THE UNCOMMITTED MOVEMENT in the United States forced Palestine as a key issue in the electoral arena for the Democratic Party. In Maryland, I helped lead an Uncommitted canvassing campaign with the Montgomery and Prince George’s branches of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America. We had over 100 volunteers knock on the doors of over 21,600 registered Democratic voters and had over 3,500 conversations with our neighbors about voting Uncommitted to send a message for peace and an immediate end to US arms sales to Israel. The reckoning of Palestine in the electoral arena is not unique to the United States, and is part of a larger global movement. In the United Kingdom elections in July 2024, several Labour Party candidates lost to pro-Palestine candidates who made Palestine central to their campaign.
But one of the biggest lessons Uncommitted taught me is the power we have to make Palestine a local issue, regardless of election cycles. For almost every person we talked to, this was likely the first time anyone ever knocked on their door to talk about Palestine. That will shift political conversation beyond the election. If there was one underlying theme in our canvassing, it was that people were not expecting us to be knocking doors about Palestine. Some people reacted very negatively, while others reacted really positively.
The Uncommitted movement put questions of strategy and tactics front and center, as well as questions about what role the Palestine movement should play in the electoral arena. Uncommitted was one of the first times we saw the Palestine movement engage in the electoral arena in a sustained way in the United States, but it also showed the differing perspectives Palestine organizers have on electoral organizing. Instead of asking if the Palestine movement should engage in the electoral arena, I think we need to be asking how we should be fighting for Palestine in the electoral terrain of struggle.
Unlike traditional electoral campaigns focused on a candidate, our pitch focused on how Palestine is a local issue and why rank-and-file Democrats voting Uncommitted would send a strong message to Biden and the Democratic Party leadership. Door-to-door canvassing was a powerful tool to engage our neighbors on Palestine and US arms sales. We often heard people share fears about another Trump presidency. Our response included talking about how voting Uncommitted can be a way to strengthen the Democratic Party against Trump, because the Democratic Party needs to listen to their base to defeat Trump. Polling from just before Maryland’s primary election day on May 14 showed that a majority of Democratic voters supported a permanent ceasefire and believed Israel is committing genocide.
We also relied on local connections to Palestine in order to explain to voters why Uncommitted was necessary. Locally in Maryland, just like across the country and the world, students and educators have faced increased repression and anti-Palestinian racism on campus. This past year, four Montgomery County Public Schools teachers were put on academic leave for expressing pro-Palestine political opinions. Montgomery College staff who have been organizing a Faculty for Justice in Palestine group have also been similarly intimidated and threatened by their administration: an email was sent out to all students before their event discouraging attendance. The University of Maryland College Park’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) filed a lawsuit against the University of Maryland, the University System of Maryland and UMD President Darryl Pines. The suit is a response to the administration rescinding SJP’s reservation for campus space due to political pressure. In the past, Montgomery County police departments have gone on police exchanges with the Israeli Occupation Forces and our local tax dollars are used to subsidize the ongoing murder, displacement and genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people.
We also had to do a lot of education about the Uncommitted option and develop our messaging to be accessible and values-aligned. Some people did not understand what selecting the Uncommitted option effectively did, and one person I spoke to mistakenly thought we were asking them not to vote. In one of our early flier designs, we included the phrase “No Votes for Genocide Joe,” which we soon after replaced with “Vote for Peace and Justice.” Not only did the former slogan prematurely turn off Democratic Party voters before they even had a chance to hear us out, but more importantly, it was a primarily negative message—a message against Biden. In order to bring a broad base of people in, we need to send a clear message about what we are fighting for, not just what we are fighting against.
In traditional electoral campaigns, most people don’t have super strong feelings about your candidate (if they even know who they are). In comparison, the responses we received were polarized - and sometimes racist and hostile responses. One of our volunteers had the cops called on her in her own building, and we also had people yell at us and call us terrorists. But we also received extremely rewarding responses—people who said they supported us and were excited that people were organizing for Palestine in this way. I spoke to an older Palestinian woman who told me she and her husband were already planning to vote Uncommitted, and that she actually thought Uncommitted did not go far enough given the United States’ deep complicity in the genocide. We also knocked on doors on election day, and we had at least three people go out to vote before the polls closed, including an older woman who I drove to the polling place right before it closed.
