Ignored by the Party, Blamed for Its Defeat

Anti-war Democrats warned Biden-Harris on Gaza. Now they’re being cast as the problem.

A series of tweets from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Rapid Response Director captured the problem in miniature. Confronted with a historic loss and the mass expulsion of Palestinians, his instinct wasn’t reflection—it was mockery. Not of Trump. Not of Biden or Harris. Not of the Democratic Party’s powerful donors or consultants. But of the people who organized to prevent exactly this outcome. It was Gaza as a punchline. A humanitarian catastrophe reduced to a political gotcha. And it made the party’s posture unmistakable: when voters cry out in grief, this faction of the Democratic establishment doesn’t listen—they sneer.

Over the past year, a certain kind of Democratic Party insider treated obvious facts as inconvenient optics. Biden’s decline? Manageable. Gaza? A fringe concern. The coalition’s unraveling? Overblown. These weren’t policy failures to confront but PR problems to spin. Now, after the loss, their instinct is the same—but the target has shifted.

Palestinian suffering, once ignored, is now weaponized—not to mourn the dead, but to mock those who demanded they be seen. Some Democrats now invoke Gaza not with grief, but with sneering contempt, wielding the scale of the tragedy as proof that protest failed—not that policy did.

The message is unmistakable: the people who tried to stop the killing are to blame for it. And the party that enabled it bears no responsibility at all.

This is a story that flatters elite instincts. It offloads blame onto the margins. It casts anti-war voters as paradoxically too marginal to deserve outreach and yet somehow powerful enough to swing a national election. But it’s wrong—and dangerously so. It transforms a political warning into a moral betrayal. It mistakes a tactical intervention for sabotage. And it elides what the Uncommitted campaign really was: a last-ditch effort to save the coalition before it fractured irreparably.

What we’re seeing isn’t a course correction. It’s something closer to a cover-up. No one is seriously defending the war anymore—not the bombs, not the policy. Because on some level, they knew it was wrong. But they didn’t have the courage to stop it. So now they do what’s easiest: they punch down—at the people who tried.

One of Kamala Harris’s senior aides even claimed she had broken with Biden on Gaza. That’s false. A quiet admission, disguised as spin, that they saw what was happening—and chose to do nothing.

And yet, a more honest narrative is right there: the party was warned—clearly, repeatedly—and chose not to listen. The Uncommitted campaign wasn’t a threat. It was a final attempt to hold the coalition together. The votes in Michigan, Minnesota, and across the country weren’t acts of sabotage. They were acts of loyalty—an effort to wake the party before it sleepwalked into disaster.

And these votes didn’t come only from Arab and Muslim communities. They came from progressives, from young Democrats, from people who may not have had direct ties to Gaza but felt implicated by what was being done in their name. Some wanted simply to register moral dissent. Others feared that the party’s alliance with Netanyahu would shatter any hope of building the unity needed to defeat Trump. For them, this wasn’t just a matter of foreign policy. It was a test of political judgment, coalition discipline, and moral credibility against authoritarian racism.

By February 2024, the reality in Gaza was unavoidable. Tens of thousands dead. Families buried beneath rubble. Hospitals bombed with U.S.-made munitions. And the White House responded not with reflection, but with escalation—more weapons, more impunity, more denial of what was happening on their watch. For millions of Americans, this wasn’t just geopolitics. It was a moral line. And the party crossed it.

For voters with family ties to the region, this wasn’t a policy disagreement. Their calls for a ceasefire, for accountability, for even symbolic recognition, were waved off as fringe. The Democratic Party claimed they had done the math: these voters had nowhere else to go. The coalition would hold once “Mr. Muslim Ban” was on stage.

But we saw the crack forming. A moral fissure intersecting with a generational one. A yawning gap between what the party claimed to be and what it was willing to defend when power was on the line.

That’s what birthed the Uncommitted campaign—a disciplined hypothesis: that a protest vote in the primaries, executed inside the party of which we were members, could force a recalibration early enough to matter. We weren’t trying to blow up the coalition. We were trying to keep it alive.

In Michigan, more than 100,000 people—13% of primary voters—chose “Uncommitted.” In Minnesota, nearly 20%. In Wisconsin and Washington, the campaign earned delegates and media coverage that made Gaza one of the defining issues of the 2024 primary. And it was built with almost no resources. No major donors. No institutional backing. Just strategy, sorrow, and the belief that protest—if serious, if rooted in coalition politics—could still be heard.

For a moment, it was. But then we hit a wall.

Let’s be clear: we were not an anti-Harris campaign. We didn’t endorse Trump. We didn’t support third-party spoilers. We didn’t walk away. We stayed inside the Democratic primary because we believed there was still room to build power. But every door was closed. Even modest proposals—a roundtable with impacted families, a statement outlining how Harris would be different than Trump, a single Palestinian American speaker at the DNC—were denied.

