Hours before the results started coming in on November 5, when Democrats were still full of hope, the exit polls released by the major news networks contained a striking piece of data that gave supporters of Kamala Harris reason for optimism. 

Voters chose the “the state of democracy” as their top priority over any other issue. Harris, taking notes from President Joe Biden, had spent much of the campaign portraying former President Trump as an existential threat to American norms, echoing the dominant message of her party for the past eight years. 

In some ways, this worked. The 34 percent of voters who chose democracy as their deciding issue favored Harris by 62 points. But the problem for her campaign was that, with the exception of abortion, voters who cited other issues as their top priority, such as the economy, immigration, and foreign policy, broke heavily for Trump. 

This failure of the Democrats’ focus on democracy points to a bigger problem: many voters do not believe that democracy is benefitting them or that the American political system is worth preserving. (Republicans also care about democracy for different reasons, believing that the 2020 election was stolen and Trump was prosecuted by “the deep state.”)

The warning signs were flashing—and top Democrats ignored them. 

A Pew Research poll from September 2023 found that only 4 percent of US adults believed that the political system was working extremely or very well. More than six in 10 expressed little to no confidence in its future. At the same time, only 16 percent of the public said they trusted the federal government always or most of the time, the lowest level of faith in Washington in nearly seven decades. A poll by the New York Times days before the election found that 45 percent of the public did not believe American democracy did a good job of representing ordinary people. 

“People care about democracy but it needs to be more than just ‘elect me and not the other person.’ That’s not democracy, that’s just a campaign.”

By talking so much about preserving democracy without outlining an alternative vision for improving it, or showing how democracy can tangibly improve people’s lives, Harris and other Democratic leaders were perceived as defending a status quo that many Americans revile. “Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions—the ‘establishment’—that most Americans distrust,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former national security adviser, wrote after the election. 

The pre-election New York Times poll found that 58 percent of voters thought that the country’s political and economic system needed major changes or a complete overhaul. By largely defending that system, Democrats allowed Trump to run as the change candidate. As former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer pointed out, “Trump won the voters who said that the ‘ability to bring about change’ was the most important quality in a candidate by 50 points.”

In his first major speech of the 2024 campaign, which coincided with the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, President Biden described democracy as “America’s sacred cause.” At the outset of his presidency, Biden said that the nation, and indeed the world, was facing a battle between democracy and autocracy. His goal was to “prove democracy still works.”

But many voters don’t view American democracy that way. They see a system that is plagued by money and corruption, one dominated by elites and self-interested politicians who skew the rules to benefit themselves.

The policies Biden thought would restore public faith in democracy—like the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill—proved unpopular or were ignored by a skeptical public. The administration also did a terrible job of selling and explaining these policies—nearly a year after the IRA’s passage, 7 in 10 voters said they had heard little or nothing about the law’s provisions. Biden even seemed to predict the trouble ahead. He worried that the IRA’s benefits would not come fast enough to convince voters that “Joe did it.”

As we noted in 2022, during the January 6 hearings, the idea of running on democracy “doesn’t work as well if everything, the very system itself, is broken. The material benefits of democracy must flow to people from the institutions to earn all this defense.”

There is an ongoing and worthwhile argument about whether Biden delivered on his economic promises. But, the basic facts remain the same. Biden began a campaign, and Harris followed it through, that was all about defending the basic norms of American democracy. This won in 2020, when voters were eager to regain a sense of normalcy. But, in 2024, it began to feel—fairly or not—like the promises had not materialized. Bidenonomics might pay off someday. It didn’t seem to help enough people right now.

This failure went beyond just economics. When Democrats had control of Washington for the first two years of Biden’s presidency, they failed to pass policies on voting rights, abortion, and gun control that a majority of Americans favored because they could not overcome the structural impediments to majority rule, namely the Senate filibuster, that are deeply embedded in America’s political system. 

Biden stubbornly resisted calling for filibuster reform during the first year of his presidency, failing to use his political capital when it might have mattered. When Harris said, on the campaign trail, that she would sign legislation reinstating Roe v. Wade or restoring the Voting Rights Act, voters were left to wonder why Democrats hadn’t already done that. Harris gave few indications of how she would differ from a Biden presidency on that score.

Too often, the Democrats’ message of saving democracy began and ended with defeating Trump. “The Biden campaign’s defense of democracy was not about a bold agenda of better democracy, it was about electing Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at the New America Foundation. “Harris inherited that and didn’t have time or energy to reframe it, other than some nods in her speeches to the voting rights bills. People care about democracy but it needs to be more than just ‘elect me and not the other person.’ That’s not democracy, that’s just a campaign.”

Democrats also actively shut down any discussion of the structural flaws to American democracy. At a pair of fundraisers in early October, Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz said that “the Electoral College needs to go. We need a national popular vote.” Two-thirds of the public favors that position. But Walz was forced by the Harris campaign to quickly disavow the remark and the comment was portrayed in the press as yet another gaffe by an unscripted and inexperienced candidate. It was immediately deemed off-limits to criticize a system that devalued the votes of 85 percent of Americans, violated basic notions of one person, one vote, and was rooted in slavery and white supremacy. 

Other cracks in the system were dismissed as well. In the 2023 Pew poll, the number one thing that Americans hated about the US political system was the amount of money in politics and the corruption it breeds. Eighty-five percent of Americans believed that “the cost of political campaigns makes it hard for good people to run for office” and 80 percent said big campaign donors have too much influence on decisions made by members of Congress. 

Yet Democrats, instead of running against the unchecked power of the moneyed elite, actively worked to further deregulate campaign-finance laws to compete in the oligarch arms race, petitioning the Federal Elections Commission to allow political action committees to coordinate directly with campaigns. That ended up benefitting Republican billionaires like Elon Musk, who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. When Harris raised $1.5 billion, and her allied Super PAC took in $900 million, it was viewed as a sign of enthusiasm for her candidacy, with little acknowledgment that Democrats might be bragging about the very thing that voters disliked most about the political process.  

