No Votes for Genocide — Workers Strike Back on the Ground in Dearborn, Michigan
November 22, 2024 by Matthew Meloy
Workers Strike Back members campaigning for Jill Stein’s anti-war, pro-worker campaign at a mosque in Hamtramck, Michigan for evening prayer
Workers Strike Back members from Boston, Kansas City, Chicago, Seattle, Ann Arbor, and more convened in Dearborn, Michigan for over a month, setting aside their personal lives to get out the vote for antiwar, pro-worker presidential candidate Jill Stein. In order to win every single possible antiwar vote we hit mosques, coffee shops, universities, and the doors with a clear message: No Votes for Genocide, No Harris, No Trump!
Over the last year we have seen a historic revolt against the Democratic Party by Muslim and Arab Americans, along with hundreds of thousands of workers and young people across the country mobilizing against the war on Gaza. Mass antiwar protests erupted in every major city late last year and then later on university campuses.
More than 740,000 voted “Uncommitted” in the historically undemocratic Democratic Party primary, led by Muslim and Arab voters, in a rejection of the policies of Genocider-in-Chief, Joe Biden, many hoping to pressure the administration to end military aid to Israel. After the Biden/Harris administration doubled-down on its support for the genocide, a section of the movement went further toward breaking with the Democrats and both billionaire parties in the general election. More than 750,000 voted for Jill Stein’s antiwar, pro-worker campaign, including 18 percent of voters in the Muslim-majority city of Dearborn, MI.
The Democrats suffered a historic defeat driven by anger at the cost-of-living crisis and the genocide in Gaza, along with the Democrats’ trail of broken promises, betrayals, and outright attacks on working people. Workers Strike Back has been part of this revolt and has actively fought to sever working peoples’ ties with both the Democrats and the Republicans. Working people need to get independently organized, and we need a new party.
Along with Abandon Harris, an Arab American antiwar coalition, we saw a major opening in Michigan for the antiwar movement and the working class as a whole–and we seized that opening to campaign in Dearborn for the largest possible vote for Jill Stein’s antiwar, pro-worker campaign, and to defeat Kamala Harris for funding the genocide. Dearborn has the highest proportion of Arab Americans of any city in the United States with 55% of residents having Middle Eastern ancestry. It is home to the largest mosque in North America and the largest Muslim population in the United States. Dearborn was also the first city to pass a ceasefire resolution on October 24th, 2023 weeks after the genocide began. The resolution demanded action “to prevent this conflict from spreading throughout the region…” By election day, neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris had heeded the call, and the results were historic.
In 2020, Dearborn was still a stronghold for Democrats in Michigan with Joe Biden winning many precincts by 80% or more. Nationally, 93% of Muslim voters supported Biden.
The 2024 election saw a sea change due to the enormous anger at the genocide, with Jill Stein winning 53% of the Muslim vote in the country. Stein beat Harris in 11 Dearborn precincts which used to vote heavily Democratic, with Trump winning Dearborn as a whole. These are communities which for the last year have regularly grieved and mourned the loss of their loved ones like Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a 56 year old Lebanese man from Dearborn who was killed by Israeli airstrikes while in his hometown of Nabatieh in southern Lebanon. Workers Strike Back was at the rally held in solidarity with Lebanon and we talked with those that knew him well. The endless betrayals and attacks on working people like Jawad and his family were a central reason for Harris’ defeat. The Democrats’ failures have created a dangerous opening for right-wing populism but they have also shown the urgent necessity for working-class politics.
We spoke with many working people on the ground while in Dearborn and the pattern was clear — the overwhelming majority of them either knew about antiwar candidate Jill Stein and were supporting her, or were not aware of her and were either supporting Trump or planning not to vote at all. We have seen in real time how the Democrats are the best builders of Trumpism. Trump's victory doesn’t mean that society is moving to the right, as corporate pundits and some “left” organizations are claiming. A slew of ballot initiatives passed in many of the same states that Trump won, including on the $15 minimum wage, abortion rights, paid sick leave and more. The results in Dearborn are also a clear example of this, where large numbers of formerly Democratic voters abandoned the Democrats because of their horrific, reactionary support for genocide. Trump winning Dearborn was the result of these Democratic Party betrayals.
