One of the few Jewish dynasties in American politics is the Levin family of greater Detroit. They may not have the national name recognition of the Cuomos or the Kennedys, but in Michigan politics, from generation to generation, they have been impossible to miss. The federal courthouse in Detroit is named for Judge Theodore Levin, who served from the mid-nineteen-forties to the volatile end of the sixties. The Port Authority building fronting the Detroit River is named for Carl Levin, who represented Michigan in the U.S. Senate for three dozen years and was eulogized in the Times, in 2021, as the “scourge of corporate America.” Carl’s brother Sander (Sandy) Levin, now in his nineties, retired from the House of Representatives in 2019, and was succeeded by his son Andy Levin, who had been elected to replace him. All are Democrats—all could even be called, with some qualifications, progressive Democrats—but within that capacious category there have always been fissures, and those fissures only grew deeper last year, after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th and Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
“Dad would never step out of line the way I’m doing now,” Andy Levin said one morning this past February. We were at his house in the Detroit suburbs, which was appointed in the haimish style of the noncoastal NPR listener—binoculars for birding, Crocs for gardening, crayons and playing cards on a coffee table. At sixty-three, Levin still has a boyish demeanor, with wiry curls and a gap-toothed grin. A few weeks prior, he had been conscripted by a small group of left-wing activists who were urging Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the upcoming Michigan primary, to protest the Biden-Harris Administration’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza. Their message was half offering, half threat. If Joe Biden, then still the Democratic candidate, moved in their direction—by making military aid to Israel conditional, say, or taking decisive steps toward brokering a peace agreement—then the activists would try to deliver him the votes he needed in November. If he didn’t, they claimed, then he might lose Michigan, and with it the general election. Now the primary was days away, and Levin, one of the most prominent Democrats in the state, was about to give a speech at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, encouraging his neighbors not to vote for the incumbent President. He found the prospect of a second Donald Trump Administration too terrifying to contemplate; still, he insisted that the primaries were the best time to put pressure on his own party. “It does make me nervous, if I’m being honest,” he said. “I just don’t see any other way.”
Only a few states are considered tossups, and Michigan is one of them. For months, Biden trailed Trump there in polling. Since Kamala Harris formally became the Democratic candidate, in August, she has held a small but shaky lead. The margins are slim. In 2020, Biden won Michigan by a hundred and fifty thousand votes; in 2016, Trump won it by about ten thousand. In the past few election cycles, Democrats have lost support among the white working class, famously, and among Latino voters without college degrees; there is also growing concern about the Party’s softening support among working-class Asian voters and Black voters. The Party’s coalition has turned out to be more rickety than it once seemed—not a sturdy edifice of regional and demographic blocs but a Jenga tower, always one tremor away from collapse.
On top of all this, there’s the war in Gaza—grisly, relentless, and surprisingly persistent in the news—which has unsettled the American progressive coalition in ways that we don’t yet fully understand. Most voters don’t list the war as their top concern, but it seems to be contributing, fairly or unfairly, to the perception of a world going to hell on the Democrats’ watch. In May, a survey asked voters to assess how the current Administration had handled a variety of issues, including crime, immigration, and the economy. Nothing ranked lower than its response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even more vexing, the respondents’ reasons for disapproval were split evenly between “too pro-Israel” and “not pro-Israel enough.”
Troy Zukowski, a representative of the Michigan Jewish Democrats who considers himself “center left,” told me, “If Harris were to threaten to cut off aid to Israel, that would be political suicide. But I’m confident she won’t do anything like that.” Other Michigan voters have the opposite view. In 2022, Michigan had the highest youth turnout of any state, and it has the largest proportion of Arab American residents. According to a poll in March, a majority of Americans disapproved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Another poll showed that a majority of Americans did not want to send weapons to Israel; among likely Democratic voters, young voters, and Black voters, the proportion was at least three-quarters. “The D.C. bigwigs I talk to are in total denial about how pissed off people are,” Andy Levin said. When it comes to the general election, “they go, ‘What are these people gonna do? Stay home?’ ” He widened his eyes and smacked a palm against his forehead: Yeah, no shit they will.
For at least a generation, he argued, the Democratic Party has taken its left flank for granted. “When there’s a swing voter who wants the Democrats to tack to the center, we’ll spend enormous effort trying to make that voter feel at home,” Levin said. “And we should! We should fight for every vote. But then, when the left demands something, it’s ‘Tough shit, get over it.’ ” During the primary, many antiwar Democrats swore that they would never vote for Biden, whose posture toward Gaza they considered callous, or worse. Harris may represent a slight reset, but not a fundamental one. Now that the election is imminent, and the choice has come into sharper focus—either Harris or Trump, who fulminates about an immigrant “invasion” and uses “Palestinian” as a slur—will these voters turn out for her? “I will, no question,” Levin said. “I just can’t promise that all Democrats will feel that way.”
Levin is enough of a natural politico to get along with just about anyone. “That was one of my favorite Trumpy neighbors,” he explained, after a genial phone call about back-yard tree removal. A few minutes later, he said, “Hey, Siri, call Rashida”—his friend Rashida Tlaib, a democratic socialist from Michigan and the only Palestinian American in Congress. They chatted about D.C. gossip and the Administration’s Middle East policy (“Do they want a regional war?” Levin asked). In his office was an award from a labor museum and a black-and-white photo from a 1968 campaign rally: a young Andy with his father and a banner in the background reading “HUMPHREY FOR PRESIDENT.”