The Democrats’ failure to show how they would not only preserve, but ultimately strengthen and reform American democracy, boxed them into the unenviable position of defending the skewed institutions that the public blames for their everyday problems. Because they were presented with no alternative vision for how to improve a broken democratic process, Americans chose the candidate who they believed was more likely to tear that system down. “If the message of democracy is just we’re going to keep this system of democracy that people feel isn’t working, you can see why that doesn’t resonate with a lot of people,” Drutman said.

A majority of voters in 2024 weren’t convinced that voting for Democrats would save democracy or that the real-life consequences of losing democratic rights would be worse than the status quo. Going forward, Democrats have to go back to being the party of political and economic reform that challenges rather than celebrates a political system that is leaving too many people behind.

Trump owns Washington once again and if his early nominations are any indication, he’ll do a disastrous job of running it. But Democrats can’t just be anti-Trump. They can’t just be pro-democracy. They need to convince skeptical voters that democracy is worth saving in the first place and that a better system can ultimately replace the flawed one we’ve got now. 

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.)—the author of the state’s infamous bathroom bill, a fan of calling abortions “infanticide,” and the man who recently said “lawfare” against former President Donald Trump is “as bad as it was [for Black people] in Alabama in 1950”—faces the camera, warning of wokeness. 

“If you don’t feel safe, there’s a reason,” Bishop says. “Violent crime is up. More rapes and murders. Record illegal immigration. The cause? Woke crime policies. Defund the police. Open borders.”

In an ad that reflects the tone of the race in North Carolina, Bishop’s argument is simple: He wants to be the state’s “law and order” attorney general. Such an approach would be a shift. North Carolina has not had a Republican attorney general in modern history. A win for the congressman would have major implications for the state’s politics, not only on criminal justice but also in checking the power of a state legislature that has lurched increasingly to the right over the last decade. 

But his argument that the state is suffering from out-of-control crime has a few flaws.

The North Carolina police have not been defunded; after 2020, many local police budgets increased. While initially immigration surged under President Joe Biden, it has fallen dramatically after a crackdown. And there is no evidence that crime increases are driven by undocumented immigrants.

The claim he makes that is most directly related to the job he hopes to win concerns the overall rate of violent crime. In the ad, behind Bishop, is a simple graph: two arrows point up, showing that rapes increased by 55 percent and murders by 32 percent. Under Democrats, the GOP says, the nation has become a place of violence. You are being attacked, and they don’t care.

The truth is more complicated. A Mother Jones analysis found no configuration of data that matched these numbers. Bishop’s analysis for both rapes and murders appears to use counts, instead of rates, discounting population change, which is not best practice. And, oddly, even if using counts, the math seems to be slightly askew.

North Carolina’s rates for murder and rape match overall trends for the country generally, making the argument that Democrats caused unique challenges in the state iffy. After continual rises from 2017 to 2020, with a major uptick during the pandemic, rape and murder rates have fallen in North Carolina—and across the country. Violent crime did rise over the past 10 years, notably, but Bishop’s statistics don’t represent the trend in context and seem to involve errors. (Bishop’s campaign did not respond to multiple calls requesting comment.)

In a normal election year in North Carolina, stretching of the truth, inaccurate data on a central campaign issue, and Bishop's pugnacious style would command some attention. But during this campaign season, voters and the media seem to find it challenging to have time, despite the importance of the race. The Democratic AG over the past decade has consistently put constraints on the power of the GOP-dominated state legislature's enthusiasm for enacting extremist laws.

“Early on, we expected this to be a really hotly contested, nasty, expensive race,” Christopher Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University and author of Anatomy of a Purple State, told me. “But there's just not been much oxygen left in the room for this incredibly important, incredibly competitive race.”

"There's just not been much oxygen left in the room for this incredibly important, incredibly competitive race.”

One major source of the oxygen drain has been the governor’s contest. In September, CNN revealed GOP gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s provocative postings on the website "Nude Africa," plunging his campaign into a double-digit deficit. The story broke just weeks after Vice President Kamala Harris floated the possibility of Gov. Roy Cooper as a potential vice presidential pick. And, soon after, Hurricane Helene ravaged the western half of the state. (In the wake of the storm, the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court allowing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vanity project of a campaign to mess with ballots became more significant.) Add to this the fact that North Carolina is not just a close swing state but, under certain Electoral College calculations, could decide the presidential election.

The battle to become the state’s next AG pits two sitting congressmen against each other and has become the most expensive race for that office in history. Jackson is a moderate Democrat who has become a TikTok regular, known for explaining his policies in social media monologues to the camera. Gerrymandered out of his current district, he has run on the traditional platform of a centrist: anti-crime, pro-family, many references to his suburban-friendly biography as a veteran and former prosecutor.

With a vocal Freedom Caucus backbencher in Congress against a Democrat who loves to use social media, the hotly contested race was expected to attract attention. Bishop is one of the 20 Republicans who voted against former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and has challenged the results of the 2020 election.

Robinson’s harlequin forum posting also may have prematurely decided the governor’s race, thereby making the AG election a contest that could fundamentally change the state’s political identity. Current Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat who appears to be heading for the governor’s mansion, won the position with 50.1 percent of the vote in 2020. (It was only 3,000 voters away from a potential recount.) Before Stein, Cooper held the AG spot for over a decade. 

Since 2010, Republicans have had near-complete control of the General Assembly—the state’s legislative branch—and have tried to implement myriad right-wing goals. State lawmakers' efforts to achieve key policy objectives—such as voter ID and the infamous anti-trans bathroom bill authored by Bishop—have been slowed by Democratic attorneys general.

“This is a position that matters,” Cooper, the professor, said. “And it particularly matters in an inter-party dynamics.” The AG job “would allow [Bishop] to litigate things like voter ID” and “to defend the Republican General Assembly in court.” 

