Economy Stupid

Secondly, the economy. Biden inherited an economy that the global Coronavirus pandemic had decimated. As global supply chains reconstituted, inflation began to rise, reaching peak levels of 9% in June 2022 (the highest level since 1981). Prices for everyday items soared, especially for food and groceries. On paper, the American economy looked strong, but this did not translate to the everyday lives of the average working American.

Inflation is now hovering around 2.3%, but the damage has already been done. Exit polls from yesterday suggest that Americans are still deeply unhappy with the prices of everyday goods and the inflation of the housing market. Undoubtedly, dissatisfaction with Biden’s economy is one of the major reasons for Trump’s victory over Harris and the Democrats on Tuesday.

Gaza

Finally, Biden’s foreign policy and the war in Gaza contributed to Harris’s loss on Tuesday.

Biden will go down in history as this generation's Lyndon Banes Johnson—an establishment liberal who passed important domestic legislation but was felled by a brutal and unpopular war (Vietnam) that ended up discrediting his party for years to come.

Following World War II, the United States set out to create a new “Rules-based International Order” that would prevent genocide, wars of aggression between states, and especially a Third World War from breaking out. This Order comprised the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Western European liberal democracies, and the English-speaking countries…essentially the entire Western world. At the top perched the new American superpower with all its military might.

For some time, the Order functioned how it was intended: containing expansionist powers like the Soviet Union, rolling back wars of aggression like Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, and stopping genocide in places like Bosnia and Kosovo.

However, as time went on the Order began to unravel. The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the George W. Bush administration was widely seen as a war of aggression that the Order’s other members could not support. In the aftermath of the disastrous Iraq War, the Order lost a lot of credibility as it came to be seen as a mere tool of American hegemony and imperialism—an alliance to hide behind while playing the world’s policeman.

When Biden took office in 2021, there were high hopes that he would restore the NATO alliance, which was weakened under Donald Trump, and the credibility of the Order. And for a while, it looked as though Biden might have succeeded. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he rallied the Order to oppose Russia’s armed aggression. The result was the entire mobilization of the West and the gifting of large amounts of Western military weaponry to the besieged Ukrainians.

Then came October 7, 2023.

In the aftermath of Hamas’ vicious assault on southern Israel, Biden and his cabinet promised “ironclad support” for the far-right Netanyahu government. American weapons started to pour into the country. US naval battle groups were dispatched to the region where they sat off the coasts of Israel, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. The US Special Operations Command provided intelligence and other covert action support to their Israeli counterparts.

As the Israeli ground invasion dragged on month after month, it became clear to many around the world that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were violating many of the laws of war, international humanitarian law, and even American laws governing arms sales to other nations. Yet Biden’s weapon shipments kept pouring in, day after day, week after week, and month after month.

Fast forward to the present. Over 50,000 Palestinians are dead in Gaza, many more horribly wounded for life, and Benjamin Netanyahu promises he will press on until “total victory” over Hamas, whatever that looks like.

It cannot be overstated how much damage Biden’s support for Netanyahu’s excesses caused to the credibility of the Order, American institutions, and, ultimately, Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

The power of the United States rests, in part, on the perception of the legitimacy of that power. Once that perception is gone, that power to act, even in its self-interests, is greatly diminished internationally. If, for instance, a superpower who has long championed human rights and laws against genocide, were to suddenly support a genocide, that would have disastrous ramifications on its legitimacy, and the perception of that legitimacy, globally.

Unfortunately, this is what we now see with the Biden administration’s complicity in the Gaza genocide. Consequently, the Order will never recover from this complicity. The alliance was so effective at keeping the peace for many decades precisely because it was seen as legitimate and desirable by many worldwide. Many nations, even in the “Global South,” were happy to defer to the Order so that neighbors did not invade neighbors, and that those who committed atrocities—like genocide—were stopped and held to account for their crimes. This fact is now history.

Through its unconditional support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza, the head of the Order—the United States of America—has lost all credibility to lead this vital international peacekeeping alliance. While the Biden administration rails against Russian aggression and atrocities on the battlefields of Ukraine, it arms and supports Israeli atrocities on the battlefields of Gaza. The Biden administration chose to ignore international humanitarian law, the laws of war, laws against genocide, and even domestic laws for political expediency.

