As Vice President Kamala Harris prepared to visit Michigan on Thursday, the national group that mobilized primary voters to cast “uncommitted” ballots against President Biden over the United States’ support for Israel in the war in Gaza announced that it would not endorse her.
The group, the Uncommitted National Movement, which started in Michigan and has become a national organization, said the decision had come after Ms. Harris failed to respond to its request for her to meet with Palestinian American families who have lost loved ones in Gaza, and for her to discuss the group’s demands for halting arms shipments to Israel. The group said it had asked for a response by Sept. 15.
“Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her,” the organization said in a statement provided to The New York Times.
Ms. Harris is scheduled to appear at a campaign event on Thursday with Oprah Winfrey in a Detroit suburb, her third trip to Michigan since entering the presidential race. The crucial battleground state has one of the country’s largest populations of Arab American voters, and many of them were among the more than 100,000 people to cast “uncommitted” votes against Mr. Biden in Michigan’s primary election in March. Hundreds of thousands more Americans cast similar protest votes in states across the country.
In its statement, the Uncommitted National Movement urged its members to vote against former President Donald J. Trump, who it said had “bragged about accelerating the genocide against Palestinians and promised to intensify the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S.” The group also urged members not to vote for a third-party candidate, saying that could help Mr. Trump win.
The endorsement decision was not a surprise: Tensions between the group and Ms. Harris’s campaign have spilled into public view. Last month, when two Uncommitted leaders briefly spoke with her and asked for a meeting to discuss the group’s demands for an arms embargo, her campaign downplayed the interaction, and her national security adviser made it clear that Ms. Harris did not support an arms embargo.
Organizers of the Democratic National Convention last month denied the group’s request for a speaker of Palestinian descent at the event, which featured the parents of a dual Israeli American citizen who was taken hostage by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attack. (The citizen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was among six hostages whose bodies were found in a tunnel in Gaza on Aug. 31.) Uncommitted supporters held a sit-in protest outside the convention instead.
The endorsement decision does, however, signal frustration among some Democratic voters who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and who had been cautiously optimistic that a Harris presidency could meaningfully change the United States’ approach toward Israel. The war has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, and continues to cause a humanitarian calamity.
In its announcement, the Uncommitted group pointed to Ms. Harris’s recent support from prominent Republicans, accusing her campaign of “courting Dick Cheney while sidelining disillusioned antiwar voices, pushing them to consider third-party options or to sit this important election out.”
“We are proud to have grown our movement, even as our government continues to send bombs that destroy families,” the statement said. “Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate; it has always been about building a movement that saves lives.”
Among top officials in the Biden administration, Ms. Harris has been the most sympathetic about the plight of Palestinians, and among the most forceful in criticizing Israel’s conduct in the war. But she has been reluctant to signal that she would back up those sentiments with a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy if she wins the presidency.
In an interview this week with members of the National Association of Black Journalists, Ms. Harris was pressed repeatedly for specifics on how she would handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She largely reiterated the Biden administration’s positions.
On the issue of weapons, Ms. Harris said she supported Mr. Biden’s decision this year to pause shipments of 2,000-pound bombs, which he acknowledged had been used to kill civilians. But when the vice president was pushed for her own position on the war, she pointed repeatedly to a deal the Biden administration has struggled to broker between Israel and Hamas to institute a cease-fire in exchange for hostages held in Gaza.
“We need to get this deal done, and we need to get it done immediately,” she said. “And that is my position, and that is my policy. We need to get this deal done.”
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