If Stein wins the governorship, veto power will be in place. But since Gov. Cooper’s first win in 2012, a Democratic governor and attorney general have created an underappreciated dual check on North Carolina’s rightward lurch.

North Carolina is seen as a somewhat gentlemanly Southern state with a progressive bend, as political scientist V.O. Key Jr. famously noted back in 1949. In 2020, former President Donald Trump won North Carolina by his smallest margin of victory in any state. But its current status as “purple,” as Cooper explained, is because “there's about half [of voters] that are pretty bright blue and about half that are pretty bright red.” 

Even though North Carolina has not elected a Republican attorney general since 1896, members of both parties consider it to be the launching pad for the governor’s office. Outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper and likely incoming Gov. Josh Stein—as well as former Gov. Mike Easley—were all attorneys general. “The joke is that the AG stands for aspiring governor,” Cooper, the professor, noted.

Both Bishop and Jackson are ambitious members of Congress hoping for a greater role on the national stage, which they would enjoy as a state AG. Such positions offer a history of headline-making lawsuits on election results, social media, and drugs. One can easily imagine Bishop issuing threats concerning election integrity, following the path forged by other Republican attorneys general across the nation over the past four years challenging the veracity of the 2020 election. 

“The General Assembly has ruled with an iron fist, and has absolutely changed the state in some fundamental ways,” Western Carolina University's Cooper explains. “It's changed the power dynamics of institution versus institution.” In the end, a victory by Bishop could upend North Carolina’s centrist political identity.

Melissa Lewis contributed data analysis and reporting.

With the little free time he has as mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud is often glued to his phone fielding WhatsApp messages from family members with updates from Lebanon. He, like many Lebanese Americans, is trying to get loved ones out of the country after Israel’s recently expanded military offensive. Last week, Israeli airstrikes killed an American citizen in Lebanon who was from Dearborn.

In normal times, Hammoud is no stranger to the national press, often fielding interviews from reporters to speak about how the broader Middle Eastern and North African community in America is feeling. Dearborn is home to the largest Arab American community in the country and the largest Lebanese American one, too. Since the war began in Gaza, political analysts, pollsters, campaign officials, and journalists are keeping close tabs on his city, trying to gauge how voters will show up—or not—this November. 

In 2020, President Biden won the crucial swing state of Michigan by 154,000 votes. With an estimated 220,000 voters who identify as either MENA or Muslim in Michigan, Dearborn serves as a useful proxy for thinking about the anger and frustration many feel about Biden’s policies in the Middle East. The White House becomes much more difficult without the support of Mayor Hammoud’s city.

The Harris campaign has done little to win back the support of Hammoud or his constituents. The initial wave to get Biden off the ticket started in Dearborn in February. Mayor Hammoud penned an op-ed in the New York Times throwing his support behind the Uncommitted campaign over the Biden administration’s unwavering support for Israel.

In that letter, Hammoud said that he and his neighbors felt betrayed. Months have passed, and President Biden is no longer on the ticket. Mayor Hammoud spoke with Mother Jones about whether that feeling has shifted, his advice to the White House, and the problem with thinking of people in Dearborn as simply pawns in the 2024 election.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

President Biden is no longer the candidate. But Israeli bombs are still dropping in Gaza and now in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran. How are you feeling now?

It’s getting all the more personal. Although we have many residents that have lost lives in Gaza, it seems that now—more than ever—we have funerals that we’re attending on a daily basis for loved ones that we’ve lost overseas. And so, how much has changed? The feeling of betrayal still exists. This idea that our administration, the leaders in this country have chosen [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu over the American people still persists. And I think it’s not just the feeling that Dearborn residents carry, but it’s the feeling that the broader American public carries.

This week, thousands of people showed up at the funeral of Dearborn resident Kamel Jawad, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. He was an American citizen who was in Lebanon trying to help those who were unable to flee. How is your community handling that loss?

I’ve been to many funerals in this community. But this, this was very different.

It was much quieter. A lot more solemn. The grief was physically visible on so many, not just the family and close friends, and it’s because everybody knew somebody that had died or been injured or displaced or that they haven’t been able to contact.

“What they’re saying is we care about universal health care and we care about what’s unfolding in Gaza.”

Dearborn is the subject of a lot of national election coverage. What is something that is either underreported or overreported? 

What people often miss is they believe that this community only cares about foreign issues and global issues. That could not be further from the truth. As somebody who grew up in the post-9/11 era, we have not had alignment on a foreign policy agenda with any other presidents for the last 20 years. And so, for as long as I can remember, the community has made issues of foreign policy and global policy secondary. What you’re hearing now is people saying enough is enough, and the genocide is unprecedented. 

What they’re saying is we care about universal health care and we care about what’s unfolding in Gaza. We care about a green future and we care about what’s happening in Lebanon. We care about centering worker and union rights and we care about the crises in Yemen. And our values are universal and we’re looking for candidates to apply them universally. 

You can’t come to us and say you want to advocate to reduce gun violence but that you’re okay funding the Israeli government, which gives radical settlers assault weapons to kill Palestinians in the West Bank—each and every single day! You can’t come to our community and say you want to end mass shootings yet provide 2,000-pound JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munition bombs] to the Israeli government to drop and decimate every university across Gaza.

Our values are universal and we’re looking for somebody who has a very strong moral compass and who wants to bring decency back to the White House.

Obviously not everyone in the MENA community is Muslim, and I guess the same would apply for Dearborn, but what do you make of two recent endorsements for the Harris administration, one from 25 Muslim leaders across the country—it does include a DEI consultant for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, some noted—as well as the backing of EMGAGE, one of the country’s oldest Muslim political advocacy organizations? 

