The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.
In the final months of his presidency, Joe Biden visited Angola. He was there to tout billions in US investment in a project called the Lobito Corridor—a railway linking the country to Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo—and, in turn, land a light punch in our new cold war with China.
As I read about the visit, I had been listening repeatedly to “Red Dust” by billy woods, the idiosyncratic rapper from New York City. He may not be a household name, but woods is increasingly the face of a certain strain of hip-hop—even if he blurs his actual face in all public photos and videos.
Woods has been hailed in the Oxford American (“brilliant”), New York magazine (“a master of his craft”), and the Guardian (“the awesome mind of billy woods”), among others. As a solo artist, head of the label Backwoodz Studioz, and collaborator, woods has been working for decades. Mostly, he’s created underground, off-the-beaten-path rap. But more notoriety came in recent years—especially because of collaborations with ELUCID as Armand Hammer.
He famously grew up moving between Zimbabwe and the United States. His mother was a professor of English literature, and his father was a Marxist scholar who worked in politics. Perhaps this background is what leads his songs to hit on a dissonance that has been heavily on my mind in 2024: the difference between what the US says about the world and what the world says about itself.
As with most woods’ songs, I cannot sum up a clear meaning in “Red Dust”; it’s a menagerie. But a few lines had stuck in my head. Early on, woods raps:
Knock the plane out the sky Spark the genocide Let’s see who gives who a place to hide
You might be surprised (you might not!)
Woods here is referencing the 1994 killing of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, which ultimately led to the genocide of over 1 million people. (This year marked the 30th anniversary.) Upon first hearing the line, I was struck by the haunting parenthetical about who would aid who in a crisis (you might not!). When I was listening this year, I thought a lot about the “you.” It makes the listener complicit in the horror. You ask yourself: Where would I hide? Who would I hide? Would I be surprised in myself? In others?
In “Red Dust,” the speed at which woods moves from the global historical to the personal always stuns me. And this year, this particular gift struck me as an important one—it provided clarity as world events hit home. For how long, and for how many years, have (certain) Americans convinced themselves that history happens to other people? The consequences of this solipsism have been stunning.
In woods, I often hear the aching sadness perched as nonchalance—the barely restrained rage—of someone who knows that tragedy in textbooks happens to real people: your neighbors, your friends, and you.
As I read about Biden’s visit to Angola, woods was stuck in my head once more. As I skimmed the usual raft of clipsin the mainstreampress, I could not help but notice how the past relationship between the two countries was discussed. Some articles mentioned battles between the former Soviet Union and the US in Angola and the new “rivalry” with China. But I saw almost no mention of how—rather famously—the United States helped the apartheid regime of South Africa invade Angola during the 1970s.
I wouldn’t call this elision repression of a known truth or even self-censorship. Instead, it seems as if we are choosing to let the truth slip away from laziness. Our role in Angola was simply another piece of Cold War realpolitik—one of many fights, a few more foreign deaths, masses of money and arms spent sprinkled in some far-off land—which, at the end of the day, was so common it’s a bit hard to keep track of how it all happened.
After reading about Angola, I came back to his song “Cuito Cuanavale,” about a late 1980s battle in the country.
In it, Cuba fights alongside Angola against South African forces. In his writing, woods connects that warfare to Rhodesia’s Ian Smith, China’s modern push into Africa, oil, and Robert Mugabe. The most punching line for me in the song is a sigh: “History will absolve me,” woods says, maybe referencing the famous speech by Fidel Castro, followed by a half-thought: “Probably.”
Woods is the only rapper I know who writes about that part of American history. And this year, it was impossible not to see the US in that light.
It was woods I thought about while editing our coverage of the US’ role in Israel’s war in Gaza. In particular, I thought nearly every day of these lyrics to “Soft Landing”:
A single death is a tragedy, but eggs make omelets Statistics how he look at war casualties Killin’ is one thing, what sticks is how casually Nonchalant, 5 in the morning, what I grew up on
I listened to woods on a long bike ride home after seeing the film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which poetically explains America’s role in the death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of Democratic Republic of Congo. (If you’re interested, I have been following up on the film by reading The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassinationby Stuart A. Reid; it is a fantastic look at CIA meddling in the name of the Cold War.)
Put simply, this is the gift of woods. He is an obsessive, but cautious, raiser of the history many want to forget. I have continually sent around a long quote he gave in a recent interview on how random the rules of our current order can be. These few paragraphs might best explain this year—and many years to come:
Things seem like they can only be so until they’re not, you know?