We were told, in fairly explicit terms, that it came down to three things: Harris could be no daylight with Biden; Harris couldn’t risk rocking the boat with key donors; and Harris was afraid that swing-state electeds like John Fetterman would go on national television, denouncing any substantive change as abandoning Israel. The fear here was that Fetterman, flanked by other suburban moderates, would declare the party’s shift too radical—and cost Democrats the very states they needed to win. They were also spooked by AIPAC’s historic spending in Congressional races.

A senior party insider described to us a moment during the convention when they looked around a suite at the United Center in Chicago at the donors and operatives shaping the convention. Two-thirds of the room, they said, was deeply connected to AIPAC or its network of affiliates. “You just don’t have the power,” they said. “You need to keep building it.” It wasn’t just a lobby. It was an embedded structure anchoring the party. The campaign’s calculation was simple: the pro-Israel and pro-war bloc was larger, wealthier, and more organized than the anti-war constituency. And so, the administration stayed the course.

But we weren’t confused. We understood the constraints. What we hoped for was not a full break, but a gesture—something that acknowledged the pain of an entire community, sent a signal that Harris would apply American and international law on weapons transfers. What we got instead was silence.

This is what happens when a campaign is trapped in a closed circuit—consultants, donors, operatives—where Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian voices are almost entirely absent. And maybe that wasn’t an oversight. Maybe it was the strategy. Because truly listening would have forced a choice: risk upsetting a powerful faction of the party, or finally acknowledge the humanity of people long treated as disposable. The same hierarchy of human value that viewed Gaza’s dead as a political inconvenience saw Arab and Muslim voters the same way: expendable.

It wasn’t just Gaza. The same instincts that dismissed Palestinian grief also led the party to ignore rising prices, and concerns about Biden’s age. Warnings voiced by voters for over a year were met not with strategy, but with condescension. The same smugness that told us Gaza wouldn’t matter told us voters didn’t care about inflation. Told us the vibes would shift.

And then it lost.

Yes, some Arab and Muslim voters defected. Some skipped the top of the ticket. A visible number even voted for Trump. So did some pro-Israel Jewish voters. At first glance, it seems incoherent. But politics doesn’t run on logic. It runs on emotion, on recognition, on whether your grief is acknowledged or dismissed. In both cases, voters felt unseen—and acted accordingly.

This is the political function Trump now serves. He was no longer just a candidate. He is a vessel for protest and anti-system sentiment. For those who felt erased by elite institutions, he offers a cruel kind of catharsis. His politics are brutal, but legible. You don’t have to believe he cares about you. You just have to believe he scares the people who ignore you.

The danger is not just that these protest votes happened—it’s that Democratic elites still refuse to understand why. They frame them as irrational. Disloyal. But loyalty is a two-way street. Coalitions are not held together by scolding. They are held together by respect.

Uncommitted didn’t elect Trump. But the decision to ignore us may have contributed to his victory. The choice to prioritize donor comfort over community recognition did. The refusal to meet even modest demands—symbolic ones, relational ones—did.

Some will argue that we overestimated our leverage. That we should’ve built more slowly. That we lacked the elite party validators or donor muscle to force a pivot. They’re not wrong. We didn’t have enough to outweigh the AIPAC network or the foreign policy establishment. We needed more infrastructure, more money, more bridge-building across difference. But we tried. We stayed in the primary. We stayed in the party. We didn’t defect—we tried to stop the defection.

And we’ve continued to make it clear—even in the face of rejection—that we are not spoilers. Uncommitted publicly stated that a second Trump term would be even worse, citing the threat of mass expulsions, annexation, and crackdowns on domestic dissent outlined in Project 2025. That statement didn’t come from a place of partisan loyalty. It came from harm reduction. From clarity. From trying to hold the line against authoritarianism even while being shut out by the people who needed our votes.

The lesson isn’t that the protest vote failed. It’s that protest without power hits a ceiling. And that moral clarity alone doesn’t move institutions. Organized political pressure does.

That’s the next chapter. Already, former Uncommitted leaders are turning toward infrastructure: donor organizing, leadership development, permanent institutions rooted in the communities that showed up. Not to burn down the Democratic Party—but to change it from the bottom up.

Uncommitted was never the problem. It was the warning flare.

The party ignored it.

And now we’re all living with the consequences.

CODA

Power shifts when organized people make demands that cannot be ignored—when voters force politicians to listen, when donors create consequences for inaction, when trusted messengers hold elites accountable. Wisdom is knowing that change takes time. That the crises of the moment are both urgent and part of a much longer struggle. It’s not just about public opinion, it’s about political power.

It means learning to fight on multiple timelines: in the short term to defend the targeted, in the medium term to shift the balance of forces, and in the long term to build institutions strong enough to prevent this from happening again.

If you're too deep in the fight, every loss feels like the end. Too far removed, and every shift seems inevitable. But real strategy lives in between—in knowing that moral clarity must be paired with power-building, and that protest alone won’t win unless it changes what the powerful fear and what the public believes is possible.