Before he ran for office, Levin was a union organizer, a labor lawyer, and the president of a local synagogue; he and his wife also co-founded a renewable-energy company. “If I worked at a Ford plant, I’d be retired and drawing a pension by now,” he said. “But in D.C. a lot of people still know me as Sandy’s kid.” Like his father, he is now an ex-congressman, though not by choice. In 2021, he wrote the Two-State Solution Act, which declared, among other things, that “the establishment of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is inconsistent with international law.” He told me, “I was just reaffirming U.S. policy, or so I thought.” Still, he attracted the ire of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC; a former president of the group referred to Levin as “arguably the most corrosive member of Congress.” The following year, AIPAC put up millions of dollars to help his opponent—who is not Jewish, but is more hawkish on Israel—win a Democratic primary against him.
Levin drove me to Ann Arbor, interrupting himself occasionally to point out a red-tailed hawk, then speed-walked to the Diag, the central quad on the university’s campus, where about a hundred people stood in a circle. An organizer from the “uncommitted” campaign handed Levin a bullhorn, and he gave a brief speech: “I’ve been involved in politics in Michigan since I was a child, and I feel the power of this moment.” Afterward, he stayed for a long time as people hung back to talk to him, expressing all manner of angst. “We can’t have Trump, and we can’t have our tax dollars going to killing children,” Linda Wan, a baker in her fifties, said. Some attendees scolded Levin for going so far as to describe the Israeli military’s actions as war crimes; others criticized him for describing them merely as war crimes, not as a genocide. A recent graduate named Zackariah Farah said that, in 2020, he “really felt hope and enthusiasm for the Democratic Party. Now it’s just disappointment and rage.”
Back in his car, Levin caught up on his recent messages. “I’m sure some people, even in my own family, will see this as a mistake,” he said. That afternoon, he texted with Norm Ornstein, a moderate policy wonk in Washington and a longtime friend of the Levin family, who had caught wind of his involvement with the “uncommitted” campaign and did not approve. “Criticize him for his policies,” Ornstein wrote, of Biden. “But to undermine him now can only hurt him in a contest against Trump.”
Long before Biden dropped out of the race, it was clear that 2024 might feel, at least in some respects, similar to 1968. A high rate of inflation; an ambient sense of end-times fervor; campus protests followed by mass arrests; an incumbent President with a long list of domestic-policy achievements who, nevertheless, kept slipping in the public’s esteem. For a time, there was even a guy named Robert F. Kennedy running for President. The Vietnam War was America’s war in a way that Israel’s current one is not. There is no draft in 2024, and large numbers of American soldiers aren’t dying in Gaza. Still, the war remains deeply divisive: Americans disapprove of it by wider margins than they did the Vietnam War in early 1968.
“There was a sense everywhere, in 1968, that things were giving,” Garry Wills writes in his book “Nixon Agonistes.” “The cities were in danger, and the college campuses.” When Martin Luther King, Jr., said that “a riot is the language of the unheard,” in 1968, he was giving a speech in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and referring in part to the previous summer, when residents of downtown Detroit, worn down by segregation and neglect, torched more than five hundred buildings in less than a week. The following month, King was murdered. Bobby Kennedy, the leading antiwar candidate, was assassinated that summer. As Wills puts it, “Senator Kennedy’s death made men realize that worse can follow worse indefinitely, no terminal worst in sight.”
Lyndon B. Johnson, after campaigning as a peace candidate, had rapidly reversed course, escalating the conflict in Vietnam and ramping up the draft. In terms of American deaths, 1968 was the war’s worst year, without a close second. Students for a Democratic Society, a group of antiwar radicals, was founded at the University of Michigan in 1960. According to its mission statement, adopted in Port Huron, “The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak.” By the end of the sixties, at a gathering in Flint known as a “wargasm,” S.D.S.’s guerrilla offshoot, the Weathermen, was plotting to assassinate police officers. Explosives were planted at a University of Michigan building, and a car blew up outside an R.O.T.C. office.
From inside the White House, Lyndon Johnson could hear chants of “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” In a biography called “LBJ: Architect of American Ambition,” Randall Woods writes, “Antiwar liberals seemed to be willing to go to any lengths to stop the war and get rid of LBJ, even to the point of sacrificing Democratic rule.” Johnson, the most adept politician of his era, took a look around and decided not to run for reëlection. The historian Luke Nichter, in “The Year That Broke Politics,” highlights more personal factors contributing to Johnson’s retirement, including his failing health and his almost supernatural premonition that 1968 wasn’t destined to be the Democrats’ year. The Party had to decide whether to nominate the antiwar upstart Eugene McCarthy or Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s Vice-President. “I admired Humphrey, and I personally disliked McCarthy,” Sandy Levin, who was the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party at the time, told me. “But the war was so divisive—I couldn’t support someone who wouldn’t make a clean break from that.”