My family left Zimbabwe in late 1989. In 1988—again, I was a child, but from a very political family—there was no sense in my mind that South Africa was any closer to collapsing than Israel. And within a few years apartheid rule had collapsed in South Africa. We can have a separate conversation about what came after it, but apartheid rule did indeed collapse. Majority rule came into effect, and for that to happen a lot of people died throughout the entire southern Africa region. And here we are, however many years later, and Israel is actually bigger and more powerful than it was at that time. So it just goes to show that sometimes things are not as far away as they seem, and sometimes things that seem on the verge of happening end up being far away—or they’re never going to happen. [Laughs.] Nobody knows what is under the surface.
Think of all the forces, energies, and waves of history that it took to bring about the transformation of the Republican Party into a Donald Trump cult of personality. It goes back through the Tea Party to when talk radio was dominant in the nineties. I remember going into a friend’s house, and their mom would be listening to Rush Limbaugh. He would just be droning on for hours, and I’d be like, “Is this for real?” The presentation was different from the traditional presentation of right-wing politics that I had seen up to that point. At that time Bill Clinton was president, but before that, there had been three straight terms of Republican presidencies. So all of these forces are happening, and it just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land.
When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.
In the final months of his presidency, Joe Biden visited Angola. He was there to tout billions in US investment in a project called the Lobito Corridor—a railway linking the country to Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo—and, in turn, land a light punch in our new cold war with China.
As I read about the visit, I had been listening repeatedly to “Red Dust” by billy woods, the idiosyncratic rapper from New York City. He may not be a household name, but woods is increasingly the face of a certain strain of hip-hop—even if he blurs his actual face in all public photos and videos.
Woods has been hailed in the Oxford American (“brilliant”), New York magazine (“a master of his craft”), and the Guardian (“the awesome mind of billy woods”), among others. As a solo artist, head of the label Backwoodz Studioz, and collaborator, woods has been working for decades. Mostly, he’s created underground, off-the-beaten-path rap. But more notoriety came in recent years—especially because of collaborations with ELUCID as Armand Hammer.
He famously grew up moving between Zimbabwe and the United States. His mother was a professor of English literature, and his father was a Marxist scholar who worked in politics. Perhaps this background is what leads his songs to hit on a dissonance that has been heavily on my mind in 2024: the difference between what the US says about the world and what the world says about itself.
As with most woods’ songs, I cannot sum up a clear meaning in “Red Dust”; it’s a menagerie. But a few lines had stuck in my head. Early on, woods raps:
Knock the plane out the sky Spark the genocide Let’s see who gives who a place to hide
You might be surprised (you might not!)
Woods here is referencing the 1994 killing of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, which ultimately led to the genocide of over 1 million people. (This year marked the 30th anniversary.) Upon first hearing the line, I was struck by the haunting parenthetical about who would aid who in a crisis (you might not!). When I was listening this year, I thought a lot about the “you.” It makes the listener complicit in the horror. You ask yourself: Where would I hide? Who would I hide? Would I be surprised in myself? In others?
In “Red Dust,” the speed at which woods moves from the global historical to the personal always stuns me. And this year, this particular gift struck me as an important one—it provided clarity as world events hit home. For how long, and for how many years, have (certain) Americans convinced themselves that history happens to other people? The consequences of this solipsism have been stunning.
In woods, I often hear the aching sadness perched as nonchalance—the barely restrained rage—of someone who knows that tragedy in textbooks happens to real people: your neighbors, your friends, and you.
As I read about Biden’s visit to Angola, woods was stuck in my head once more. As I skimmed the usual raft of clipsin the mainstreampress, I could not help but notice how the past relationship between the two countries was discussed. Some articles mentioned battles between the former Soviet Union and the US in Angola and the new “rivalry” with China. But I saw almost no mention of how—rather famously—the United States helped the apartheid regime of South Africa invade Angola during the 1970s.
I wouldn’t call this elision repression of a known truth or even self-censorship. Instead, it seems as if we are choosing to let the truth slip away from laziness. Our role in Angola was simply another piece of Cold War realpolitik—one of many fights, a few more foreign deaths, masses of money and arms spent sprinkled in some far-off land—which, at the end of the day, was so common it’s a bit hard to keep track of how it all happened.
After reading about Angola, I came back to his song “Cuito Cuanavale,” about a late 1980s battle in the country.