Some have the false idea that Trump will end the wars or help working-class people. Many simply wanted to punish Harris by supporting Trump. We convinced hundreds of Muslim, Arab, and working-class people that the best way to strengthen the antiwar movement and fight for workers’ demands, while also punishing the Democrats, was to support Jill Stein’s campaign. Many illusions in Trump held by working-class people will be rapidly undermined by the new administration’s policies in office, including helping Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza, as Trump has pledged. But Republicans will also increasingly try to pose as the “lesser evil” for workers and the antiwar movement. To stop working people from turning to Trump and the Republicans, we urgently need to build a working-class, antiwar alternative.
The turn away from the Democrats by the Arab/Muslim community is of great importance because it points toward the potential for independent and working class politics.
Stein’s majority support among Arab Americans nationally shows the potential that exists to break with the Democrats and Republicans and take steps toward building a new party. These communities lived through the War on Terror and the anti-Muslim hysteria under Bush and Trump and yet were pushed far enough by the Democrats to make that break with them in this election. Although Muslim and Arab Americans represent only a small section of the population, the same anger is bubbling among millions of American workers and young people who have been repeatedly attacked and betrayed. We need to fight and organize to turn this potential into a wider exodus from the two billionaire parties.
The Democrats’ betrayal is dramatic. Over the last year the Biden/Harris administration has sent billions to fund the genocide in Gaza with Harris herself saying she would not differ from the current administration’s policy of genocide. They refused to commit to an arms embargo and doubled down on their already “ironclad commitment” to the Israeli state. The “30-days notice” message from the Democratic party in the final days of the campaign was completely meaningless, and the deadline has since flown by with no change in policy. The Arab American community, like others, are also angry at the sky-high cost of living. Trump will not address this any more than the Democrats, because fundamentally it is the outcome of both these capitalist parties making working people pay for the crisis of their system.
Workers Strike Back stood against the tidal wave of lesser evilism and supported Abandon Harris and their bold call to break with the Democrats and make them pay a price for genocide. Abandon Harris proudly claimed the title of “spoiler” for the Democrats’ rotten genocidal candidate, and Workers Strike Back joined up with them in Michigan to campaign.
We brought the strongest left independent candidate, Jill Stein, and her campaign together with Workers Strike Back and Abandon Harris across the country in a united front at several rallies. This began with our Disrupt the DNC rally in Chicago, protesting the DNC’s crowning of Kamala Harris and support for the ongoing genocide, followed by rallies in Dearborn and Seattle. More than 150,000 tuned into our rally in Chicago. Kshama Sawant’s viral speech in Dearborn, openly calling for Harris’ defeat in the election because of the genocide, reached more than 4 million people and drew attacks from Democratic Party apologists like political commentator Mehdi Hasan. Throughout all of this work we have used On Strike, a production of Workers Strike Back, to provide working class analysis and strategy wherever we are. Through on the ground interviews and live streams of our events we put forward a fighting class struggle approach to provide working people with the media we need to strengthen our movements. It has been especially important over the last year as we have covered our rallies with the Stein campaign and Abandon Harris, and brought the Stein campaign to places like the Boeing machinists picket line while they were striking.
On Strike Team interviews students at Henry Ford University in Dearborn
We loudly and boldly called for the antiwar movement, and Stein’s campaign in particular, to focus their resources and time in the crucial swing state of Michigan, specifically in places like Dearborn and Hamtramck. Our organizing cry was No Harris, No Trump, No Votes for Genocide.
Unfortunately, in our view, the Stein campaign and the Green Party didn’t put the necessary resources into getting out the vote in Michigan. They also didn’t take the bold approach that Workers Strike Back and Abandon Harris took by campaigning openly in the swing states to win the strongest possible antiwar vote and deny Harris the election.