Humphrey got the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. TV networks cut to footage of the so-called Battle of Michigan Avenue: Chicago police officers indiscriminately beating street protesters, as onlookers called the police “pigs” and “fascists.” On September 30, 1968, after trying for months to dodge the issue, Humphrey gave a speech on Vietnam, drawing a tepid contrast between Johnson’s policies and his own. It helped, but not enough. “Because of our actions in Chicago, Richard Nixon will be elected,” Abbie Hoffman, a leader of the Yippies, said. The group’s theatrical antics—dancing naked and dropping acid in Lincoln Park, nominating an actual pig for President—were great at attracting media attention. Silent-majority voters, watching TV in their living rooms, saw a country that looked increasingly disordered, a perception that played into the Republicans’ hands.
But, of course, 2024 is not 1968. Nixon, who had not yet revealed his crookedness and paranoia to the nation, was able to run as a levelheaded centrist; Trump is running more or less openly as a vengeful maniac. Nixon had a “secret plan” to wind down the Vietnam War, and eventually did, after several more years of brutality. Trump’s stance on the war in Gaza is not particularly coherent, but he would probably escalate it. During the debate in June, Trump criticized Biden for not letting Israel’s military “finish the job.”
In the sixties, most states were battleground states, and the rancor in the streets corresponded with fluidity at the ballot box. Nixon won Illinois; Humphrey won Texas; George Wallace, running to Nixon’s right, carried five Southern states—the last time a third-party candidate won any electoral votes. These days, the nation’s discontent doesn’t have a reliable democratic outlet. The political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck refer to calcification—the politicians may get crazier, but voters’ partisan allegiances stay mostly the same—and to a related phenomenon called parity: almost no matter what happens, the two parties remain perpetually neck and neck. The result is that even a few thousand votes in the right state can be enough to swing a national election. The 2000 Presidential race, which came down to five hundred and thirty-seven votes in Florida, may have been tipped by “el voto castigo”—thousands of Cuban Americans who, outraged at the Clinton Administration’s handling of the Elián González affair, voted as a bloc for George W. Bush—or by Muslim voters in the state, who overwhelmingly voted for Bush.
If past is prologue, then what should Harris do? Make a play for the antiwar youth vote, or accept that much of it will remain out of reach? Harris often reaffirms her “unwavering commitment” to Israel’s defense, yet she clearly also sees some upside in distancing herself from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now wanted by the International Criminal Court. In July, when Netanyahu came to Washington to address a joint session of Congress, Harris skipped the speech, citing a scheduling conflict; she then gave public remarks expressing “serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza” but announcing no change in policy. “Harris is not going to come out tomorrow and say, ‘I’m not sending Bibi one more bomb,’ ” Levin told me. “But if she changes nothing, and she loses a few thousand votes in Michigan because of it, there’s a chance it could cost her the election.”
On most domestic issues—guns, abortion, climate change—the Democratic coalition is, by historical standards, remarkably unified. But foreign policy, and particularly the war in Gaza, is an issue that seems almost designed to highlight dissension within the Party. After the October 7th attacks, Biden gave an Oval Office address in which he implied that Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine, Netanyahu’s Israel, and Biden’s America represent a sort of twenty-first-century axis of democracy. After that idea didn’t seem to land, he apparently switched to a quieter strategy that involved mostly supporting Netanyahu in public, pushing for diplomacy in private, and hoping that the issue would fade from voters’ minds.
Meanwhile, a group of left-wing political strategists formed a Signal group to brainstorm ways to prevent it from fading. “People are opposed to the war, but it’s not a top-priority issue for them,” Waleed Shahid, a strategist who helped recruit Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman to run for Congress, said. “The way it becomes a top-priority issue is we need to keep driving the urgency.” Shortly after October 7th, he set up an outfit called Israel Palestine Communications and started sending e-mail blasts, multiple times a day, to the hundreds of journalists and political flacks in his contact list. In December, a producer at MSNBC told him that cable news would soon pivot from war coverage to election coverage. “If we wanted to keep the same amount of media attention on Gaza,” Shahid told me, “we would have to find a way to make it an election story.” For Shahid’s cohort, this was not a new strategy. “In 2016 and 2020, if we wanted to drive coverage of Medicare for All, we had a go-to frame—‘That’s a priority for Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders is running for President,’ ” he said. In December, a member of the Signal group published an opinion piece urging Andy Levin to run against Biden as a protest candidate. “I’m not running for President,” Levin told Politico. He did add, though, that the people who’d tried to recruit him were “serious” about their concerns.
By late January, the group had identified another opportunity: the Michigan primary. Abbas Alawieh, a thirty-three-year-old organizer with a clean-shaven head and a linebacker’s frame, convened a meeting of community leaders in a back room of a Lebanese restaurant in Dearborn. (The city, which is just outside Detroit, recently became the first majority-Arab city in the U.S.) Alawieh was born in Lebanon, and his family moved to Dearborn when he was six; after grad school, he spent five years as a legislative staffer in Congress. Some people at the meeting were eager to see the Democrats suffer at the polls. “I don’t love Trump, but I will not vote for Biden even if he stands on his head from now until November, and he can’t even stand on his feet,” Osama Siblani, the editor of a local paper called the Arab American News, told me in February. “We gave him our support last time, and he gave us the middle finger.” Already, local leaders were spearheading a campaign called Abandon Biden, asking voters to pick any candidate other than the President. Alawieh argued that they should mobilize the community to vote “uncommitted” in the primary instead. If they got just ten thousand votes, the margin there in the 2016 Presidential election, they could claim victory.