The community is not a monolith—to your point. We have to acknowledge this. There’s differences within communities. I think the largest voting bloc, based on what I’m hearing, are those feeling great apathy toward this election. And apathy is very destructive. I think, for the 2016 election, it wasn’t the fact that Donald Trump won Michigan by 11,000 votes; it was the fact that 80,000 people skipped the presidential question in total that led to the presidency of Donald Trump. And so I think that is what is dangerous.

Is that something that you think can be used to put pressure on either campaign?

We’re trying to advocate through every means necessary to highlight the need to change course on Gaza, to change course on what’s unfolding overseas, to prevent a broader regional conflict, to bring home all the hostages and all the prisoners, to end the genocide.

If I can ask more pointedly, would you call for a campaign to skip the vote to make the case?

My advocacy is going to encourage people to come out to the ballot box and to make sure that they cast their ballots and take care of their moral conscience, and what that means for each individual may be different. Sitting on the side will not move the needle.

Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib made headlines with his endorsement of Donald Trump. He’s not the only one. Some Yemeni leaders in the area have also thrown their support behind the Trump campaign. And the Arab American Institute just released a poll that says the community is split on who to support. Given the stakes of this election, some are going to blame leaders like you. Is that fair?

The blame lies within the candidates running for office. Right now, if you look at polling across America, the majority of Americans—the majority of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans—all agree that we need a ceasefire now.

And the majority of Americans also believe in bringing about an arms embargo against the Israeli government. Yet, we don’t see any of the mainstream candidates adopting these policy platforms. So, the blame lies there.

I have respect for Dr. Ghalib, but I wholeheartedly disagree with his endorsement. Donald Trump is a threat. Donald Trump, we know what he stands for, and bringing back the Muslim ban 2.0, we know that he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he annexed the Golan Heights, and ended all humanitarian aid for Palestinians. This is an individual who tells Netanyahu to finish the job, and who’s advocating for the bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran. And so many in this community understand that he is not a friend, nor ally, to this community.

What do you make of this 2024 political conundrum that those who care about Palestinians should still vote for Harris if they truly care about them?

When you have residents pouring in saying, “I have lost a family member, I have missed the burial that would provide some semblance of peace, and we couldn’t even find the body of my family member—we only found limbs that were cast because of the size of the explosion,” how would you approach them and say, “While I understand this pain you’re feeling, you still should cast your vote for the quote-unquote lesser of two evils?” It is a very difficult conversation to be had, and so what we are doing is: one, comforting our residents, first and foremost, and secondly, advocating for the vote. That is what we can do. 

The conundrum is real, but ultimately what I keep pushing back on is it’s not this community that has to move in its values and principles and any issues that it’s taken a stance on. It’s the candidates who have to move. 

And don’t move because of Dearborn, by all means. I’m not telling you to move because this small city in the Midwest is telling you to move on these issues. Move because the general American populace has said these issues matter to them. And this idea that people will forget? Remember we heard this nine months ago: “People will forget come November.” People are not forgetting nothing. Genocide is not something you can cast aside.

When you hear Democrats, dare I say, chastise people for not voting at all or kind of expressing their frustration when it comes to US policy around Israel, what’s your response?

My response is why is voter turnout flailing all across this country? Because people want to be inspired to come out to the ballot, the continuous argument that they are the lesser of two evils or the fear factor of this other president will threaten democracy. So that’s what I push back on. Don’t blame the constituency if it doesn’t come out. If they don’t come out, you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself: What did you do wrong? Where did you fall short? What policy positions did you take that are not popular? And what position did you take that was absolutely morally wrong? 

That is the question people need to ask. In any traditional campaign, young people are knocking on doors. Correct? Correct. Now you have young people protesting on college campuses, calling for an end to our US taxpayer dollars funding a genocide. That is where young people are spending their time. That is where the organic energy that traditionally uplifts campaigns is being spent today to try to end our government from supporting a war criminal like Benjamin Netanyahu each and every single day.

What do you make of the recent reporting that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected reports of blocked aid into Gaza? And what do you make of what is going on in so-called behind-the-scenes discussion—with Biden reportedly being frustrated with Netanyahu—amid what is happening daily in Gaza?

I am so tired of Biden expressing his grief in private. It is tiresome. Be an adult. You are the president of the greatest country in the world, of the most powerful country in the world. That speaks volumes about your character and about who you are. And somebody who’s unwilling—all this grief he’s expressing in private is a bunch of bullshit. I am tired of rhetoric and talking points. It’s all a bunch of bullshit. And you can quote me for that. I think this is all theatrics. You know, they think that if they leak Biden expressed grief or said he’s an asshole behind the scenes that we’re going to see that Biden is actually trying.

He’s not trying. We see it every time they want to advocate for millions in aid and billions in bombs. Well, here’s the problem: The billions in bombs only amplify the aid that you need. You can’t sign off on the invasion, sign off on the incursion, and then say you’re going to try to provide some level of—some semblance of—support and aid to people.

Can I ask you a deeply personal question? Who are you planning to vote for for president?

My wife and I have this conversation often. Typically the first thing my wife asks me when she wakes up is, what happened last night, did we lose anybody? Because all of our families are displaced in Lebanon. So, I don’t know what’s going to come November 5. I know I’m going to cast my vote. I can’t tell you in what direction.

But I do know what’s more important than November 5 is the work I’m doing today. I’m trying to advocate for this carnage and this war to end, for this genocide to cease, for our US taxpayer dollars to stop funding this and supporting this. And I do know regardless of what happens on November 5, I’ll probably be on the phone organizing people on the ground, November 6 and beyond, to begin to hold that new administration accountable as well.

With the little free time he has as mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud is often glued to his phone fielding WhatsApp messages from family members with updates from Lebanon. He, like many Lebanese Americans, is trying to get loved ones out of the country after Israel’s recently expanded military offensive. Last week, Israeli airstrikes killed an American citizen in Lebanon who was from Dearborn.

