Alexandra Buxbaum/Sipa USA via AP Images
Pro-Palestine protesters rally at Union Park in Chicago on Monday, the first day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Thousands of people gathered on Monday for the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago’s Union Park to kick off a week of pro-Palestine activism. The protesters fought hard for their right to be within “sight and sound” of the United Center, the site of the convention, so that Democratic officials, delegates, and the news media get a sense of the political power of the pro-Palestine movement.
Some protesters intend to push the Harris-Walz campaign on Gaza, advocating for an arms embargo and cease-fire. Other marchers mourn the tens of thousands of Palestinian lives lost in the past nine months. There are hundreds of people organizing for their respective movements, from immigrants’ rights and reproductive freedoms to climate justice and third-party candidates.
As tens of thousands marched to oppose the war in Gaza, the Uncommitted National Movement, a group advocating for a permanent cease-fire, was for the first time ever holding an official DNC panel on Palestinian human rights. The panel received a standing ovation at the end of the event.
To get a sense of where various outside protesters stand on voting in this presidential election, I spoke to attendees who run the gamut from Harris superfans to firm nonvoters.
Some protesters are still unsure as to whether or not they’ll cast a vote this fall. As someone who lives in a deep-blue state, Soph, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, is calculating the value of their vote. “I live in Chicago, which is safely blue, so I have not yet decided whether I will be voting,” they told me. But they admitted: “If I lived in a swing state I’d be out knocking on doors.” They are also well aware of the political power of the pro-Palestine movement. “It’s exciting and good to see Democratic leadership responding to the energy of groups calling for an end to aid to Israel,” Soph said.
Many others like Soph are weighing the pros and cons of voting in the presidential election this year. It’s clear that there are voters who can still be swayed to show up for Harris, both at the ballot box and in the streets, but who still need to be convinced.
Athena, Drew, and Cynthia were standing together at the rally. All of them struck me as people who fundamentally believe in voting as a civic duty but have been pushed to their breaking points since Israel began bombing Gaza last fall. “I want to vote,” Athena, a 26-year-old who hails from Urbana-Champaign, told me. “I would actually very much like to campaign, door-knock, and all this other stuff. But my, I don’t know, my conscience tells me not to until something changes, until [there’s an] arms embargo [on] Israel.”
“I think it’s likely that I’ll vote for Kamala, but I don’t think I’ll be organizing or campaigning,” Athena concluded.
Meanwhile, Drew, a 30-year-old from Chicago’s northwest suburbs, is looking for a signal: either an arms embargo or direction from Palestinian leaders in the United States before casting a vote for Harris. “If, for example, Rashida Tlaib endorsed Harris, I would get the hint,” he told me.
Cynthia, 24, shares that view. “I’m not sure if I’m voting for Harris yet. I definitely wasn’t voting for Biden,” she said. “I think I would also be swayed by Tlaib or the Uncommitted [National] Movement people—if they did something behind the scenes and then endorsed [Harris], I would assume she gave them a good promise.”
But for many others, Harris’s current positions on Gaza are problematic. On August 8, Harris’s national security adviser Phil Gordon posted on X that the vice president “does not support an arms embargo on Israel,” which is a key policy bullet point for pro-Palestine advocates and groups.
The day before Gordon’s post, Harris’s dismissive comments to pro-Palestine protesters who were chanting at her rally in Michigan went viral. “You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” she told the protesters. Multiple speakers at the protest in Chicago on Monday repeated the phrase, reclaiming it: “We’re speaking now.”
Nijma, a 25-year-old Palestinian American from Cleveland, Ohio, came to the march with her family. “No matter who is elected, I don’t believe any political leader is going to help make a change for our country and our people,” she told me. “I don’t think we plan on voting at all. I don’t think they’re gonna help benefit our people back in our country.”
Jeff Alian, a 62-year-old Palestinian American, lives in Florida. We talked as Alian handed out signs that said “Abandon Harris ’24” as part of the rebranding of the Abandon Biden campaign, which was launched late in 2023 to leverage the votes of Muslim and Arab Americans in key swing states for a cease-fire in Gaza. “Two-thirds of my life I’m living here. I’m loyal to this country, but I’m against supporting the genocide, the ethnic cleansing, that’s happening to my people,” he told me.
Alian wasn’t always determined to withhold his vote, but the Democratic Party lost it when Biden did not call for a permanent cease-fire by October 31st. I asked him if there was anything Harris could do to win his vote back. “She could have before,” he told me, “but she did [nothing]. She’s complicit. She stood silent.”
I also spoke to protesters who supported the Palestinians in Gaza but planned to vote for Harris. Tracy Richardson, a 60-year-old from Berkeley, California, wore a “Harris 2024 For the People” hat proudly while listening to the rally. She calls herself “an environmentalist at heart” and cited Trump’s anti-environmental policies as her main motivator for casting a vote for Harris.
“I’m not into what’s happening in Gaza at all, and it’s got to stop,” she said. “But [people] saying that they’re not gonna vote for Kamala is like cutting off their nose to spite their face.”
Nadine Seiler, a 59-year-old from Waldorf, Maryland, stood out in the crowd by holding a massive canvas sign that read: “Trump’s Project 2025, Agenda 47” on one side and “Trump & J.D. Are WEIRD” on the other. Wearing a T-shirt that read “Stop Genocide” and watermelon sneakers (watermelons have become symbols of the pro-Palestine movement since their colors—black, red, and green—match the Palestinian flag), Seiler told me that she came out to the protest “in solidarity with the Palestinian people and the other groups that are advocating for their rights.” But her core concerns, she told me, are Project 2025 and Agenda 47.
Seiler also told me that she is deeply concerned about her safety with respect to concealed-carry laws under a second Trump presidency. “As a Black woman with an accent that triggers people, [if] somebody gets scared for their life, and then they shoot me,” she said, “then in the system that we have in America, as a Black woman, there’s a very, very, very small likelihood of there being any justice for my death.”
Despite that grim conclusion, Seiler added, “We cannot boycott the system right now, because that is the only system we have—and if we allow Project 2025 and Agenda 47 to be implemented, we will have no elections to boycott come January 2025.”