We spoke with several people whom we onboarded as canvassers, proving our success at empowering neighborhood voters to become active volunteers. Since we have a closed primary in Maryland, independent voters need to register as a Democrat three weeks before the primary election day to be able to vote Uncommitted in the Democratic Primary, so we included independents in those we door knocked for the first few weekends until April 23, 2024. One of the independents whose door I knocked took a flier and signed our pledge form, and then I followed up with him to remind him to update his party affiliation. He came out and canvassed several times, becoming one of our top volunteers. Many of our volunteers were also not your typical electoral campaign volunteer. For many, this was their first time canvassing door to door, and a lot of our volunteers had, and continue to have, an aversion to electoral politics. And that is part of why Uncommitted was such a powerful organizing tool, because it brought people from across the electoral spectrum, people who likely had serious disagreement on electoral organizing, together to work towards a common goal, with Palestinian liberation as the unifying force.
Many of our volunteers were also eager to knock doors in their own neighborhoods. I regularly encouraged folks to do this, and I offered to cut the turf for them. Door knocking in places you have a particular connection to is much more impactful. When I canvassed my parents’ neighborhood, it was nice meeting neighbors I didn’t know and connecting with them about Palestine. Canvassing my neighbors reinforced for me that canvassing is not just an electoral tactic, but can be used year-round as a community building and relationship-deepening tool.
With more and more money spent in political campaigns and rising repression on college campuses of pro-Palestine speech, there is a growing feeling that our vote doesn’t matter. Uncommitted sought to change that by encouraging people who don’t feel represented in our electoral process to engage by sending a message for peace and justice for Palestinians through our vote. The campaign gave us something to vote for: an end to US weapons sales to Israel. Canvassing sparked conversations between thousands of registered voters about how we engage with voting and the electoral process, our complicity in the use of our weapons and taxes, and how we can leverage our vote and organize for Palestine. Those conversations will have a lasting impact in how those voters think about Palestine and how they think about political engagement.
While Joe Biden might not have dropped out primarily because of the Uncommitted Movement, it was definitely a part of the story of the 2024 election. Uncommitted made Palestine a key part of the Democratic primary politics. We did not break the 15% threshold needed by a congressional district in Maryland to get an Uncommitted delegate sent to the Democratic National Convention, but we made Palestine a local issue by literally showing up to our neighbors’ doors and talking to 3,500 of them about Palestine.
Since the primary elections, Uncommitted organizers have taken their organizing in different directions, which is a testament to the diversity of organizers the movement brought in, as well as the lack of a clear strategic direction. The Uncommitted National Movement met with the Harris campaign to ask for a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention, and other organizers have launched No Votes for Genocide campaigns and other similar efforts locally in places like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. At the recent Socialism 2024 conference panel about Palestine, Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-Muslim American organizer, described the suffering of the genocide against Palestinians today, saying: “We are not a movement asking for a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention ... A reasonable request was made, and exactly what we thought would happen, happened … The conversation that’s happening about Palestinians without the Palestinians, and our Arab American and Muslim voters—we’re expected to play point guard in an election, and when the championship happens, we don’t get a ring. ... We owe our people a lot more than that.”
Part of why I think Uncommitted was effective is that it enabled us to encourage our neighbors and people who feel disenfranchised by our political system to take a stand against the status quo. It was a powerful tool or tactic to use at the time, within a larger ecosystem of tactics (mass mobilizations, popular education, divestment and boycott legislation, etc.) currently being used for Palestine. Door knocking and canvassing, as a tactic, shifts the conversation, though it is difficult work to sustain without a clear ask. I am eager to see more canvassing and door-to-door talking with neighbors about ways Palestine is a local issue, whether it’s anti-Palestinian repression in our local schools or economic partnerships with Israel.
I believe we can and should push for Palestine in the electoral arena. We cannot give up any terrain of struggle, despite our fears of co-optation. That would be to shy away from the power we are growing as a movement. We need to be organizing for Palestine in every terrain we can. We especially need to organize in the electoral arena, which is most responsible for supplying Israel with weapons. But organizing for Palestine in the electoral arena does not mean we have to give up our values or accept the low bar the Democratic Party has set. We need to organize in the electoral space, and we need to do it according to our own rules and towards our own goals—breaking past the limited scope dictated to us by establishment politicians.