The campaign raised about two hundred thousand dollars to buy some online ads and contact several thousand voters. One night, a few days before the primary, Alawieh and Levin met up at Spot Lite, a record store and art gallery in Detroit, where the campaign was hosting a phone bank. “On weekends, they have Arab techno dance parties here,” Alawieh said. “Coolest spot in town.”
“I’m sure my kids know this place,” Levin said.
“Oh, they do,” Alawieh said.
Lexis Zeidan, an “uncommitted” co-founder whose parents are Palestinian Christians, sat at a folding table next to Layla Elabed, another co-founder and Rashida Tlaib’s younger sister. Marianne Williamson, the self-help author and occasional politician, walked in and sat next to them. “I was a nondenominational minister in Michigan for many years,” she said, in her unplaceable cosmopolitan accent. She is now a proponent of “universal spiritual themes,” but she was raised, in Houston, as a Conservative Jew; one of her formative political experiences was hearing her childhood rabbi speak out against the Vietnam War. She had made a memorable run for President in the 2020 Democratic primary, and another bid in 2024, but she had recently announced that she was suspending her campaign. The organizers wanted her to encourage her supporters to vote “uncommitted” instead. “Let’s make a video of you endorsing us right now, and I’ll put it on TikTok,” Zeidan said.
“Not yet,” Williamson said, leaning forward in her chair. “I’m here with an open heart, but I need to hear more. What’s your ultimate goal?”
“Permanent ceasefire,” Elabed said.
“Which I support,” Williamson said.
“Conditioning aid to Israel,” Zeidan said.
“We should have conditioned aid years ago,” Williamson said. “And how does ‘uncommitted’ get us there?”
“Right now it’s ‘uncommitted,’ ” Nasser Beydoun, then a long-shot primary candidate for the Senate, said, taking a seat. “If nothing changes, it’ll be ‘Abandon Biden.’ Then it’ll be ‘Fuck Biden.’ Matter of fact, maybe I’ll make that my campaign slogan.”
Elabed inhaled between gritted teeth. “His views, not ours,” she said. She tried pivoting to flattery: “With you out of the race, Marianne, there’s no real antiwar candidate.”
“You know who was an antiwar candidate?” Beydoun said, with a roguish grin. “Trump.”
Williamson stood up and left without making an endorsement. “I have a sense for when an electoral strategy is coming from a centered place, a grounded place,” she told me, under her breath. Still, more than a hundred thousand people, or thirteen per cent of the total, voted “uncommitted”—enough to send two delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. On the evening of the primary, the organizers held a watch party, dancing into the night. (In later weeks, they picked up delegates in other states—eleven in Minnesota, seven in Hawaii, one in Rhode Island.) Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn and a supporter of the “uncommitted” campaign, told me, “The Democrats have done good things. But the scales of justice will not allow voters to weigh that over a genocide unfolding in front of their eyes.”
One night in March, Alawieh parked at a strip mall in Dearborn Heights, between Eight Ball Pool and Point Blank Firearms, and entered a high-ceilinged hookah lounge. “We’ve been treating this place like our office,” he said. He was so busy greeting people as they passed his table (“Habibi! What’s good?”) that he could barely sit down. “Is your family safe?” an acquaintance asked him, in Arabic. “They’re in Palestine, right?”
“Southern Lebanon,” he said.
“Oh, so they might get hit, too.”
Eventually, he sat in a booth next to Elabed and Zeidan, who moved their plates so that three laptops could fit on the table. He ordered a steak quesadilla, then turned to me. “Please write that I did not order shisha, in case my mom reads this,” he said.
The server who brought Alawieh’s quesadilla, a young hijabi woman, asked what he was working on, and they started chatting about politics. She hadn’t voted in the primary. “Who is there to vote for?” she said. “All I want is peace.”
“And in November?” Alawieh asked.
“I’ll probably vote for Trump,” she said.
“But he’s horrible,” Alawieh said. “He hates us!”
She shrugged. “Something’s got to change,” she said. When she was gone, Alawieh told me, “I meet voters like that every day. Not just Muslims. You can scold them all you want, but that’s how they feel.”
As the war in Gaza ground on, it became a focus of protest energy around the world. Sit-ins emerged at American universities, then spread to Australia and the University of Tokyo. Some demonstrators exhibited remarkable message discipline; others exhibited whatever the opposite of message discipline is. The day before Netanyahu spoke in Congress, two hundred peaceful protesters, led by Israeli and American rabbis chanting the Shema, were arrested in the Cannon House Office Building. The next day, “revolutionary” groups spray-painted pro-Hamas symbols around D.C.’s Union Station and burned effigies of Biden and Netanyahu in the street. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, two of the few American politicians who support conditioning aid to Israel, spoke at a campaign rally for Jamaal Bowman in the Bronx. Bowman had referred to the military campaign in Gaza as a “genocide,” and AIPAC had funnelled millions of dollars to his opponent. Still, leftist protesters heckled all three, holding a sign that read “AOC, Bowman, Sanders: Shills for ‘Genocide Joe.’ ” Bowman went on to lose the race by seventeen points.