In normal times, Hammoud is no stranger to the national press, often fielding interviews from reporters to speak about how the broader Middle Eastern and North African community in America is feeling. Dearborn is home to the largest Arab American community in the country and the largest Lebanese American one, too. Since the war began in Gaza, political analysts, pollsters, campaign officials, and journalists are keeping close tabs on his city, trying to gauge how voters will show up—or not—this November. 

In 2020, President Biden won the crucial swing state of Michigan by 154,000 votes. With an estimated 220,000 voters who identify as either MENA or Muslim in Michigan, Dearborn serves as a useful proxy for thinking about the anger and frustration many feel about Biden’s policies in the Middle East. The White House becomes much more difficult without the support of Mayor Hammoud’s city.

The Harris campaign has done little to win back the support of Hammoud or his constituents. The initial wave to get Biden off the ticket started in Dearborn in February. Mayor Hammoud penned an op-ed in the New York Times throwing his support behind the Uncommitted campaign over the Biden administration’s unwavering support for Israel.

In that letter, Hammoud said that he and his neighbors felt betrayed. Months have passed, and President Biden is no longer on the ticket. Mayor Hammoud spoke with Mother Jones about whether that feeling has shifted, his advice to the White House, and the problem with thinking of people in Dearborn as simply pawns in the 2024 election.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

President Biden is no longer the candidate. But Israeli bombs are still dropping in Gaza and now in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran. How are you feeling now?

It’s getting all the more personal. Although we have many residents that have lost lives in Gaza, it seems that now—more than ever—we have funerals that we’re attending on a daily basis for loved ones that we’ve lost overseas. And so, how much has changed? The feeling of betrayal still exists. This idea that our administration, the leaders in this country have chosen [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu over the American people still persists. And I think it’s not just the feeling that Dearborn residents carry, but it’s the feeling that the broader American public carries.

This week, thousands of people showed up at the funeral of Dearborn resident Kamel Jawad, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. He was an American citizen who was in Lebanon trying to help those who were unable to flee. How is your community handling that loss?

I’ve been to many funerals in this community. But this, this was very different.

It was much quieter. A lot more solemn. The grief was physically visible on so many, not just the family and close friends, and it’s because everybody knew somebody that had died or been injured or displaced or that they haven’t been able to contact.

“What they’re saying is we care about universal health care and we care about what’s unfolding in Gaza.”

Dearborn is the subject of a lot of national election coverage. What is something that is either underreported or overreported? 

What people often miss is they believe that this community only cares about foreign issues and global issues. That could not be further from the truth. As somebody who grew up in the post-9/11 era, we have not had alignment on a foreign policy agenda with any other presidents for the last 20 years. And so, for as long as I can remember, the community has made issues of foreign policy and global policy secondary. What you’re hearing now is people saying enough is enough, and the genocide is unprecedented. 

What they’re saying is we care about universal health care and we care about what’s unfolding in Gaza. We care about a green future and we care about what’s happening in Lebanon. We care about centering worker and union rights and we care about the crises in Yemen. And our values are universal and we’re looking for candidates to apply them universally. 

You can’t come to us and say you want to advocate to reduce gun violence but that you’re okay funding the Israeli government, which gives radical settlers assault weapons to kill Palestinians in the West Bank—each and every single day! You can’t come to our community and say you want to end mass shootings yet provide 2,000-pound JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munition bombs] to the Israeli government to drop and decimate every university across Gaza.

Our values are universal and we’re looking for somebody who has a very strong moral compass and who wants to bring decency back to the White House.

Obviously not everyone in the MENA community is Muslim, and I guess the same would apply for Dearborn, but what do you make of two recent endorsements for the Harris administration, one from 25 Muslim leaders across the country—it does include a DEI consultant for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, some noted—as well as the backing of EMGAGE, one of the country’s oldest Muslim political advocacy organizations? 

The community is not a monolith—to your point. We have to acknowledge this. There’s differences within communities. I think the largest voting bloc, based on what I’m hearing, are those feeling great apathy toward this election. And apathy is very destructive. I think, for the 2016 election, it wasn’t the fact that Donald Trump won Michigan by 11,000 votes; it was the fact that 80,000 people skipped the presidential question in total that led to the presidency of Donald Trump. And so I think that is what is dangerous.

Is that something that you think can be used to put pressure on either campaign?

We’re trying to advocate through every means necessary to highlight the need to change course on Gaza, to change course on what’s unfolding overseas, to prevent a broader regional conflict, to bring home all the hostages and all the prisoners, to end the genocide.

If I can ask more pointedly, would you call for a campaign to skip the vote to make the case?

My advocacy is going to encourage people to come out to the ballot box and to make sure that they cast their ballots and take care of their moral conscience, and what that means for each individual may be different. Sitting on the side will not move the needle.

Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib made headlines with his endorsement of Donald Trump. He’s not the only one. Some Yemeni leaders in the area have also thrown their support behind the Trump campaign. And the Arab American Institute just released a poll that says the community is split on who to support. Given the stakes of this election, some are going to blame leaders like you. Is that fair?

The blame lies within the candidates running for office. Right now, if you look at polling across America, the majority of Americans—the majority of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans—all agree that we need a ceasefire now.

And the majority of Americans also believe in bringing about an arms embargo against the Israeli government. Yet, we don’t see any of the mainstream candidates adopting these policy platforms. So, the blame lies there.

I have respect for Dr. Ghalib, but I wholeheartedly disagree with his endorsement. Donald Trump is a threat. Donald Trump, we know what he stands for, and bringing back the Muslim ban 2.0, we know that he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he annexed the Golan Heights, and ended all humanitarian aid for Palestinians. This is an individual who tells Netanyahu to finish the job, and who’s advocating for the bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran. And so many in this community understand that he is not a friend, nor ally, to this community.

What do you make of this 2024 political conundrum that those who care about Palestinians should still vote for Harris if they truly care about them?

