This story was written by Teen Vogue's 2024 Student Correspondents, a team of college students and recent graduates covering the election cycle from key battleground states.
The 107-day Harris-Walz presidential campaign — the shortest in modern American history — came to an abrupt end with the reelection of Donald Trump. Trump won every swing state, while Harris performed significantly below average in key blue strongholds that her predecessor, President Joe Biden, had clinched with wide margins. It was a swift demise for a campaign that was defined by a Gen Z-focused internet presence and a bold prioritization of abortion access. Despite intensive outreach on college campuses and a popular TikTok following, the concerns young people had about Harris’s planned policy on the war in Gaza and centrist positions on immigration and climate change cast a shadow over the course of her campaign.
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Now, as a second Trump presidency looms and Harris voters and the Democratic Party grapple for answers, third-party and nonvoters have been targeted with no shortage of blame.
The Uncommitted movement, a protest campaign that emerged during the Democratic primaries to pressure the Biden administration to secure a ceasefire in Gaza, and grassroots efforts for third-party candidates in majority-Arab and Muslim American communities like Dearborn, Michigan (a city whose mayor refused to endorse Harris due to her positions on Gaza), gained traction as the war in Gaza continued to rage.
Campaigns in other states, such as Listen to Wisconsin (called Ceasefire First, Votes Next after the primary election), gained traction among young people who wanted to leverage their vote to urge Harris to call for a permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo, demands organizers say were clearly outlined and attainable for a sitting vice president.
In the months leading up to the presidential election, a multitude of organizing efforts and initiatives akin to Listen to Wisconsin and Uncommitted were, many felt, largely not sufficiently acknowledged by the Democratic Party and the Harris campaign. Some in the Uncommitted movement ultimately cast a ballot for Harris, but others were steadfast in their refusal to do so.
In Dearborn, deemed the heart of Arab America and a historically blue stronghold, Trump claimed 42% of the vote, compared with Harris’s 36% and Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s 18%, according to unofficial results. Trump’s margin this year is a massive change compared with Biden’s in 2020. This radical shift is reflective of the community's disappointment in Harris’s hard-line stances on the war in Gaza.
During Harris’s first campaign stop in Michigan, in what became a viral moment, she sternly responded to pro-Palestine protesters by saying, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Later that summer, at the Democratic National Convention in August, the DNC denied a Palestinian a speaking slot despite significant lobbying and protests.
Dearborn voters, located in Wayne County, one of the most influential in maintaining the “Blue Wall,” likely denied Harris the entire state.
Dane County, Wisconsin, another critical area and home to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had a lower voter-turnout percentage than in 2020, by nearly 3%. Harris significantly underperformed in UW-Madison wards by 7.2% points, compared with Biden in 2020.
During the presidential primary, more than half a million voters cast “uninstructed” ballots; in Wisconsin, more than 48,000 opted to vote uninstructed. The turnout of disillusioned voters in the primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin showed these states alone had the potential to swing the election.
Over the past year, Arab and Muslim American community leaders and voters, as well as students and other community members, urged the Biden administration and, later, the Harris campaign to hear their concerns. They urged them to empathize with the mass loss of civilian life in Gaza, to understand the blanket of grief and pain that has fractured their communities. Ultimately, for some Arab and Muslim American voters, Gaza became the force that determined how they cast their ballot.
Ameen Atta, a Palestinian-American registered voter in Wisconsin, tells Teen Vogue he could not vote for Harris or Trump and was deeply committed to the uninstructed movement. “They need[ed] to earn our votes, not the other way around,” Atta says. “They’re not entitled to my vote; they need to earn my vote.”
Atta cast his vote for Jill Stein. “We need[ed] a box for people to dump their votes in, to show an area that these votes are because of Gaza,” he explains. “It has less to do with Jill Stein than showing people the pool of voters who care about this issue.” Atta, like many Arab American third-party voters this election cycle, has a deep, innately personal tie to civilians in Gaza. His grandparents survived the 1948 Nakba, and he grew up fighting for Palestinian liberation.
“My upbringing in America has largely reflected what I witnessed in Palestine and what I’ve learned from my family,” Atta says. “It’s one of the most important causes to me.”
Atta, now a board member of the Muslim Student Association at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is involved with the UW-M Popular University for Palestine Coalition, a group of student organizations that established a student encampment protest last spring. As the war in Gaza drags on, Atta mourns alongside his peers who have lost family members to airstrikes.
Atta’s choice to vote third-party, while influenced by his connection to Gaza, was also about driving forward a political message: “This will set a precedent in this country that, from now on, if you have bad policy on issues that the majority of American people care about — if you have bad policy, you will be punished on a political level.”
Other voters such as Dahlia Saba, a Palestinian American graduate student in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, chose to abstain from voting. Prior to the election, Saba told Teen Vogue that the Democrats’ “refusal to stop funding genocide” would lose them votes, hers included.
“This is the reason that tipped me from not liking them but still voting for them anyway to not voting for them,” Saba explains, adding that she knows many people who feel similarly. “You can’t expect that people will vote for you no matter what you do, just because Donald Trump is worse. I don’t want Donald Trump to set the terms of what is morally acceptable.”
Following the election, Saba tells Teen Vogue, she was not surprised by the results: “I think the results emphasize the fact that the Democratic Party has been out of touch with its voters. The Democratic Party relied on earning votes regardless of policy, just because the opponent was so bad.” The 2024 election and, specifically, the issue of Palestine, make clear that policy reflecting the demands of constituents is crucial. For the Democrats not only were the election results impacted, but the Democratic Party lost trust with its base.
“We see younger voters being turned off by the Democratic Party,” Saba says. “We see voters of color being turned off by them, especially when you look at Arab voters, Muslim voters, and Palestinian voters specifically…. I think that can't be dismissed.”
As the nation attempts to make sense of Harris’s stunning loss, many have placed blame on third-party and non-voters. This rhetoric, which says it is the “voters’ fault for not wanting to vote for a candidate rather than the candidates’ fault for not making a case [for] why they should be president,” is, as Saba calls it, “alienating.”
Many Arab and Muslim American voters feel that Harris failed to fully recognize their humanity and to do more than verbally acknowledge over a year's worth of collective grief. The frontiers of a deeply divided country as it enters a second Trump presidency are still in flux. For many Arab and Muslim American voters, questions remain.
“There is a lot of uncertainty about what the second Trump term will bring,” Saba tells Teen Vogue. “Regardless, the same fight continues, because the [war] in Palestine has only escalated…. The struggle for justice in Palestine is all the more urgent…. That does not stop based on who our president is, because, as we've seen, neither party currently is able or willing or even wants to stop this violence.”
Other young voters echo Saba’s call to continue to organize. For Eman, 24, a registered Michigan voter who did not vote for Harris (and requested only first name use for privacy), the dawn of another Trump era is an “awful situation,” but may mean a new forefront in community organizing. “The weaponization of national security to quash civil liberties — including the right to protest, donate, meet, in essence, organize — will only be exacerbated under a red political system that has every donor incentive to deem all organizers as terrorists. It’s horrifying, but at the same time, organizing was never easy. We just have to take the blows as they come,” Eman tells Teen Vogue.
“I hope more people are interested in organizing for civil liberties like we saw under Trump’s 2016 run," Eman continues. "People tend to unwind when Democrats are in office in a way that facilitates our marginalization. I hope his reelection is a wakeup call that we must hit the streets for the change we seek. It’s clear it’s never coming freely from those in power.”