At the White House, Andy Levin and a group of antiwar Israelis had a meeting with members of the National Security Council and a Harris aide. Although the Administration didn’t commit to any policy changes, Levin said, “at least they acknowledged that they have a real problem.” When James Zogby, the founder of the Arab American Institute and an informal adviser to the “uncommitted” campaign, spoke with a top Biden Administration official, he had the opposite experience. “I said, ‘There have been all these civilian deaths,’ and the response was ‘We find that intolerable,’ ” Zogby told me. “I said, ‘So we need a ceasefire.’ ‘No, that’s also intolerable.’ I said, ‘So you’re between two intolerables, and you’re choosing the one that continues the civilian casualties.’ I left feeling like nothing would change.” In March, at a speech in Selma, Alabama, Harris called for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza; a few weeks later, Biden paused a shipment of two-thousand-pound bombs to Israel while continuing to authorize other aid. The “uncommitted” activists tried to claim credit for these developments while criticizing them as inadequate.
Then, in June, Biden faltered in his debate against Trump, and dropped out of the Presidential race three weeks later. Many pro-Palestine organizers told me that, compared with Biden, Harris and her team seemed more amenable to hearing them out. It remains to be seen whether this is simply an affordance of the Vice-Presidency, where Harris has little direct control over U.S. policy. I called Zackariah Farah, the recent graduate I’d met at the “uncommitted” rally in Ann Arbor, to ask how he felt now that Harris was the nominee. “I had a brief glimmer of hope when she first came in, but she’s repeatedly said she would do nothing to change the policy in the Middle East. Now I and most people I know are voting Green.” Osama Siblani, of the Arab American News, said, “Abandon Biden, Abandon Harris—nothing has changed. It’s the same rhetoric, same bullshit.” I spoke to many supporters of the “uncommitted” campaign who told me that they planned to vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, or for Cornel West or Trump, before I could find anyone who was voting for Harris. This is anecdotal, of course, but there is some evidence to corroborate it: one poll of Muslim voters, conducted in late August, found that Harris and Stein were tied.
Waleed Shahid told me that his parents, Pakistani immigrants who live in Virginia, have voted Democrat in every election since 2008. Now, he says, his father is threatening to vote for Trump, and his mother plans to vote for Stein. “I can tell them, ‘Trump would be worse, we have a long-term strategy to push the Democrats on this issue,’ but normal voters don’t always care about long-term strategy,” Shahid told me. “Sometimes they vote based on ‘I just saw a video of a baby getting blown up—who’s gonna do something about it?’ ”
As a matter of raw electoral math, it’s possible that, for every Dearborn voter who wants the Biden Administration to stop sending bombs to Israel, there is another Democratic voter in Michigan who wants to send more bombs—a Christian Zionist in Grand Rapids, say, or a Jewish moderate in Oakland County. (And then there’s Pennsylvania, where the polls tend to be even tighter than in Michigan; the state also has more Jewish voters than Michigan has Muslim voters.) One Friday night, I went with Andy Levin to the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism in Farmington Hills, where the rabbi, Jeffrey Falick, had invited him to give a talk during Shabbat services. Afterward, there was the post-service noshing and bickering, and Levin stayed for more than an hour. Rabbi Falick, who calls himself “a proud gay liberal and a proud Zionist,” told me that he saw the “uncommitted” movement as deeply misguided. The allegation that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, he said, is “as offensive as it is inaccurate. Humanistic Jews rely on reason, and my reasoned opinion is that Hamas is the problem, and Israel is trying to root it out.” Later, I spoke to Adam Jentleson, a former staffer for Senators Harry Reid and John Fetterman, who told me, “I understand the Rube Goldberg move the ‘uncommitted’ organizers were trying to pull off, using the vehicle of a primary to extract a change in policy. But it’s high risk at best, and at worst it’s a pure gift to Trump.”
In early August, Harris flew to the Detroit airport on Air Force Two for a campaign rally. The crowd was so big that Donald Trump asserted, falsely, that a photograph of it must have been faked. Before the event, in a photo line backstage, Alawieh and Elabed asked Harris to meet with them and others to discuss the prospect of an arms embargo against Israel. Alawieh told me that Harris was noncommittal, but seemed receptive: “She looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’d very much like that.’ ” (The campaign later denied this account to reporters.) During the rally, though, two unrelated protesters heckled Harris, shouting, “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide.” As the moment dragged on, she gave them a stern glare and said, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” The following day, her national-security adviser put out a statement saying that Harris “does not support an arms embargo on Israel,” and it became clear to Alawieh that the proposed meeting with Harris might not happen after all.
A lot of Michigan voters, probably a majority, will base their votes on something other than foreign policy, if they decide to vote at all. Yet when I talked to these people, including several who had been reliable Democrats in the past, many did not sound fired up about the Party. In another year, a pocket of voter discontent in one part of a swing state might be offset by base turnout elsewhere; in 2024, though, the Harris campaign can take little for granted. At a United Auto Workers union hall in an industrial part of Dearborn, I mostly heard about the untenable cost of living. A few weeks later, I met a half-dozen locals at a Starbucks in Pontiac—all African American men, all self-described “leaders in the community.” Sean Preston, who owns a small clothing company, told me that he was considering voting for a third-party candidate: “A lot of us have become independent thinkers.”
“The Democrats just don’t have a great elevator pitch,” Bryan Killian-Bey said. “Hard to hear anyone’s elevator pitch, anyway, over the echoes of your empty pockets.”