In it, Cuba fights alongside Angola against South African forces. In his writing, woods connects that warfare to Rhodesia’s Ian Smith, China’s modern push into Africa, oil, and Robert Mugabe. The most punching line for me in the song is a sigh: “History will absolve me,” woods says, maybe referencing the famous speech by Fidel Castro, followed by a half-thought: “Probably.”
Woods is the only rapper I know who writes about that part of American history. And this year, it was impossible not to see the US in that light.
It was woods I thought about while editing our coverage of the US’ role in Israel’s war in Gaza. In particular, I thought nearly every day of these lyrics to “Soft Landing”:
A single death is a tragedy, but eggs make omelets Statistics how he look at war casualties Killin’ is one thing, what sticks is how casually Nonchalant, 5 in the morning, what I grew up on
I listened to woods on a long bike ride home after seeing the film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which poetically explains America’s role in the death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of Democratic Republic of Congo. (If you’re interested, I have been following up on the film by reading The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassinationby Stuart A. Reid; it is a fantastic look at CIA meddling in the name of the Cold War.)
Put simply, this is the gift of woods. He is an obsessive, but cautious, raiser of the history many want to forget. I have continually sent around a long quote he gave in a recent interview on how random the rules of our current order can be. These few paragraphs might best explain this year—and many years to come:
Things seem like they can only be so until they’re not, you know?
My family left Zimbabwe in late 1989. In 1988—again, I was a child, but from a very political family—there was no sense in my mind that South Africa was any closer to collapsing than Israel. And within a few years apartheid rule had collapsed in South Africa. We can have a separate conversation about what came after it, but apartheid rule did indeed collapse. Majority rule came into effect, and for that to happen a lot of people died throughout the entire southern Africa region. And here we are, however many years later, and Israel is actually bigger and more powerful than it was at that time. So it just goes to show that sometimes things are not as far away as they seem, and sometimes things that seem on the verge of happening end up being far away—or they’re never going to happen. [Laughs.] Nobody knows what is under the surface.
Think of all the forces, energies, and waves of history that it took to bring about the transformation of the Republican Party into a Donald Trump cult of personality. It goes back through the Tea Party to when talk radio was dominant in the nineties. I remember going into a friend’s house, and their mom would be listening to Rush Limbaugh. He would just be droning on for hours, and I’d be like, “Is this for real?” The presentation was different from the traditional presentation of right-wing politics that I had seen up to that point. At that time Bill Clinton was president, but before that, there had been three straight terms of Republican presidencies. So all of these forces are happening, and it just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land.
When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.
Amid the inevitable Democratic identity crisis this post–presidential election winter, there have been exasperatedcalls for the party to return to “the economy.” The op-ed writers, angling for their future role, are painting the usual scene. The party must sit once again at the kitchen table and talk pocketbook issues. It is a long-held idea. For years, whenever voters have rejected Democrats—say, afterthe2004election—leadersexplained the catastrophe by nostalgically invoking the mantra of former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Thevague shibboleth does nifty work. It does not really advocate for any specific policy. Focusing on the economy could mean more money for poor people, ending corporate greed, and expanding government. (Let us call that the Bernie option.) Or it could mean deregulation, cutting federal spending to balance the budget, and ending welfare “as we know it.” (A return to Clinton.) It could even mean a robust industrial policy pushed through and synthesized with an anti-China trade war (which would be Bideonomics, but, as the argument goes, Washington’s man did not—or could not—use his record to craft an effective campaign).
Importantly,the phrase often clarifies the villain in every Democratic defeat sincethe 1960s: the “culture.” In 2004, commenters groused at those who dared support gay marriage and abortion. In 2016, the problem was so-called identity politics. And this year, there has been frustration with “wokeness,” focusing on the defenses of trans rights and those who pushed on fear of migrants. It has led Democrats to warn, once again, that unless a politician exploits a Sister Souljah moment, liberals are doomed. (In 2024, that seemed to focus on condemning those protesting against Israel.)
Interestingly, in this pattern, materialism drifts away. Often, post-election calls for a focus on the economy somehow devolve into a critique of what Democrats say about everything but people’s bank accounts.
A good example of this evasion occurred when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) appeared on a recent episode of TheDaily. In theory, the episode was a chance to demonstrate that perhaps Sanders was correct to hyper-fixate on income inequality. But that isn’t what much of the discussion focused on. Instead, the host Michael Barbaro spent a good deal of time asking Sanders if Democrats were talking too much about “things like race and gender and trans people” and if this left working-class voters “feeling alienated.”