When you have residents pouring in saying, “I have lost a family member, I have missed the burial that would provide some semblance of peace, and we couldn’t even find the body of my family member—we only found limbs that were cast because of the size of the explosion,” how would you approach them and say, “While I understand this pain you’re feeling, you still should cast your vote for the quote-unquote lesser of two evils?” It is a very difficult conversation to be had, and so what we are doing is: one, comforting our residents, first and foremost, and secondly, advocating for the vote. That is what we can do. 

The conundrum is real, but ultimately what I keep pushing back on is it’s not this community that has to move in its values and principles and any issues that it’s taken a stance on. It’s the candidates who have to move. 

And don’t move because of Dearborn, by all means. I’m not telling you to move because this small city in the Midwest is telling you to move on these issues. Move because the general American populace has said these issues matter to them. And this idea that people will forget? Remember we heard this nine months ago: “People will forget come November.” People are not forgetting nothing. Genocide is not something you can cast aside.

When you hear Democrats, dare I say, chastise people for not voting at all or kind of expressing their frustration when it comes to US policy around Israel, what’s your response?

My response is why is voter turnout flailing all across this country? Because people want to be inspired to come out to the ballot, the continuous argument that they are the lesser of two evils or the fear factor of this other president will threaten democracy. So that’s what I push back on. Don’t blame the constituency if it doesn’t come out. If they don’t come out, you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself: What did you do wrong? Where did you fall short? What policy positions did you take that are not popular? And what position did you take that was absolutely morally wrong? 

That is the question people need to ask. In any traditional campaign, young people are knocking on doors. Correct? Correct. Now you have young people protesting on college campuses, calling for an end to our US taxpayer dollars funding a genocide. That is where young people are spending their time. That is where the organic energy that traditionally uplifts campaigns is being spent today to try to end our government from supporting a war criminal like Benjamin Netanyahu each and every single day.

What do you make of the recent reporting that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected reports of blocked aid into Gaza? And what do you make of what is going on in so-called behind-the-scenes discussion—with Biden reportedly being frustrated with Netanyahu—amid what is happening daily in Gaza?

I am so tired of Biden expressing his grief in private. It is tiresome. Be an adult. You are the president of the greatest country in the world, of the most powerful country in the world. That speaks volumes about your character and about who you are. And somebody who’s unwilling—all this grief he’s expressing in private is a bunch of bullshit. I am tired of rhetoric and talking points. It’s all a bunch of bullshit. And you can quote me for that. I think this is all theatrics. You know, they think that if they leak Biden expressed grief or said he’s an asshole behind the scenes that we’re going to see that Biden is actually trying.

He’s not trying. We see it every time they want to advocate for millions in aid and billions in bombs. Well, here’s the problem: The billions in bombs only amplify the aid that you need. You can’t sign off on the invasion, sign off on the incursion, and then say you’re going to try to provide some level of—some semblance of—support and aid to people.

Can I ask you a deeply personal question? Who are you planning to vote for for president?

My wife and I have this conversation often. Typically the first thing my wife asks me when she wakes up is, what happened last night, did we lose anybody? Because all of our families are displaced in Lebanon. So, I don’t know what’s going to come November 5. I know I’m going to cast my vote. I can’t tell you in what direction.

But I do know what’s more important than November 5 is the work I’m doing today. I’m trying to advocate for this carnage and this war to end, for this genocide to cease, for our US taxpayer dollars to stop funding this and supporting this. And I do know regardless of what happens on November 5, I’ll probably be on the phone organizing people on the ground, November 6 and beyond, to begin to hold that new administration accountable as well.

This week, at the Democratic National Convention, the speeches of Michelle Obama and the Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff (and maybe Lil Jon’s, if you want to call that a speech) stood out.

But there was one speech, in particular, that struck me: The sermon-like words of Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.).

Warnock has served as senior pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church for nearly 20 years. His election on January 5, 2021 was one of two pivotal, and highly covered, Senate races in Georgia. That made him a national figure, of sorts. But not exactly a household name. If you don’t know Warnock well, it’s worth remembering he is a pastor who invokes his Christianity as a foundation of his politics.

He clearly brings that power to the secular pulpit in his speech on the first night of the DNC, telling of the need to heal a nation that has long been broken. Michelle Obama might have done a bit of call-and-response. But it is hard to imagine anyone else pulling off calling Donald Trump a “plague,” as Warnock does, with such heft.

At first, I wondered if that was why I kept drifting back to Warnock’s speech, watching it a bit obsessively. I grew up in the South, and his mannerisms are so comforting it is hard to describe. But despite that bias—and a compulsive problem of continual re-watching generally—I also think there is a deeper reason for my fixation. On close examination, I think you can see that Warnock’s message is one the Democratic Party often avoids. In fact, his speech was a subtle subversion of DNC orthodoxy.

Warnock begins his speech by mentioning his mother. “She picked other people’s cotton and other people’s tobacco” in Waycross, Georgia, he explains. But now her son was on this stage. “This is my America,” Warnock says.

Usually, you hear this classic campaign line as: Only in America. Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, said that “only in America” could middle-class kids like her and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota potentially make it to the White House.

By changing that phrasing, he implies that believing in such an America is a choice—one that is hard-earned and not easy for people like his mother, or so many Americans, who have been harmed by this country. “Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Georgia,” Warnock continues, speaking of his election win. “Thank you, America, for raising your voice and using your vote.”

The tone struck me. When is last time you heard a Democratic politician make thanking voters such a central part of their message? He leaves off the exhortations (“don’t boo, vote“; “do something!“) and, instead, casts a royal American we of gratitude for our collective participation in a political system with a horrific history that shut out so many people for so long.

In a party campaigning on democracy, he offers a simple message for what, on my hopeful days, I believe the ballot box means: “A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children.”

Getting rid of Trump would not save us from the moral rot that paved the way for his presidency.