Kermit Williams called Trump a “bravado artist with no substance,” and Killian-Bey didn’t disagree. “Trump doesn’t give a fuck about us,” he said. “But he is a marketing genius, you’ve got to admit that.” Williams was excited to vote Democrat in November, especially after Harris became the nominee—“This just makes motivating friends and family that much easier.” Killian-Bey, for the first time in his life, was toying with the idea of not voting. Money from the Biden Administration had recently paid for a fleet of electric school buses in Pontiac, and for highway repairs and training for new construction jobs across the state. The men at the Starbucks hadn’t heard about any of that, and learning about it didn’t seem to change anyone’s mind.
In 1960, four political scientists at the University of Michigan published a landmark study called “The American Voter.” They found that a tiny minority of the electorate, about three per cent, were true “ideologues” who based their voting decisions on policy preferences. The rest voted based on group affiliation (“The Democrats are the party of farmers”), or because they associated certain candidates with broad societal states of “war or peace, recession or prosperity,” or because they liked a candidate’s personality. Some of the non-ideologues were called “nature of the times” voters. (Had the study been published in the twenty-twenties, they surely would have been dubbed “vibes voters.”) This framework became known as the Michigan model. It has since been widely critiqued, in part because it sounds so condescending. (“Voters are not fools,” the political scientist V. O. Key retorted.) But it remains true that, no matter how much attention we lavish on swing voters, we still don’t really understand them. Some are moderates, but many have an unpredictable hodgepodge of views. Some are single-issue voters, or no-issue voters. Some are mostly in it for the vibes.
A good test of the Michigan model, this time around, was the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an inveterate weirdo (bearish on antidepressants; bullish on Bitcoin; into falconry and meditating with ravens) who drew support from both parties. He promised to put “peace and diplomacy first,” but at other times he sounded downright bellicose, saying that any other nation in Israel’s position would “level” Gaza with “aerial bombardment.” This is the sort of incongruity that might be expected to kill the mood, but, for many of Kennedy’s supporters, it didn’t. “I do still think of him as the peace candidate,” a woman named Maddie Garvia told me in February.
We were at a café in Northville, an affluent suburb between Detroit and Ann Arbor, at a weekly meetup of Kennedy supporters. For some, predictably, the top issue was “vaccine safety”; for others it was “holistic health,” or the “deep state.” Many of them did little to dispel the caricature of the Kennedy voter as someone who fixes you with a fervent stare, corners you at less than socially distanced range, and launches into an uninterruptible diatribe about the difference between ethylmercury and methylmercury. “None of my kids are vaccinated,” one attendee said. Another countered, “None of my cats are vaccinated.”
The most pleasant conversation I had was with Patricia Van Bonn, who was eighty-six, with half-rimmed spectacles and white hair pulled back in a bun. She was a Navy nurse just after the Korean War, then a labor-and-delivery nurse at a hospital in Ann Arbor. “The obstetricians—all men, of course—would tie women down with leather cuffs, and knock them out with sedatives, and that’s how they’d give birth,” she said. “That just seemed so outrageous to me.” She grew skeptical about the medical system, and then about other institutions: if that sort of cruelty was routine in hospitals, then what else was going unquestioned? She raised her children “half wild,” mostly without vaccines, on a rural plot of land with horses and chickens. “I kept telling the school, ‘Oh, silly me, I forgot to hand in those forms again,’ and they let it slide,” she told me.
She got the local newspaper delivered to her house for decades, until it went out of business. “Now I’m dependent on the computer,” she said. “One day it popped up on there—Yahoo News, or whatever it was—‘There’s a Kennedy running for President.’ So I followed the links.” She’s since listened to dozens of hours of Kennedy’s podcast interviews with Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, and the like. “He always sounds so well informed, so confident,” she said. “I’ve become convinced he’s a man of integrity.” When the meetup was over, she took my arm and said, “You can’t go without meeting Flat Bobby.” I followed her to her car, where there was a life-size cardboard cutout of Kennedy, with his retro skinny tie and rolled-up sleeves. If Kennedy weren’t running, Van Bonn told me, she might vote Democrat. The only person she wouldn’t consider voting for was Donald Trump, whom she considered “dishonorable and dangerous.”
In April, at an Art Deco theatre in Royal Oak, Michigan, the Kennedy campaign put on a fund-raiser in the form of a comedy show. Van Bonn went, clutching Flat Bobby under her arm. Inside were about seventeen hundred kindred spirits—a diverse and energetic community relishing its right to live free. The comic Rob Schneider did a few Henny Youngman-style jokes (wives: so annoying, right?), followed by a bit of observational humor about straining on the toilet, followed immediately, with no segue, by a heartfelt written speech about “why I love Bobby Kennedy.” Then came R.F.K., who gave a plodding campaign speech, although he did have one funny line: “I have something in common with these comedians. We all come from families that wish we had a different job.” At the after-party, in a bar down the street, Van Bonn was waved to the front of a photo line, where she posed for a picture: Flat Bobby and Real Bobby, with Van Bonn beaming in between them. On her way out, she made ecstatic small talk with everyone, including a heavyset bouncer who jutted a chin toward Flat Bobby and said, “I hope you and your boyfriend have a lovely evening, Ma’am.”
