Vice President Kamala Harris was campaigning in Michigan on October 19 when a journalist asked if she risked losing the election “because of Gaza”. (Let’s put it more explicitly, because the Biden-Harris administration shares responsibility for a likely Israeli genocide there.)

“There are so many tragic stories coming from Gaza,” she responded. “And, of course, the first in this phase of everything that has happened, the first and most tragic story is October 7^th”.

Watching her evade the question, pivoting to a classic Israel-centric perspective, I got a very strong sense that few people in the anti-genocide constituency would ever be tempted to vote for this candidate. Instead of seriously trying to connect with voters in this Arab American heartland, putting a break between her position towards Israel and President Biden’s, she went on uttering platitudes; about “acknowledging the tragedy”; “never giving up”, and again bringing it back to the “1,200 innocent Israelis being slaughtered, women being horribly raped”. No plan, nor any equivalent empathy evident for innocents, including women and children, killed on the Palestinian side.

It bears repeating the Biden-Haris administration could stop the slaughter in an instant if it wanted, by cutting military supplies to the Israeli armed forces. The result is at least 40,000 Palestinians, and counting, have been killed by Israel, with estimates the real number reaches hundreds of thousands. If she was unable to do anything under the Biden-Harris umbrella, the VP could have indicated she would act after being elected in her own right, but she didn’t. 

I became even surer she had lost valuable votes when the subject came up again at her CNN Town Hall on October 23, in a question about how to “ensure not another Palestinian dies due to bombs being funded by US tax dollars”. This time she trotted out the Democrats’ cliché that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” before switching to a different, equally evasive track.  “For many people who care about this issue, they also care about bringing down the price of groceries.  They also care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

One cannot argue unreservedly that Harris’s election disaster was because of her support for Israel, discounting some rhetorical or symbolic flourishes. Trump’s victory was not the knife-edge that everyone predicted, and voters are motivated by a different mix of factors - primarily, of course: “The economy, stupid!” But deciding to defend Israel’s actions, to do nothing effectively to stop them, and even take part behind the scenes, surely sapped the Democrats of the momentum needed to match the challenge posed by a resurgent Donald Trump. Not just that but a large, unappreciated audience have spent the past year experiencing what’s happened in Gaza, and more recently in Lebanon, via their phones. If they’re like me, US voters among them will have felt every sickening blow, almost as though their own relatives were in the firing line, their homes, their hospitals, their children.

Reports suggest a disproportionate number of such people live in the battleground states that Harris needed to win, but which were swept up convincingly by Trump on November 5. You can see it on social media – countless US voters driven to distraction daily by horrific scenes from Gaza and Lebanon streamed to their devices. We see some of them on marches, camped out at universities, disrupting political speeches. No doubt some pro-Palestinian voters voted Democrat vainly hoping to keep a “greater evil” out of office. Some may have voted Trump (naively, in my opinion) believing the Republican’s claim to be an anti-war candidate. But surely most withheld their support from any nominee who failed to come out staunchly against genocide. I’m pretty sure I would have, were I a US voter.

In the coming months, more granular election data will allow analysts, and ultimately future historians, to understand with academic precision how much Gaza was a factor in Harris’s defeat. But let’s face the fact that mainstream media commentary, without exception, will avoid this awkward question, just as it has avoided discussing so many awkward storylines emerging from Palestine and Lebanon, not least the genocide itself, and Washington's implicit support for it. (The first hot take on BBC News, Why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, fulfilled this expectation by not a single passing reference to Gaza .)

Let’s assume though that Gaza played some role in the Harris defeat, more than it is given credit for; certainly among those with intense personal feelings about Palestine, and perhaps as part of a broader Democrat failure to reach people on one side while trying – and failing – to secure enough votes on the other. Does that say anything about the future shape of US politics which has shown unwavering bipartisan support for Israel going back at least to the 1960s? Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely to trigger a period of self-reflection or a voluntary change of direction. And that is even without considering the role of powerful pro-Israel lobbyists like the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which right now is celebrating 362 victorious candidates from both parties whom it endorsed, and “11 anti-Israel candidates” defeated in congressional races this year.

We are in a world where AIPAC’s motto, that “being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics”, is still true in an American context despite Harris’s defeat. She may have been scrupulously pro-Israel, never failing to mention how much she supports it. But what appeal this had among Israel’s many supporters was no decisive factor, against an opponent who was even more pro-Israel than her.

In fact, on the campaign trail, candidate Trump went out of his way to paint Israel as a partisan issue for the US, making the extraordinary claim – normally only heard from true believers in the anti-Israeli Axis of Resistance – that Israel “will not exist in two years” if Harris were to win the election.

Could there be a future when Israel’s increasingly brutal actions, seen today in the northern Gaza Strip and widening bombardment of Lebanon, will undermine bipartisan support in the US? Could the kind of polarisation that Trump always seems to bring with him extend to attitudes on Israel, making it a left-versus-right issue more like gun control, for example? Without the power of AIPAC to keep the discourse acceptable to Israel and its US supporters, one could see Democrats opposing more extreme initiatives of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (or any successor in the next four years). We should watch closely to see if new Israeli transgressions, such as annexing the occupied West Bank, no doubt backed by an avidly Israel-friendly Trump administration, trigger a new partisan dynamic in Washington. And younger generations of US voters and future voters, the much-discussed TikTok generation, may take a very different view of the conflict having not witnessed the past year's conflict exclusively through Israel’s lens.