This does not say your civic duty is to vote. It does not say that everyone’s America involves a story of like Warnock’s. Instead, the senator from Georgia implies that we fight, despite how easy it would be to be cynical, with a relentless faith that maybe this America is possible. Thank you, he says to his congregation, for having a faith in democracy that is not always earned.

Warnock continues in this mode, hammering the word together. How we worked together throughout the last few years to create a better world. Instead of listing accomplishments by Democrats, he explains these wins as products of community engagement.

Then he shifts to his opponents. What America do they see? What is their America? Warnock begins to speak of what happened the day after his election, on January 6. He mentions the insurrection, fueled by myths. But, then, he goes deeper. Warnock says:

Behind the big lie was an even bigger lie. It is the lie that this increasingly diverse American electorate does not get to determine the future of the country. The lie and the logic of January 6 is a sickness. It is a kind of cancer that then metastasized into dozens of voter suppression laws all across our country. And we must be vigilant tonight because these anti-democratic forces are at work right now in Georgia and all across our country. And the question is, who will heal the land? And so here we are America. Are you ready?

It is worth pausing here, reading this again. Throughout so much of the Trump era, Democrats have said that the 45th president is a unique ill. That Trump’s power is something abnormal and dangerous for democracy. Warnock asks the nation’s liberals to go deeper. Getting rid of Trump would not save us from the moral rot that paved the way for his presidency. As you contemplate that idea from Warnock, there is still, in your mind, the story of his mother’s presence on election day three years ago. Her story looms behind the question Warnock poses to America: Who will heal the land?

The speech continues in a more typical fashion from here. Warnock lists accomplishments. He makes sure to keep up his pastor rhythm. (Words are repeated so much it’s hard to keep track—forward, he intones to the crowd.)

But then he ends, again, where he starts. He mentions a parent, his father, “a preacher and a junk man” who “lifted old broken cars and put them on the back of an old rig” during the week and then “lifted broken people whom other people had discarded” on Sunday.

“My dad discovered strength in the broken places. A power made perfect in weakness,” Warnock explains. “And so I’m convinced tonight that we can lift the broken even as we climb.”

This resonated so deeply with me: The idea that being called to action has to be wedded to the humility that comes with recognizing human frailty. (I can hear the lapsed Catholic in me yearning to go back to mass.)

The American story often presented in politics speaks of a triumphant, powerful nation where only we could do this. I don’t think that is true. But I do think there is this America, the one that Warnock invokes. In it, a broken place can be redeemed and healed if we all join hands. In that message, I find some half-belief—some hope—that Warnock reminded me still lingers around my cynical soul: that participating in politics, however futile, could actually lead to a better world. “Keep the faith,” the senator ends the speech. Thank you, he seems to say, for continuing to pay attention to politics—when so much would, rightfully, make you want to quit.

In the weeks since his selection as Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance’s political vision has come to be defined by a single, compact denigration of Democrats: “childless cat ladies.”

Journalists unearthed scores of clips of Vance ridiculing the left as lost souls—non-parents adrift and building a ruinous culture. The family had been abandoned, Vance fretted in 2021, by Democrats who were not real Americans but “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Many iterations of this insult exist. Over the years, Vance has critiqued Vice President Kamala Harris’ lack of children; he’s gone after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for not having offspring. He has suggested adults with children should get extra votes.

There is a way of thinking of Vance’s mantra as strange. But, is it? Vance has uttered these “childless” epithets so much because the idea that kids are paramount—central and necessary for true citizenship in America—is not that abnormal. For years, economic policies have been, on both sides of the aisle, about helping families.

Parenthood has an exalted place in our society. People often trade away their values for the supposed necessity of protecting children (whether that leads to QAnon madness or the liberal extolling of public education right up until choosing a school for your son). Vance’s “childless” comments are simply a cruder, meaner version of what often is presented as “family values” in the United States.

As Dr. Melinda Cooper wrote in her pathbreaking work Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, many would like to cleave the idea of policy away from “the family”—but our economic order is bound up with how we conceive of the home.

A few years ago, I read Cooper’s book and it completely upended my understanding of “cultural politics“—and I am still sifting through how it rearranged my thinking. How do the economic structures of our world create systems we call natural? And what does it mean that we appeal to these myths in our politics? Her new work, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance, tackles similar ideas and applies them to how the agenda of austerity developed since the 1970s. (It’s also causing me again to rethink…well, most things.)

I thought immediately of Cooper when I heard Vance’s comments. Pondering Vance and my frustrations about how we talk about his social conservatism, I reached out to her. She answered a few of the thorny concerns I had over email. Take a read of the lightly edited answers below:

Over the last week or so, journalists have resurfaced a series of clips from Vance—and other Republicans—bemoaning “childless” people. It seems like many were surprised to hear his arguments. Were you?

No. I think the wider social acceptance of homosexuality, brought about by the legalization of same-sex marriage, has shifted the line of deviance from sexuality (hetero versus homo) to reproductivity. Hetero versus homo has been replaced by the reproductive versus the sterile. Judgements around childlessness were always there. But it has become the focal point. The stigmatization is sex-asymmetric—it weighs on women in a way it doesn’t on men because of our asymmetric understanding of female bodies as bearers of family lineage. There’s a reason why there is no male equivalent to the cat lady.

It’s interesting to see that the stigmatization of trans people now often turns around issues of sterility. I would say that a few decades ago transphobia overlapped with homophobia to a much greater degree; that is, transpeople were tainted with the brush of deviant (homo) sexuality. Now the defining issue is the threat to reproduction, either through the sterilization of children or imagined pedophilia by trans adults.

A lot of your work concerns the political economy of cultural arguments like Vance’s. What do you think are some of the key things that have happened since the 1970s in our economic structure that help us understand why someone like Vance would say this?

Demographic common sense has shifted since the 1970s.