In August, after Kennedy dropped out and threw his support behind Trump, I talked to Van Bonn again. “I can hardly say it out loud,” she told me, “but if I trust Bobby enough to be President, and if his judgment now is that Trump is the best choice, then . . .” She trailed off. I reminded her of her earlier assessment of Trump, and she didn’t take it back. “As a human being, I like Harris, and I’d love to see a woman in that role,” she said. “But I’ve become quite disillusioned with the Democratic Party. I don’t know who’s really pulling the strings.” She had until November to continue doing her own research. “I do worry that Trump might try to become a dictator on Day One, trying to jail people who’ve spoken out against him—I don’t like that part,” she said. “But politics is all about trade-offs.”
The day before the Democratic Convention, Alawieh was in Chicago, in a rented meeting room a mile from the United Center, wearing a kaffiyeh bearing the words “Democrats for Palestinian Rights.” He was now a delegate, and he was leading an orientation, telling the other “uncommitted” delegates—thirty in all, from eight states—the plan for the coming week. “The Party wants to brush this issue under the rug,” he said. “But we represent the majority.” They had nowhere near the numbers to challenge Harris’s nomination, and it wasn’t clear that they would have tried if they did. Their more immediate goal was to circulate through the hallways, recruiting Party insiders to their cause. On my way out, I spotted a list of “best practices,” including “Find common ground” and “Use calm and respectful language.”
Already, a separate coalition called March on the D.N.C. was massing in a nearby park. “Our strategy has been to build power from within,” an “uncommitted” organizer who lives in New York told me. “Demonstrating in the streets—it’s all good, as long as it stays chill, but it’s not our strategy.” If the demonstrations were less than chill—if, for example, they included property damage or violence—then the “uncommitted” activists might be conflated with the less disciplined ones. “I can’t control what anyone else does—I can only keep my people on message,” she went on. “Our motto all along has been: Let’s make this 1964, not 1968.”
In 1964, the Democratic Party held its Convention in Atlantic City, to nominate Lyndon Johnson for his first full term. This was, of course, the pre-Voting Rights Act Democratic Party, and the delegation from Mississippi comprised sixty-eight white men, all outspoken segregationists. In response, Fannie Lou Hamer, Robert Moses, and other civil-rights activists formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, selecting their own unofficial delegation. They took buses to Atlantic City, subsisting on “cheese and crackers and baloney” and sleeping several to a hotel room. Johnson offered the activists a symbolic “compromise”: two of them could be seated alongside the segregationists. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” Hamer said. Instead, they stood on the Atlantic City boardwalk, holding up protest signs about the Party’s hypocrisy. In the short term, such demonstrations were a blow to Party unity, forcing Johnson to choose between keeping his promises and “losing the South.” In the long run, it’s hard to imagine how the Democratic Party could have survived without such agitations.
Ahead of this year’s Convention, the activists asked Party leaders to allow a Palestinian American to speak from the main stage. At first, they were given only an untelevised daytime panel, held in a separate building. Hala Hijazi, a San Francisco city commissioner and a longtime Kamala Harris ally, identified herself as a “proud moderate” during the panel and said, “I’m really here because my family’s dead.” The following night, while walking out of the stadium after Barack Obama finished his address, I ran into Alawieh in the lobby. Everyone around us was buzzing—twenty thousand Beatlemaniacs who had just seen their favorite band come out of retirement—but Alawieh looked wrung out. “I appreciate a well-written, well-delivered speech, but I just can’t bring myself to be in that headspace right now,” he said. That night, outside Chicago’s Israeli consulate, protesters passed out flyers reading “Make it great like ’68!,” and fifty-six people were arrested. But none of the protests came close to the mayhem of the Battle of Michigan Avenue.
On the penultimate night of the D.N.C., the activists got the final word that, although the parents of an Israeli American hostage would appear on the main stage, no Palestinian would speak. Alawieh called an impromptu press conference outside the United Center. About fifty feet in front of him, V.I.P.s lined up to enter the CNN-Politico Grill, an invitation-only pop-up. Alawieh sat cross-legged on the ground and said, of the D.N.C., “I’m staying here until they change their minds.” About a dozen “uncommitted” delegates sat down next to him. Organizers linked arms and sang in Arabic, Hebrew, and English; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined via FaceTime. Around 1 A.M., when the Chicago police were shutting down the area, they asked the Secret Service what to do; the Secret Service asked the D.N.C. what to do; the D.N.C. said to leave the protesters alone, so the police left them alone. The whole time, a D.N.C. official was hanging around quietly in the background, sitting on a nearby bench and vaping, negotiating with the protesters off camera and ordering pizza for them when they got hungry. Someone went to an Airbnb and came back with a few bedsheets, and the protesters did their best to sleep on the ground.
I visited them again early the next morning. “If I’d known we were gonna do this, I would have at least brought my makeup with me,” Asma Mohammed, an “uncommitted” delegate from Minnesota, said. Ruwa Romman, a Democratic state representative from Georgia whose parents are Palestinian, delivered a version of the speech that she’d wanted to give onstage. “Our party’s greatest strength has always been our ability to unite,” she said.
