With just a few days to go before Election Day, one would think that Democrats would be all hands on deck at this point in the battleground states to get voters to the polls to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket, right?
Well, in Michigan, there is an exception to that rule: Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), perhaps Congress’ most vocal critic of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, has (again) declined to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.
During a UAW GOTV rally Friday in Detroit where the other speakers, including fellow Squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) urged the crowd to vote for Harris, the pro-Hamas Tlaib did not echo the sentiment, instead focusing on other races on the Michigan ballot including non-partisan races:
At the UAW gathering later in the day, Tlaib steered clear of supporting the top of the ticket and instead encouraged the hundreds of union members not to just get out and vote, but to encourage friends and family to do so as well.
“Don’t underestimate the power you all have,” she said. “More than those ads, those lawn signs, those billboards, you all have more power to turn out people that understand we’ve got to fight back against corporate greed in our country.”
She focused her speech to UAW members on down ballot races, specifically the judicial races, voicing support for Democratic-nominated Michigan Supreme Court candidates Kyra Harris Bolden and Kimberley Thomas in their respective races against Republicans Patrick O’Grady and Andrew Fink.”We’ve got to make sure that the nonpartisan part of the ballot gets filled in,” Tlaib said.
And in case anyone thinks Tlaib not endorsing Harris was an oversight on her part, a tweet she posted the day of the event in response to news of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump trying to make more inroads with the Muslim-American community made clear what she thought of the Biden-Harris administration. Note the last sentence about how she feels “this election didn’t have to be close”:
There have been concerns in Democrat circles about turning out the vote in Michigan this year, considering the Tlaib-backed campaign back in February during the presidential primary to get voters discouraged by Biden to vote “uncommitted.” Over 100,000 of them did, with Muslim-American communities being the driving force.
Like Trump, Harris has spent a lot of time in Michigan since she was installed as the nominee. But like Tlaib, Harris has no doubt been frustrated by Trump’s attempts at peeling off disaffected Muslim-American voters in the Wolverine State. For instance, there was this from a week ago:
In three of the last five polls taken in Michigan (as of this writing), Trump has led, although the leads have been within the MOE. The most recent one, from Atlas Intel, has him up by 1.5 points:
With all of that in mind, it’s no wonder Harris is running sharply different ads in Michigan (where her emphasis was on not being “silent” about “the suffering” in Gaza) than she is in Pennsylvania (where the emphasis was on supposedly being a strong supporter of Israel) on the Israel-Hamas war.
Trump narrowly won Michigan in 2016 but lost the state to Joe Biden in 2020. If he wins, it will be interesting to learn via exit polls what role – if any – groups that Democrats traditionally rely on played.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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