Anti-natalist arguments were dominant in the 1970s. In the Anglo-American west, there was widespread fear that the Keynesian welfare state had been too successful—that it had literally subsidized the birth of a whole generation of student radicals (the baby boomers) and empowered parts of the American population who were supposed to remain in the margins. These fears were projected onto the anti-colonial “Third World” and translated into fears of overpopulation from the global south.

For a long time now, the pendulum has shifted back in the other direction and the overriding danger is understood to be declining birth rates. This is as true of countries in the global South as it is in the global North.

Demographic fears around declining birth rates often rest on the idea that they are a key factor in economic growth. The term “secular stagnation” was coined by the American Keynesian Alvin Hansen in the late 1930s: he proposed the term as a way of describing the long-term decline in growth rates, a decline which he attributed above all to falling birth rates. The concept of secular stagnation posits a crude one-to-one relationship between women’s per capita fertility, the size of the national population and GDP growth. This leads to the idea that the primary reason for lackluster growth rates and national economic decline is women’s refusal to have enough children. You could describe this as a bastardized Keynesianism. But in that case Keynes was also a bastard Keynesian, because he was not above attributing underconsumption crises to underpopulation. (I explored this in a paper.)

In recent years, this has become an increasingly popular explanation for faltering growth rates in Western Europe, North America, and Japan. At the turn of the century, the renowned development economist Walt Whitman Rostow published a book about the worldwide dangers of underpopulation in the 21st century. After the global financial crisis of 2008, some very mainstream economists resurrected the idea of “secular stagnation” and sometimes suggested a link between falling birth rates and declining growth rates. Every few years, the Financial Times runs a feature on the economic dangers of the “baby bust.” See this for a recent example. Matthew Yglesias’s recently reissued One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger is a clear example of the genre. The argument is that America is in economic and military decline—the root cause of which is demographic decline (with a nod to Alvin Hansen’s secular stagnation). Note that much of this kind of thinking has a Keynesian lineage and is coming from the centre or liberal left.

This leads to the idea that the primary reason for lackluster growth rates and national economic decline is women’s refusal to have enough children. You could describe this as a bastardized Keynesianism.

So in some ways the most surprising thing about the new “pro-growth” pronatalism is the fact that its coming from within the Republican Party. This is driven by a resurgent right-wing economic nationalism that is protectionist and mercantilist rather than Keynesian. The anti-free trade, protectionist wing of the Republican Party was once represented by someone like Pat Buchanan, who can also be described as a far-right paleoconservative. This tradition was always very pro-natalist. In his 2001 Death of the West, Buchanan wrote that the Western world was committing “autogenocide” thanks to the refusal of overeducated, working women to have children and the “Reconquista” of their lands by non-white migrants.

I would see JD Vance as a paleoconservative economic nationalist like Pat Buchanan, so his pronatalism is hardly surprising. You have a new breed of Republicans associated with American Compass and American Affairs who make devastating critiques of the free-trade neoliberal consensus in the name of a renewed economic nationalism. Their welfarism represents a genuine break from neoliberal orthodoxy but it is also very limited and conditional. It’s a species of welfarism that supports paid parental leave or child benefits on pro-natalist rather than gender-egalitarian grounds. Similarly, their pro-labor politics doesn’t go much further than protectionism and mercantilism—tariffs and migration crackdowns.

The nativist inflections of this kind of thinking can vary in intensity. On the one hand, you have great replacement theory and fears of white extinction at the hands of migrants. On the other hand, you have someone like JD Vance who would say, I want women to have lots of children but immigration can never be a solution to declining birth rates because it says something about our moral weakness as whites if we accept this. (See this clip.) Instead of externally directed racism the accusation is turned inwards and whites are held responsible for their own extinction.

It seems to me liberals really struggle to understand the argument here from Vance, and why he would say these things. What do you think the typical Democrat misses about what he’s saying—and why it’s dangerous? There is a discomfort, it seems to me, with discussing their own understandings of family structures under capitalism.

I think the discomfort comes from the fact that some of Vance’s core assumptions are shared by liberals. Every few years liberals start beating themselves up for having abandoned the issue of family values to the right. It is happening again in the context of wider fears around declining birth rates. See this recent feature article in the New Yorker which talks about the forthcoming book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What Are Children For?. In an extract from the book, Berg and Wiseman begin by lamenting the self-obsession of young “people” who “spend their twenties on journeys of personal and professional self-discovery and self-fulfillment.” But the complaint very quickly narrows in onto the problem of “female empowerment” and “female autonomy.”

These narratives translate very quickly into a conservative “anticapitalism” (really an anti-neoliberalism as in economic liberalism). Typically working women, particularly working women in positions of relative power, become the symptoms of market excess in a way that working men never do. So you slide very quickly from a critique of lean-in neoliberal feminism to the idea that neoliberalism is somehow inherently feminist.

Vance is much crueler and authoritarian in his views. But the basic assumptions are shared. Vance talks about the childless left. Berg and Wiseman talk about “the left’s wariness of children.” Vance talks about people who “don’t have a stake in the future of the country.” They imagine children in exactly the same terms, as a form of secular transcendence and commitment to the future of the nation.

In the foreword to Kevin Robert’s new book, Vance writes: “Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids.” What rift between new and old right do you think he is addressing here? 

He is referring to the shift away from neoliberal economics toward economic nationalism among Republicans associated with American Compass, American Affairs, and, most recently, the Heritage Foundation (led by Kevin Roberts since 2021). He is suggesting that this move will make the Republicans more focused on “family values.” But the Republicans’ neoliberalism was always aligned with neoconservatism (the dominant current in social conservatism up until George W. Bush) as well as various religious conservatisms. So the attachment to family values is far from new. However, JD Vance and Kevin Roberts represent a shift from neoconservatism to paleoconservatism, which is much more closely aligned with the racist far right (see my “The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation”) and the theocratic far right (I discuss this in Counterrevolution). This articulation of paleoconservative and economic nationalist positions was represented for a long time by Pat Buchanan.