“They could have let her do this speech Monday night at five-thirty,” a British American journalist behind me said—in fact, it might have received less press coverage. He repurposed a mordant Israeli aphorism, applying it to the Democrats: “They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
“Dad and I have always been super close,” Andy Levin told me. “But my whole life we’ve had this back-and-forth where I try to move him to the left and he explains, very calmly, why what I’m asking for is not realistic.” Alawieh told me that he’d attended an “epic Shabbat dinner at Andy’s house, where it was Sandy making some mild critiques of Israeli policy, Andy’s kids making way more radical critiques, and Andy trying to keep the peace.” Over the years, Andy had urged his father to be more boldly progressive on trade policy, military actions in Central America, and the Middle East. “Then I got to Congress,” Andy said, chuckling, “and my kids started telling me I wasn’t going far enough.”
Many political strategists see it as their job to assess the prevailing electoral climate and then adapt their message (and perhaps their underlying ideology, if they have one) to fit it. The “uncommitted” organizers took the opposite approach, starting from a set of stubborn moral beliefs and then trying to change the political weather accordingly. Several times, I pressed them on the dangers of their strategy. If Harris acceded to all of the movement’s demands, wouldn’t she risk alienating centrist voters? Given the vertiginous stakes—the threat Trump poses to American democracy, not to mention to the people of Gaza—how could they take a chance on a tactic that might, even indirectly, help him win? For the most part, the activists stayed on message. They quoted Martin Luther King: “The time is always right to do what is right.” They paraphrased the Talmud, and the Quran: Whoever saves one life saves the whole world. At times, though, they fell back on a version of a rhetorical shortcut that they derided when their opponents tried it: My constituency’s votes need to be earned, but other constituencies will eventually fall in line.
In “What It Took to Win,” a history of the Democratic Party with occasional glints of memoir, the historian Michael Kazin writes, “By 1968, like most New Leftists, I was ready, even eager, to see the Democrats lose power as a fitting punishment for their sins.” He now regrets that stance. He told me, “When my students say they can’t bear to vote for a government that is doing these intolerable things, I say to them, ‘You can vote morally. When I was twenty, I voted morally. Now I vote strategically.’ ” Mark Rudd, a former leader of the Weathermen, also told me that he now thinks of his late-sixties activism as counterproductive. “Some of us thought there was no difference between Humphrey and Nixon, and some of us knew Nixon was worse but didn’t give a shit,” he said. “We were utopians, and as such we were essentially apolitical.” Still, as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party realized, there are political horizons beyond winning the next election. “With Dixiecrats out of the coalition, it got much harder for Democrats to win, for decades, but it was worth it,” an “uncommitted” activist told me. “If we’re now reaching a point where donors who support Israel above all else don’t feel comfortable in the Democratic Party—well, that may be painful in the short term, but it would still be worth it.” Even if the antiwar movement did contribute to Nixon’s victory, it may have hastened other developments in American life, such as ending the draft, that were arguably as important.
Earlier this month, YouTube ads, apparently sponsored by a PAC with Republican ties and targeted to viewers in the Detroit area, highlighted Harris’s support of Israel and her Jewish husband. In the recent debate between Trump and Harris, only Trump made a direct appeal to “the Arab population.” Alawieh said, “I see him preying on my community’s pain, and I fear, for some people, it might actually work.” He told me that he has implored the Harris campaign to “give us something so that we can go mobilize voters on your behalf,” but that he and other local leaders had heard “very little” in response. “If they’ve decided they can win without us, maybe by reaching rightward, then I hope to God their calculation is the correct one,” he said. “But they can’t ignore this issue long term.” Last week, the “uncommitted” movement announced that, given “Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy,” they would not be endorsing her; yet they also discouraged their followers from voting for Trump, or for any third-party candidate. Alawieh, as an individual, will vote for Harris; other “uncommitted” organizers will not. “Movements have long worked to rid the Democratic Party of hateful forces,” the announcement read, “and we will work in that legacy to rid our party of AIPAC’s pro-war extremism.” (The Harris campaign sent me a statement that read, in part, “The Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans.”)
One afternoon, between a lunch meeting and a dinner meeting, Andy Levin stopped in Royal Oak to visit his father. “I’ve been fighting radicalism my whole career, on the right and the left,” Sandy Levin said, sitting in his living room. “Whenever I hear ‘My way or the highway’ or ‘Now or never,’ my instinct is to step back and say, ‘Well, I’m sure there’s a way to find some consensus position.’ ” He reflected on 1968, when he was the chair of the Michigan delegation at the Democratic National Convention: “My job was to keep the delegation together, and I almost wasn’t able to do it.”
“You were not a Humphrey guy, right, Dad?” Andy asked.
“I was supposed to be neutral, but everyone who knew me knew I was for this guy,” Sandy said, picking up a photo on the mantel: himself as a young man standing next to Bobby Kennedy, Sr. “We kept begging Humphrey to distance himself from the war, and it took him far too long.”
Andy drew the obvious parallel: “Humphrey should have had his break much earlier—so doesn’t that mean that the Administration should be making a big break with Netanyahu, like, yesterday?”
Sandy gave his son a patient smile. Then he turned to me and said, “I’m proud of what Andy’s doing, because he’s not part of some radical, ‘It’s got to be now or never’ sort of group.”
“I kinda do think it has to be now or never,” Andy said.
He hugged his father, said, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” and walked out to the driveway. “Dad was shaped by the pre-sixties left, where everything is about going through the proper channels,” he said. “I accuse him of being too cautious, and he says I’m too impetuous. And maybe he’s right. He spent thirty-six years in Congress, and I only lasted four.” ♦
