I’m gay, mixed-race and from California – but Kamala Harris is losing my vote

Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Why couldn’t the Vice President say so?

By all accounts I should be a Kamala Harris slam dunk. Not only am I mixed-race like the Vice President, I’m also Jewish and gay and a Northern Californian – raised within 10 miles (and 10 years) of Harris on the same diet of sunny progressivism and Gen X-er intersectionality.
But I’ll be frank: I can’t stand the woman. I can’t stand how she so shabbily sidelined her former boss in the summer coup that ousted Joe Biden. I can’t stand her effortless coronation as the Democratic candidate with nary a vote or roll call. I despise the progressive media’s shutdown of any critique of Harris. I abhor her late-hour pandering to sceptical black men through her hectoring surrogate, Barack Obama.
And while I was impressed by her September debate performance against Donald Trump in Philadelphia, I’m horrified by Harris’ general lack of verbal acuity – along with her timidity in media performances and her deep aversion to anything resembling a concrete platform or policy. I can’t stand that I don’t really know what she wants to achieve – besides becoming president. But I can stand Donald Trump even less – and, for that reason, Harris, reluctantly, had my vote. Until this past week.
At a time when the nation – the entire world really – is screaming for moral clarity, Harris keeps succumbing to the temptation to indulge in moral equivalence, to treat certain opinions as valid even when they are grotesquely wrong. And she did so again last week. At a campaign appearance in Milwaukee, Harris was interrupted by yet another pro-Palestinian protestor demanding to know what she intended to do about the “genocide” in Gaza.
As she has done in similar incidents, Harris tried to silence the young, keffiyeh-clad man – “I am speaking right now,” she told him. But he would not be silenced, insisting that she account for the “billions of dollars in genocide” he apparently believes the US has supplied to Israel.
And so Harris responded bafflingly: “listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real. That’s not the subject that I came to discuss today, but it’s real and I respect his voice.”
Say what?
Despite my wary fence-sitting, I’ve been waiting for a chance – desperate for a reason – to make Harris my own and this very well could have been it. And she blew it, spectacularly. There is absolutely no reason for Harris to “respect” this young protestor’s belief in a Gazan “genocide” because there is no genocide in Gaza.
In fact, the actual genocide here came from Gaza – on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Palestinians descended upon Israel with the sole purpose of killing Jews because the were Jews. That is the definition of genocide – the eradication of a people precisely because they are that people, often backed by official bodies and institutions, such as was the case with Hamas.
There is death and destruction and misery in Gaza – widespread, tragic and seemingly without end. This is happening to the people there not because they are Palestinian, but because they inhabit a strip of land run by a craven Islamist government that cares little for their well-being and uses them as human shields. True, the contours of where these various realities collide are porous and overlapping. But the fundamental truth still holds: Gazans are dying because they’re ruled by Hamas, not because they are Palestinians.
Because of this, Harris’ only appropriate response to her heckler last week should have been “sorry kid, there is no genocide in Gaza”. It would have been brave, it would have been honest and it would have cannonballed me over into her court. This would have been moral clarity, Madame Vice President and that would have given you my vote. Instead, Harris flinched and scrambled – and you’re unlikely to see me on her side next month because of it.
The term “genocide” is so laden with meaning, so clearly co-opted from Jews’ own real genocide eight decades ago at the hands of Hitler, that any ascription of it to Gaza – no matter how off-hand or in-the-moment – feels like an affront too far. And Harris should already understand this. The fact that she’s not better prepared to confront anti-Israel types with savvier, more sophisticated, more deeply-reasoned responses only reinforces the amateurishness that has been her campaign’s greatest weakness.
I want a president who can demonstrate leadership even in the toughest situations – this Hamas-bro lobbed a soft-shot and still she opted for the easiest possible out.
It will be hard for Harris to claw her way back from this “I respect his voice” disaster, but I can’t fully rule it out. I still want to vote for her even if I currently don’t see how. Don’t get me wrong – I won’t vote for Trump. His refusal to believe that he lost to Biden four years ago makes his return to the White House anathema to me.
And so there is a chance – not a minor one – that I’ll end up voting for neither candidate. It’s an unfathomable thought barely two generations on from the anti-Jewish pogroms of Europe and just a few more from the horrors of American slavery. With my dual legacies of extreme disenfranchisement, voting is an existential duty for me – and yet I may very well sit this one out.
Two weeks before election day, I feel scant joy for Kamala Harris and always thought America was pretty great before Trump entered politics. Of course there remains plenty of time for yet another October surprise – or three. But I want strength not surprises – and giving into the Gaza crowd has been Harris’s weakest move so far.
David Christopher Kaufman is a New York Post columnist