The Michigan Democratic primary came on the heels of the February 12th Rafah Strikes, when Israel targeted 14 residential homes and three mosques, killing over 100 Palestinians. As we continued to watch the violence unleashed on Gaza with US-made bombs, DSA chapters across the country — including our own chapters in Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Maryland — enthusiastically took up leadership roles in our local iterations of the “Uncommitted” movement. The Democratic Party primary elections presented an opportunity for us to hold the Biden administration accountable through a simple message: if Democrats continue to abet Israel’s genocide in Gaza, they will lose votes in this year’s presidential election.
This movement provided Democratic Party voters with an alternative choice in the primaries, receiving 740,000 votes and winning 36 Uncommitted delegate seats at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Yet to this day, the party has refused to offer even the smallest concessions. Not Another Bomb failed to secure the demand for an arms embargo at the DNC, and Vice President Kamala Harris stated plainly that, if elected, she “will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself” through no change in policy. As the genocide rages on and Israel’s annexation project extends into Lebanon, our demands remain unmet.
This moment poses a question: are we willing to hold the line for the demands articulated by a national, sustained, highly politicized anti-war movement that our chapters have spent the last eight months building, or are we going to capitulate and throw away our leverage even though our demands have been ignored?
When we joined the Uncommitted movement, we sent a clear message: we are willing to withhold our votes from the Democratic Party over their policy of support for the genocide of Palestinians. This message resonated with hundreds of thousands of voters. Much of that anti-war base is once again ready to withhold their vote from a Democratic Party that has not earned them, if an arms embargo and a permanent ceasefire are not achieved by Nov. 5. Uncommitted organizers nationwide are running a national No Votes for Genocide campaign, and many swing states have organized and are actively running their own No Votes for Genocide campaigns, including Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.
Our votes remain ones that must be earned, and neither the Biden administration nor the Harris campaign have done anything to earn them. No Votes for Genocide surfaces as this movement’s logical next step. We are at a crucial juncture as a project with the leverage of having amassed 740,000 votes against genocide in the Democratic Party primary — more than Kamala Harris’ likely margin of victory in several key swing states — that we can mobilize to stop our government from enacting atrocities in our name.
If we do not hold this line, we not only signal to the Democratic Party that they can commit genocide, violate international law, and slaughter Palestinians in service of an imperial project on our dime with impunity, we also abandon a highly agitated segment of the working class that is politicizing around the idea that our whole political system is complicit in genocide and imperialism, and serves the interests of capitalists and war profiteers rather than those of working people. We should make it a primary task, as socialists, to be part of that base and organize it into an alternative political home: DSA.
Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities across our nation continue leading the fight for a free Palestine. They are increasingly refusing “lesser of two evils” logic and being blackmailed into unearned support for Harris. Muslim voters are evenly split between the Democratic Party and the Green Party. More than 100 imams nationwide have signed a letter calling on Muslim voters to reject both the Democratic and Republican presidential tickets and vote third party. While No Votes for Genocide does not endorse a specific third party, it inevitably calls upon pledged voters to follow their conscience and abstain from voting for the Democrats, the party currently leading the U.S. government and aiding the ongoing genocide.
We did not enter the Uncommitted movement with any false hopes for a leftward swing of the Democratic Party. We believe the time for party reformism has passed: Democrats have not only committed to genocide, they have adopted inhumane right wing positions on immigration, gun control, death penalty reforms, policing, and foreign policy broadly. It is clear that the small window for progressive politics that opened within the Democratic Party in 2016 and 2020 has been closed and nailed shut as the United States’ existential dependence on imperialism locks it into blank-check support for Israel’s regional war.
As the party clamps down on the Left, now is the time for us to turn to organizing strategies that increase politicization by bringing the working class into conflict with the capitalist class and its politicians, developing the level of organization necessary to inflict material and political damage to the ruling classes, and shifting the terrain of what is possible. And as we look beyond Nov. 5, to the uphill battles present in our communities from housing to reproductive healthcare, it is clear to us that the only path forward is one that puts the working class in control. Workers do not want to fund a genocide, so why should they vote for one?