We need a workers' party that can identify these opportunities and strike while the iron is hot with the full force of our movement – the type of party that goes on the offensive against the Democrats and that is prepared to make them pay a price for their attacks on working people and support for genocide. The urgent need for a break from the Democratic Party is why Workers Strike Back spent a month on the ground in Dearborn and committed serious resources to getting out the vote for Jill Stein.
Workers Strike Back identified key points in the community where we felt we had the best chance of winning large numbers of voters to Stein. We tabled and campaigned relentlessly, playing a central role in the Stein campaign in Dearborn. Stein beat Harris in 11 precincts, winning 18% of Dearborn as a whole. Notably, many of Stein’s strongest showings were in the areas we campaigned heavily, including at mosques in northeast Dearborn like the Islamic Center of Detroit and the American Moslem Bekaa Center, where Workers Strike Back members set up all-day tables during Friday prayers, and community grocery stores like the Dearborn Fresh Market in eastern Dearborn.
Jill Stein beat Kamala Harris in 11 out of 50 Dearborn precincts, outlined in red
At markets, mosques, community events, and universities we were there fighting back against not only “lesser-evil” support for Kamala Harris but also against the growing support for Trump.
Three weeks out from the election, Donald Trump opened a campaign office in Hamtramck, Michigan, a city next to Dearborn which is 40% Middle Eastern and which supported Biden with 86% of the vote in 2020. As a reflection of Trump’s dishonest attempts to court the Arab American vote, the yard signs around the campaign office read, “Vote Peace. Vote Trump.” This time the mayor of Hamtramck endorsed Trump. There was a massive vacuum of working-class leadership in this election, with left and labor leaders shilling for Harris and Democrats rather than supporting Stein.
We were far too small a force to be able to counteract the wider turn toward Trump. Yet, in a short time we made a real impact in places like Dearborn and Hamtramck through taking the offensive against lesser evilism and for the antiwar, pro-worker candidate, Jill Stein – and by using tactics to reach the largest possible number of people, including translating our leaflets and petitions into Arabic and putting up posters around the city. Our partnership with Abandon Harris was also crucial.
Workers Strike Back members at University of Michigan Dearborn
We feel that if the Stein campaign had opened an office in Dearborn and taken a more committed approach to this historic opening we could have won Dearborn outright and likely other U.S. cities with majority Arab American populations. This could have had a galvanizing effect in building the antiwar movement as a whole. The reality is that the ruling class, Democrats included, WILL attack our movements at all costs and we WILL be labeled as “spoilers.” Bending to pressure from the Democratic party is not strategic, it puts us on the defensive.
But the main responsibility for the relatively low vote nationally for Stein belongs to left leaders like Bernie Sanders and “progressive” labor leaders like Shawn Fain. Rather than fighting for the strongest antiwar, pro-worker candidate Jill Stein, all of them shamefully acted as shills for Harris and the Democrats. This was yet another major betrayal. With their backing, millions of votes could have been won for Stein, in the context of the huge anger over the war and cost of living crisis.
This all points to why working people need a decisive break with the two parties of war, genocide, and capitalism. We believe that in the coming months as Workers Strike Back builds towards our February Organizing Conference in Seattle that Abandon Harris could play a leading role in abandoning the Democrats altogether. It simply will not work to try to “hold them accountable” or play one capitalist party against the other.
We believe that there is an opening for the working-class antiwar movement to run a few independent candidates on a strong platform to which they are held accountable by the movement. It will be important what kind of campaigns they run, as Kshama Sawant recently outlined in her article on CounterPunch. We need a movement-building approach to continue this momentum and the historic wins we were still able to achieve in Dearborn.
In the coming months, we can’t let Democrats pose as the “Resistance” to Trump, because we know they will be as ineffective as they were in the wake of Trump’s last election. The Democrats are afraid of mass movements, and yet mass movements are precisely what we need to stop Trump and his attacks on immigrants and other oppressed people. We need fighting, campaigning organizations that can do what we did in Dearborn on a much larger scale. The results of our work in Dearborn show that it is possible to have a real impact if we take a bold lead in the fight against the billionaires and their two parties.