The News
When Kamala Harris lost the presidency, peace activists had hoped that Democrats might revisit their no-strings support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
On Wednesday — two weeks after her concession speech — they learned that it wasn’t going to happen.
In the Senate, efforts led by Sen. Bernie Sanders to block $20 billion in arms sales to Israel failed, with just 19 Democrats voting for at least one of his three resolutions. At the United Nations, the administration cast the only no vote — a veto — against a ceasefire resolution.
And in the House, Republicans moved toward passage of the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act. Progressive and anti-war groups warned it could empower the Trump administration to shut them down, by finding any tenuous connection to pro-Palestinian groups. Dozens of Democrats supported it anyway.
“I don’t think Trump needs this to do that,” said Ohio Rep. Greg Landsman, a Democrat supported the bill in a failed attempt to bring it up last week, and intended to support it again.
The post-election debate between Democrats, searching for the reasons why Donald Trump was able to beat them again, has focused very little on Gaza. Activists who’d advocated a protest vote against Harris claimed victory; those who had urged frustrated anti-war voters to stick with Harris said that she had lost them by not breaking with her administration’s support for arms to Israel, and not putting a Palestinian-American speaker onstage at the Democratic National Convention.
The Biden White House hasn’t reacted as they hoped. It urged senators to oppose the Sanders resolution on Wednesday; James Zogby, the co-founder of the Arab American Institute, called that intervention “disturbing and embarrassing,” and harmful to Democrats.
“Polls show that when asked if we should continue to supply weapons to Israel unconditionally or should condition future weapons shipments based on Israel’s compliance with U.S. law, an overwhelming majority of Democrats say condition, weapons, and a plurality of Republicans agree,” said Zogby, who is now running for vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. “Not getting that is out of touch.”
But a majority of Senate Democrats did not support the Sanders effort, and other Democrats staked out clear positions against it. Shortly before the vote on the Sanders resolution, Arizona Rep.-elect Yassamin Ansari said in a statement that “this resolution will attempt to deprive Israel of the materials needed for deterrence and defense while also accomplishing nothing to improve the situation in Gaza,”
Ansari, the first Iranian-American ever elected to Congress, won a close primary with the support of Democratic Majority for Israel. Less than two hours after her statement, Ansari’s fellow Democratic freshmen elected her as president of their class.
The View From Democrats
Trump’s sweep of the swing states this month deprived some activists of the story they were ready to tell: That Gaza cost Harris the election.
In Michigan, Harris ran behind Joe Biden’s 2020 vote total, and faltered in majority-Muslim and majority-Arab American cities — Hamtramck, Dearborn, and Dearborn Heights. At a Tuesday press conference, Michigan Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin pointed out that she won those cities after holding sympathetic conversations with residents, creating more distance with the Biden policy than Harris.
“The most important thing that I tried to do was keep lines of communication open with people, even when we didn’t see eye to eye,” said Slotkin. “But obviously, the pain in the community was so deep that Trump was able to win some of those communities.”
But the election did not come down to Michigan, where supporters of Green Party candidate Jill Stein focused their energies. Had Harris won the state and flipped no other, she still would have lost the presidency.
“I think she would have won Michigan, but it’s broader than that,” said California Rep. Ro Khanna, assessing what might have happened had Harris made a clean break with Biden on Gaza. “The rural communities and small towns just don’t feel like they’re coming back. There’s a sense of stagnation.”
Pro-Israel Democrats saw another angle to the Michigan protest votes. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American member of Congress, pointedly declined to endorse Harris, and out-performed her in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights. AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel, which spent heavily to defeat Democratic critics of Israel across the country in this year’s primaries, could not find a credible challenger to Tlaib. They were more optimistic about finding one in the 2026 midterms.
“Refusing to endorse Hillary Clinton was a major problem for Nina Turner,” said Mark Mellman, the president of DMFI, referring to an Ohio Democrat who pro-Israel groups helped beat in a 2021 primary. “Democratic primary voters don’t like folks who help Trump.”
The View From Voters
There was a sizable constituency of progressive voters who had withheld votes from Harris, demanding change on Israel policy — mostly in non-competitive states.
On Election Day, shortly after noon, Daniel Denvir rode an electric scooter from his home in Providence to his polling place at a Jewish community center. The host of The Dig, a socialist interview podcast, skipped over the federal candidates on his ballot, writing four letters three times.
For president and vice president: GAZA.
For U.S. Senate: GAZA.
For Congress: GAZA.
Denvir voted for his local Democratic candidates. He also reckoned that his vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in a safely blue state wasn’t necessary, and would have given him some amount of culpability in what he considered a genocide.
“I knew people who said, ‘I would vote for Harris in a swing state,’ and I totally get why,” Denvir told Semafor. In interviews since the election, people who said they’d voted Democratic but skipped the top of the ballot typically cited Gaza. They expressed a little more confidence in their decisions if they were voting in safe blue states.
“I wrote in Joe Biden in D.C., because it didn’t matter,” said Hamid Bendaas, a progressive strategist at the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, who spent months warning Democrats that Harris was losing votes she could win if she broke with the administration on Gaza.
Joe Getzoff, who voted for the PSL in Massachusetts, said that Gaza was the key: He supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s re-election, but declined to vote for Rep. Katherine Clark, who didn’t stray from the administration’s position.
“I would have voted for Harris if she called for an arms embargo on Israel and even if she specifically called for a conditioning of aid to Israel,” he said. “But I have to say, this election has pretty much destroyed any last vestige of ‘maybe the Dems are the good guys’ I still had lodged in my lizard brain.”
David’s view
Democrats are hitting every pressure point in their post-election analysis — every decision Harris should have made but didn’t, every policy choice she should have clarified before Republicans could define her. I’ve been struck by how little they’ve cited Gaza, and the demand that Harris break with her administration to end arms shipments to Israel.
The anti-war left wanted a change in policy; failing that, it wanted Democrats to look over the 2024 wreckage and realize that it could have been prevented had they forced an end to the war. That is not the lesson Democrats took away, and Trump’s first foreign policy hires — Marco Rubio at State, Mike Huckabee for ambassador to Israel — emboldened angry liberals who wanted to tell protest voters that Trump had duped them.
Room for Disagreement
Some progressives pointed to the Senate action as a step in the right direction for their movement. Among the Democrats who defied the White House on one of the votes was Sen. Jon Ossoff, even as he faces a tough re-election in Georgia in 2026.
Notable
- In Zeteo, Prem Thakker covers the Senate vote and analyzes what it meant for the Democrats: “They also came a week after aid groups said Israel not only failed to comply with the Biden administration’s 30-day deadline to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza, but it made things dramatically worse.”
- On his substack, Seymour Hersh cites reports from Gaza about deteriorating conditions, brought about by an Israel “fortified by bombs and funding from the Biden administration.”