Alex Poppe Informed Comment
“Books frighten power,” Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets, said on the first day of our fiction workshop. We were at the Macondo Writers Workshop, where Robert led a class on how to write across identity lines without tokenizing, flattening, or reducing a character to a single story. Robert also declared that “Writing is the most insurgent of all the arts,” and because I write at the intersection of social justice and literary pursuit, I want to believe him.
Whatever the modality, using stories to tell difficult truths can change the way people think. Readers contrast the characters’ lived experiences with their own and may, in turn, see the world from alternate perspectives; this speaks to the vital need to tell stories as respectfully and accurately as possible. At the most recent Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago, Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, observed that living is analog while language is discreet and therefore cannot fully capture living. When language comes close, we call that great writing. Most of the time, language fails, such as when we call people held without trial by ICE or at Guantanamo Bay detainees instead of prisoners.
As the midterms draw near, I’ve been thinking about the role art plays in catalyzing political change. On September 12, the documentary film NAZA, which interrogates the systems used by the Israel government to target and calculate Palestinian civilian casualities in Gaza, was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival after receiving a 25-minute standing ovation.
On September 13, the crowd surrounding the Printer Row Lit Fest’s Digital Realty Stage to hear Omar El Akkad in conversation with Bill Ayers was the biggest and most diverse across age, ethnicity, race, and gender lines than any other conversation I attended that day, despite its late hour and the rain. The next day, Macklemore was removed from Ed Sheeran’s tour after his onstage, pro-Palestinian comments, which prompted Sheeran’s scheduled openers and backing band to leave the tour. Artists are speaking out in favor of Palestinian rights and freedom, and people are listening. Some of those people vote. If the Democrats want to win in November, candidates need to support Palestinian rights, freedom, and dignity.
Vice President Harris received six million fewer votes in 2024 than President Biden received in 2020. President Trump beat Vice President Harris by 2 million votes. (Trump received 77 million votes compared to Harris’ 75 million, but 89 million eligible voters stayed home.)
Polling conducted by the Institute of Middle East Understanding (IMEU) and YouGov found that 29% of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 but who didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 reported that “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was the reason they withheld their vote from Harris. Foreign policy is not usually a motivating factor for voter turnout. However, the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza was a more important reason for voters to withhold support than the economy, healthcare, immigration, and abortion were. In states that swung support from President Biden to President Trump, 20% of voters who had voted for President Biden in 2020 but stayed home in 2024 did so because of Gaza.
A useful first step would be for Democratic leaders and candidates to talk directly with Palestinians. Georgia state representative Ruwa Romman, the state’s first female Muslim representative, views the DNC’s denial to have a Palestinian American speaker on the main stage at its 2024 national convention, at a time when over 40,000 people had been murdered in Gaza, as “a disregard to the real devastation our tax dollars were causing” and “launched a nationwide rebuke as we’ve seen this past election cycle.”
But words need actions, especially at a time when public trust in the federal government is at 17%. Democratic candidates should pledge not to take campaign contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the controversial pro-Israel lobbying group, which would also appeal to voters who are angry about the influence of money in US politics.
Democrats are more motivated to vote than Republicans this year: 71% of Democrats compared to 53% of Republicans and 48% of independents. In Democratic primaries this year, party establishment choices lost to candidates who showed empathy for Palestinians and called for accountability in Gaza.
A May 2026 poll found that 60% of potential Democratic voters sympathize more with Palestine than with Israel, and 48% think the Democratic party has been too supportive of Israel. The data suggest that Democratic voters, who are much more motivated to vote than Republican voters, do not want to maintain the status quo of unlimited US support for Israel. Look at the New York election results from June, when pro-Palestinian candidates won their races across all five boroughs.
Admittedly, the rest of the country is not New York City. However, recent polling shows that Republicans are increasingly unhappy with President Trump, who has urged voters to pretend he is on the ballot, which could benefit Democrats. According to a new CNN poll, 44% of registered voters see the midterms as an opportunity to let President Trump know how unhappy they are with his leadership. 56% of American voters believe the war President Trump started in Iran benefits Israel more than the US. More than half of Republicans under 50 view Israel unfavorably. An economic Democratic centrist who champions affordability, Palestinian rights, and ending the war in Iran, could pick up the under 50 Republican vote while securing Democratic support.
Juan Cole’s Informed Comment delivers independent, expert analysis of war, the Middle East, climate change, and U.S. foreign policy. Help sustain this work
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