Implicit in his question is dichotomizing theculture and theeconomy. The senator did not accept the premise. “It’s not either/or,” Sanderssaid. “It’s going forward in both directions.”
“It’s not either/or,” Sanderssaid. “It’s going forward in both directions.”
This illustrates a dynamic that occurs with alarming frequency: those who want to talk about “the economy” often move to culture as soon as the discussion lands on our nation’s poverty. We can talk about the economy, but not like that! At the same time, the tactic subverts the conversation about critical social issues. It turns fighting for trans rights into something deemed worthy of political consideration only if moderate voters who swing elections find the issue palatable—or not. (I am sure lots of voters didn’t love integration in the 1950s.) The old, new idea here is—as New Yorker writer Jay Caspian Kang recently noted when pondering the way Democrats are dealing with self-reckoning—a “class reductionism” that “takes out the ‘class’ part.”
As Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of American History at UCLA, has written, there is a misguided liberal assumption that “Trump is reducible to racism and misogyny or ‘false consciousness’ substituting for the injuries of class.” Such myths cloud an honest assessment of the next president’s victory. And set a wrong path for understanding how Republicans won.
Trump never discussed the economy without talking about the culture. Tariffs are intertwined with American identity, as is his hope to deal with housing by mass deportation. His 20 “core promises” include “CRUSH GANG VIOLENCE” and “UNITE OUR COUNTRY BY BRINGING IT TO NEW AND RECORD LEVELS OF SUCCESS.” These are not focused on raw numbers but on emotional appeals. Trump has made identity politics completely intertwined, and even synonymous, with his economic message.
The theoretical best messages for the Democrats going forward did the same. In 2004, “the economy” did not include abortion. In 2024, it seems obvious that it can. Abortion bans not only increased the likelihood of death or serious injury for pregnant people, but led to the potential loss of billions of dollars invested in health care in states where the procedure has become criminalized. Mass deportations, if fully implemented, could cause another Great Recession. Price gouging made a brief appearance. But, despite Trump saying recently the phrase “the groceries” is why he won, Democrats shied away from such class chatter. Instead, in this campaign, Harris and Biden often tried to make their arguments in Republican terms—with Republicans such as former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney present.
Again and again, the message appears to be that you cannot escape cultural politics. You can only really win the argument. Ironically, one of the best examples of this is the history of the phrase most often used to bat down such discussions. “It’s the economy, stupid” was never just about numbers. The phrase always had its own identitarian appeal. The command, coined by James Carville, was not about abandoning appeals to culture but deploying a successful one.
The creation of “it’s the economy, stupid” emerged from the work of pollster Stanley Greenberg. As my former colleague Tommy Craggs wrote, Greenberg is a “funny figure”—a former academic who studied apartheid South Africa and then, with the Clintons, sought to bring back the so-called “Reagan Democrats” from the GOP.
While running focus groups with these lapsed liberals, mostly white union workers in Michigan, Greenberg realized that “the economy” never just meant earning and spending money. It meant understanding the anger that other people—in this case, Black people—were getting too much from the government; it meant that Ronald Reagan, the movie star millionaire, was approachable as he demonized “welfare queens” but the patrician George Bush was an “out of touch” rich dude.
This, the campaign realized, gave Clinton a chance to end a streak of Republican wins. Reagan had seemed to nail down a dominant new era. By 1992, the Democratic Party seemed adrift. Only one liberal, Jimmy Carter—who was quickly ousted—had won the presidency since 1964.
Carville, the political consultant running Clinton’s campaign, was determined to end Reaganism. Losing ground during the 1992 campaign, he put three reminders on the wall of campaign headquarters to guide the message and appeal to a “vast middle class of Americans who decide every Presidential election.” The sign read: “Change vs. more of the same.” “The economy, stupid.” And, “Don’t forget healthcare.”
Only the middle phrase endured. Clinton’s more progressive demands of the campaign—attack the status quo and give people health care—were eclipsed by scandals, a pugnacious GOP Congress, and a turn to “triangulation” to win in 1996. Once in office, as labor historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein argue, Clinton betrayed the progressivism he presented during the campaign. For all his talk of running on “the economy,” Clinton’s policies dealt a crushing blow to the working class. It was he who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that contributed to more than 90,000 factories closing in 13 years. Perhaps more importantly, the shift to appeal to the moderate right made Democrats seem politically aligned against workers. Notably, in the Clinton era, the party made concerted efforts to shed its “big government” label, so it helped Republicans pass welfare reform that gutted protections for the poor.
