The Uncommitted Movement failed because it refused to punish Democrats

On February 27, 2024, anti-war activists across the country watched in shock as over 100,000 Democratic voters cast Uncommitted ballots in the Michigan presidential primary. The ‘Listen to Michigan’ campaign, built out by a small team of political organizers from Southeast Michigan’s Arab-American community and supported by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), declared victory, telling the nation that two pro-peace delegates would be at the Democratic National Convention to protest the Biden Administration’s aiding and abetting of over 40,000 murdered Palestinians in the Gaza genocide. The message was clear: untold masses of Democratic voters found the slaughter unconscionable, and unless the President shifted course, he risked losing the immigrant and progressive coalition that had swept him into the White House four years prior. Former Congress member Andy Levin said “I don’t see how he wins reelection without winning Michigan, and I don’t see how he wins Michigan without changing course.”

In the prevailing weeks, a number of other states – Minnesota, Wisconsin, Colorado, Washington, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawai’i, and more – launched and ran Uncommitted campaigns. By the end of the primary calendar, over 740,000 Democrats nationwide had voted Uncommitted, with 30 Uncommitted delegates, unpledged to Vice President Kamala Harris, and over 300 pledged Harris delegates united behind the demands of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel. In Maryland, whose Uncommitted campaign I served on the Coordination Committee of, we won over 66,000 Uncommitted votes.

Going into the Democratic National Convention in August, the Uncommitted movement formed the Not Another Bomb coalition, endorsing rallies to demand an arms embargo across the country. Uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in outside of the convention, demanding the DNC allow a Palestinian-American speaker to address the party. Despite allowing an Israeli-American to speak, the DNC refused to provide even Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman, who had already endorsed the Harris campaign, with a speaking slot. Ultimately, the Uncommitted delegation told the Vice President that they would open a forum for her to meet with Palestinian-American families and discuss the arms embargo demand prior to September 15. Harris allowed the deadline to expire, and prominent Uncommitted organizers Abbas Alawieh and Layla Elabed issued a statement urging Uncommitted voters to cast tactical, anti-Trump ballots in the election.

Uncommitted was based on a premise: that by proving that supporting a genocide in Palestine could cost the Democrats the general election, cooler heads would prevail, and Administration officials would press to finalize a ceasefire deal in Gaza and reconsider our military aid to Israel. Despite pursuing an extensive inside-outside strategy that has won over hundreds of thousands of Americans to our movement, over seven months, we have failed at all our strategic goals. President Biden’s center-left peers in allied nations, like Britain and Canada, have issued partial embargos of Israeli arms shipments. As of now, Vice President Harris has wholesale rejected any notion of an embargo or of conditioning aid.

Lack of democracy

Over the course of the state-level march that followed Listen to Michigan, many of the activists behind that campaign formed the Uncommitted National Movement, which coordinated the coalition’s strategy for the DNC. Notably, the national team’s internal structure remained opaque to Uncommitted state leaders across the country, particularly states that did not win delegates to the convention. To my knowledge, state representatives were never invited to help formulate coalition strategy or decide the coalition’s ultimate statement urging votes against Trump in the election.

Lacking any internal mechanisms for decision-making, the Uncommitted National Movement defaulted to an unacknowledged cadre of spokespeople, such as Waleed Shahid, Lexis Dena Zeidan, and Asma Mohammed, among others, like Layla and Abbas. These individuals were not subject to democratic control, setting the political lines of a movement over 740,000 people strong entirely unchecked by the many grassroots organizers that supported the campaign. 

While uncommitted leaders in many states, like Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Rhode Island have raised calls for voters to reject Harris entirely in the general election, the Uncommitted National Movement took a conciliatory approach, giving Harris ample time to engage with our demands after the convention and failing to commit to withholding their support for her even in the absence of her compliance.

Sharpening contradictions

A central goal of the Uncommitted movement was exploiting the extreme dissonance of the Democratic Party supporting the genocide while the majority of its voters, particularly immigrant and young voters, opposed it. Exposing these contradictions and highlighting the need for a political system with real options for working class people was important.

The Palestinian Youth Movement argues “in moments of heightened conflict or war, contradictions are sharpened and people’s political consciousness shifts – their demands become more radical, they recognize the futility of traditional vehicles for alleged change, and they start to feel empowered through direct action and movement building.” 

The DNC’s refusal to grant the Uncommitted delegation a convention speaker, even a speaker supportive of Harris, sharpened these contradictions in the public consciousness, demonstrating the sheer depravity of party leaders, who allowed an Israeli to speak, but could allow no mention of Palestinian humanity. The evocative, disquieting optics of the delegate sit-in – hundreds of supporters kneeling to candlelight outside the convention hall begging the Vice President for an audience – further sharpened these contradictions, highlighting how little we were asking for.

However, in its post-convention statement, the Uncommitted National Movement stopped short of a further sharpening of these contradictions: a public break with her campaign entirely. Despite the groundswell of support for calls to withhold our votes from Harris to leverage an arms embargo, Abbas Alawieh has said that he will vote for Harris in November. Many voters who supported the uncommitted campaign will now return to voting for the Democrats, and our opportunity to absorb them into the anti-war movement has been lost.

Leveraging our power

The power held by the uncommitted campaign rested in the over 740,000 voters under its banner: registered Democrats, many of whom in key swing states won narrowly by Biden in 2020, that singled an openness to defecting from the Democratic ticket in 2024 without the party acquiescing to the demands of a ceasefire and an arms embargo. 

Our theory of change was that this implicit threat would supply enough pressure for Harris to be compelled into embracing the movement’s demands. Materialized through our delegation and the Harris delegates behind it, we went into the DNC with some leverage. As she did not comply, we can conclude either that our threat was insufficiently large, or that Harris did not feel sufficiently intimidated by our willingness to make good on the threat. 

In continuing to attempt to move Harris, we must reconcile the Uncommitted National Movement’s refusal to make good on the threat with the size of the voting base behind us, and determine how to make Harris feel more threatened by the anti-war movement against her. Abdicating the best card in our hand – our collective tactical vote – means we no longer have any leverage. 

Urging voters to oppose Trump, putting the cart before the horse, means that, on a fundamental level, we accept that the horrific genocide in Gaza and the US-funded murder of over 40,000 Palestinians, is not a red line in this election. On a political level, it means that a small cadre of unelected and unaccountable spokespeople have bartered away what remains of our hand without the input of our state leaders and a thorough, winning analysis of what comes next for the robust movement for an arms embargo on Israel in the United States. 

In an array of states, state leaders of the Uncommitted movement have charted a path forward – calling for everyone disgusted by the genocide in Gaza to withhold their votes from Kamala Harris in November until she commits to an arms embargo. Their position, and will to leverage our power for Palestinian liberation, is clear: no votes for genocide.

Frederick Douglass said “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.” If Harris holds all the cards, the movement for Palestinian liberation must be willing to impose our demand, and exact the cost of any politician’s non-compliance.