Where the world used to see American leadership, it now sees American hypocrisy in all its ugliness. Where the world used to see American fairness, it sees criminality.

Of course, Kamala Harris was the unlucky inheritor of this mess. As much as she tried to present herself as different from Biden on the Israel question, her efforts did not go far enough for many voters.

As the Democratic Party establishment rallied around Harris, they made no effort to ease fears that the administration would continue to provide the increasingly genocidal Netanyahu government with unconditional military and diplomatic support. Harris herself scolded pro-Palestinian protestors at a rally that they should shut up; otherwise, Trump would be reelected. During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Democratic leadership denied a request to have a Palestinian speaker on stage while granting every opportunity to promote America’s “ironclad support” for Israel.

In Michigan, a critical swing state, the Arab-American community was watching events closely with increasing horror and dismay. An “Uncommitted” movement sprang up to pressure the Biden administration to hear their voices and take action to rein in the Netanyahu government. No action came. Instead, in the final days of the 2024 presidential race, Epstein-Island Bill Clinton, a paragon of virtue and morality, was dispatched to Michigan to shore up support for the administration’s failed foreign policies.

Justifying the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians by the IDF, Clinton said of Israeli society: “You would say, ‘You have to forgive me, but I’m not keeping score that way.’ It isn’t how many we’ve had to kill because Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians. They’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.”

For the Arab-American population of Michigan—as well as all Democrats, liberals, centrists, independents, and progressives sympathetic to the Palestinians’ plight—this speech by Clinton was less than reassuring to say the least.

In a way, Clinton perfectly and succinctly displayed, for all to see, the profound moral rot, arrogance, disassociation, and corruption that had taken hold in the Party’s establishment. Far from distancing herself from Clinton’s remarks, Harris remained on the sidelines, still and silent.

It is little wonder then that on Election Day, the Arab-American population of Michigan overwhelmingly voted for third-party party candidates like Jill Stein or even broke for Donald Trump himself. In Dearborn, which has one of the highest concentrations of Arab-Americans in the US, 47% voted for Trump, 28% for Harris, and 22% for Jill Stein, according to the city clerk for that distract. That is an astounding rejection of the Democratic Party and its candidate by a demographic that has overwhelming voted Democrat in the past.

It may be pointed out that Arab-Americans represent a small minority of the American population and that their rejection of Harris on Tuesday had minimal impact on the overall election. So what of Americans in general, and Democrats in particular, on the question of the war in Gaza and arms shipments to Israel?

A June poll from CBS/YouGov found that 61% of Americans said the US should not send weapons to Israel, including 77% of Democrats and 40% of Republicans.

Harris failed to carry a single swing state on Tuesday. So what of the Israel-Gaza issue in the swing states?

A September poll by the libertarian Cato Institute showed 61% of people in Wisconsin, 56% in Michigan, and 51% in Pennsylvania were in favor of conditioning military aid to Israel or halting arms shipments altogether. Another poll in August by the Middle East Understanding Policy Project and YouGov showed that 57% of people in Pennsylvania, 44% in Arizona, and 34% in Georgia said they were more likely to vote for Harris if the US withheld arms to Israel.

In other words, Biden and Harris's current armament policies are widely unpopular, especially among registered Democrats. How much did this impact Tuesday's decision-making? Unfortunately, we will have to wait for more exit polling data to find out.

However, it is clear that the Biden administration—and, by extension, Kamala Harris—did not care what the voters and its own constituents thought about their foreign policy in the Middle East. They did not care and were unwilling to change direction until the election. Instead, they were wedded only to what the Blob (a derogatory term for the American foreign policy establishment) wanted. They were at the head of the Blob, in fact, and were dedicated only to American hegemony in the Middle East, which requires unconditional support for Israel—even in the face of hard evidence that genocide is taking place in Gaza (you can read the UN’s most recent report here).

In an interview yesterday, political scientist and Chicago professor John Mearsheimer said that he did not vote for Harris on Tuesday because of her complicity in the Gaza genocide. “Genocide is a red line for me,” said Mearsheimer. How many other Americans, in and out of the voting booth, thought the same thing on Tuesday?