This is why calls to return to Clinton’s messaging seem odd at the moment. We’re living in the wake of the backlash to his policies. But, also, we’re told to come home to his rhetoric. Where does that leave Democrats when it comes to actually doing something?
Take inflation. After the election, rises in prices have dominated discussions about why Democrats lost. Amid a real cost-of-living crisis, all woe has been pegged to inflation. (Historically, this has led to proposals for austerity measures and calls for cutting government programs.) Democrats have been charged with ignoring the suffering that working-class voters have endured.
But the causes of inflation, or the steps taken to combat it, often aren’t attached to those gripes. In fact, the government’s attempts to stop inflation by raising interest rates created additional hardship for many voters. The same can be said of politicians ending Covid-era government programs.
“It was a weight lifted like I can’t describe. I could actually buy what I wanted to at the grocery store,” one woman said to the Washington Post, explaining her experience of the federal stimulus during Covid. “But now I keep telling my boyfriend that I’m stuck. Living is so much harder now.”
As the writer Gabriel Winant noted in Dissent, “By the middle of his term, Biden had become a de facto austerity president.” A Democrat had presided over “the lapse of welfare state expansions, including not just the loss of the child tax credit and temporary cash relief but the retrenchment of SNAP and the booting of millions off Medicaid.” Yes, Biden did pass several measures to economically benefit the working class. But, as economics professor J.W. Mason noted, many of them were only temporary. Biden was in office when the expanded child tax credit cut child poverty nearly in half; he was also in office when the program ended. Trump signed stimulus checks; after the election, Biden says he regrets he did not follow suit.
This meant, as James K. Galbraith wrote in the Nation, an “early curtailment of direct Covid relief” hit “just as prices rose” and interest rates forced people into taking bad jobs to pay for the skyrocketing price of eggs and gas. “Should we really be surprised that the affected families having briefly tasted a better life for their children, were unhappy?” he asks.
“Should we really be surprised that the affected families having briefly tasted a better life for their children, were unhappy?”
Saying we should focus on the economy is easy, obvious, and usually only a way to obscure a desire to push away positions centrists do not like. How Democrats focus on the economy is what matters. Taking on inflation by raising interest rates likely will not be popular with voters. Taking on greed might be. And deciding what constitutes good policy between those options is the balance of politics. What economic message resonates—that we stupids should focus on—is the point. And it involves looking at the culture—or, to put it another way: the actual lives of people—to see what matters to them. That’s the lesson of “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Even Rahm Emanuel, the bruiser of the Obama era and ur-centrist, said as much recently. “There is more to people than the collection of their wallet and their checkbook,” he told Ezra Klein on his eponymous podcast. You have to tell a story. Being able to articulate a broader, compelling story about “taxes” or “stimulus”—making those words connect with family, anger, hunger, love, or disappointment—is the entire game.
Trump has always realized this. It was why he talks about economic woe very differently, fusing policy with cultural anxieties. Think of his most famous ad this cycle: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
In that simple turn of phrase, Trump once more weaponized the power of the outsider against regular, hardworking Americans. There are those Democrats, helping trans people, migrants, and demonstrators. And then there is you. Trump’s economic policies centered on removing migrants. New policies—no tax on tips, for instance—were not built to change lives but to appeal to the idea of being for you. (Or at least not against you.) Policies were not made to be effective in practice but in messaging. There is them and there is us.
“It is certainly not the case that Trump brims with solutions to the bleak economic horizon,” as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor noted in the New Yorker. “But, when millions of working-class people have endured so much continuity in hardship, have endured rising rents, crushing debt, and jobs they hate, it can feel as if no matter who you vote for, not much will change. The biggest problem the Democrats face is the belief that voting for their Party won’t help solve working Americans’ major problems.”
“The biggest problem the Democrats face is the belief that voting for their Party won’t help solve working Americans’ major problems.”
Can anyone say Trump’s plan—which seems at this point to consist of punishing tariffs and more punishing attacks on immigrants—would stop inflation? Tariffs are often a regressive measure. And some say they could lead to $1,200 in lost purchasing power for the average American. The problems may be real but the solutions presented by Trump are performative. Often contradictory, they easily can be summed up: America First.
So what was Harris’ economic plan? The campaignrolled out a major change in Medicaid to include homecare aid; it doubled down on national YIBMYism, hoping to decrease housing prices by building more housing. It toned down anti-corporate messaging, supposedly at the counseling of her adviser who was a top exec at Uber. Here was “middle-class capitalism.” Not exactly a winning phrase. The pitch felt calculated and distant. And it hurt Harris who already was seen by some voters to be an “empty vessel.”
Democrats attempted to create a winning coalition by poll-tested treats doled out to certain groups. The super PAC Future Forward was given $700 million and, according to the New York Times, stood at the “pinnacle” of Democratic politics. It was obsessively analytical, slicing and dicing voter surveys to try to find the best messaging. After the loss, the same strategy was pushed again: more data and appeals to the middle. “Rather than engage in some self-examination as to whether or not this brand of micro-targeted, capitalism-friendly consultancy-speak had any flaws,” Adam Johnson wrote in In These Times, Democrats went back to “blaming woke.”
Such data-heavy speak can likely never beat clear themes. Trump chose one of the most compelling myths in our nation’s history: cross-class nativism. One of the original Republican scorched-earth strategists, Lee Atwater, realized that invoking “patriotism” usually suffices for a message.
In 2024, when Bernie Sanders rails about class war, his economic message is directly linked to a narrative about what it means to be an American. And it feels authentic coming from him, instead of some obligatory attempt to appeal to as many niche polling interests as possible.
Of course, we have been here before. In the 2004 book What’s The Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Thomas Frank, a historian and journalist, argued that the working classes were inflamed by cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage into voting against their own interests. I have always liked the rebuttal from leftist journalist and political commentator Ellen Willis.
“There is widespread agreement that the left must concentrate its energies on promoting a populist economic program, and that the Democrats, if they want to win elections, must stop being identified as the party of ‘upper middle class’ feminists, gays, and secularists,” she writes, “preoccupied by what [Michael] Lind calls ‘inflammatory but marginal issues like abortion.’…Libs to cultural rads: shut up.”
Willis does not say economic issues are not important. But, as this cycle repeats itself, she asks: Why are we stuck in this constant debate? One reason, Willis writes, is because these hopeful writers misunderstand the Democratic Party. The party has not been the New Deal coalition—labor unions, minorities, white Southern farmers, Democratic machines like Tammany Hall—since before Frank was even born in 1965. Cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage have been what people voted for and then they receive bad economic outcomes in return. “Vote to protect Roe v. Wade; receive NAFTA,” she writes. The truth is not that abortion or immigration cost the Democrats the election, or that they should not—as Bernie said—separate from the upper-class influences. It is instead, something more irreducible: The New Deal coalition is gone forever. “We need to look not to the New Deal but to a new politics,” she concludes, “one that recognizes equality and freedom, class and culture, as ineluctably linked.”
“We need to look not to the New Deal but to a new politics. One that recognizes equality and freedom, class and culture, as ineluctably linked.”
Willis notes that since Jimmy Carter lost, the left has engaged in a never-ending circular firing squad. The question is will the Democratic Party finally embrace the challenge and decide on what should be truly workable next steps. Can they embrace that link between class and culture?
The cultural theorist Stuart Hall famously made a similar point to Willis in an essay he wrote during the rise of Margaret Thatcher in England. Hall wrote about a “great” move to the right. He noted working-class complaints and frustrations about the economy had a “rational and material core.” It was not, Hall said, simply people tricked into voting against their interests—as appealing as this false argument may be to liberals. And, still, it was also not just a nifty bit of economic determinism—as attractive as that may be to class reductionist Marxists.
The right’s “success and effectivity does not lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk,” Hall wrote, “but in the way it addresses real problems, real lived experiences, real contradictions—and yet is able to represent them within a logic of discourse which pulls them systematically into line with policies and class strategies.” Hall calls this an “ideological and political class struggle.” But let me simplify it. Explaining why people should join your movement, and connecting your ideas to a logic that pulls them in to vote for you, is the point of politics.
Democrats will have to learn how to convince people to vote for them. They need to engage in both an ideological and class struggle, as Hall said. That means making left ideas appeal because they are plain, common sense—a difficult task in a world dominated by oligarchs and special interests. The Carville koan advocates against this introspection. And it halts the necessary reckoning. Sure, it’s the economy, stupid. But since the economy is—can be—just about everything, Democrats won’t find a way to beat the antidemocratic right’s dominance by returning to Clinton. If anything, this election proved that era is finally gone forever.
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.
“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, despitethe 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 decidethe 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.”
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.
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 isgoing 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.”
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.
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 isgoing 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.
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