Chapo Trap House - BONUS: The Uncommitted Movement feat. Layla Elabed & Waleed Shahid

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Organizers Layla Elabed and Waleed Shahid join us to discuss their recent successes with the movement to vote uncommitted against Joe Biden in the ongoing democratic primaries. They lay out their goals, how they’ve been organizing, what they feel they’ve achieved so far, and what they hope to accomplish going into the Democratic convention. If you’d like to know more or learn how to get involved, go to: https://www.listentomichigan.com/

Hello, everybody. It's Thursday, March 7th. This is Will and Chapo here. We've talked about it, obviously, a couple times over the last few weeks on the show, but the uncommitted movement has been sort of a surprise of this Democratic primary season, racking up over 100,000 votes in Michigan and just on this Tuesday picking up about 20% of the vote in Minnesota, which is around 40 or 50,000 votes. Joining me to talk about the Uncommitted campaign are two organizers from it. Joining us is Waleed Shahid and Layla Alabit. Layla, Waleed, welcome to the show. Layla Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Waleed, Wale Here's where I want to start. And while I'll begin with you, and then Leila, I'd love to hear from you as well. So like I mentioned, like this is, Uncommitted has sort of surprised everyone,

but like going forward, the Super Tuesday just happened, going forward, what do you each think is like the realistic goal for the Uncommitted campaign at this point? Well, so the main purpose of the Uncommitted campaign was to literally get the political class and the media class to listen to the voices of Palestinian Americans, Arab Americans, young people

who are pissed off about President Biden's funding of a genocide in Gaza. And I think we've been enormously successful at getting the media to pay attention to these voters who are currently uncommitted to the president's reelection unless he dramatically changes course and ends funding to the war. Just today it was announced that Hawaii is getting, I believe, seven delegates. They had 29% uncommitted. So I think if we can continue to show that we can get, you know, 5% to 10% to 15% in

some of these states, especially Washington state coming up and Wisconsin. Those are places with real organizing efforts on the ground. That would be amazing. If you go to listentomichigan.com right now, you can plug into phone banks for those efforts in Washington, Wisconsin. You can donate to our campaign, but you don't need to live in those states to phone bank or donate or participate, but those are the next two battlegrounds. And Leila, you're from Michigan.

How did you get involved with the Uncommitted Campaign and what does this movement mean to you and what do you hope to achieve with it? Yeah, so I was the, I'm the campaign manager for Listen to Michigan. And how I got involved is that I'm a long time organizer in the Arab American and Muslim American community, but also in Detroit and Dearborn. And so I got a hold of Walid's memo talking about this theory of change and this

strategy to use this unifying vehicle of the uncommitted option on the Michigan Democratic primary ballot. And so as a Arab American, a Muslim American, and a Palestinian American that has a family in occupied West Bank, for me, this felt like, you know, another powerful movement, an extension of the ceasefire movement, an arm of the ceasefire movement that we could use to really, really send this message to Joe Biden, his administration, and the Democratic Party, that his core base, his core constituency, demands a permanent ceasefire now,

and we demand the end of military funding to fund Netanyahu's war crimes. And so for me to see the success that we had in Michigan, in Michigan birthing this political movement that has, you know, went to Minnesota, we were incredibly successful in Minnesota and the organizing efforts there. And then to take this to, hopefully to Washington

and then to Wisconsin, it feels like we're onto something that is powerful. And we've already seen some change in narrative from the Biden administration. And I think it has a lot to do with what we were able to do here in Michigan. Well, Laila, you mentioned a change of narrative from the Biden administration. I just saw this morning that Joe Biden will be announcing at his State of the Union address at a U.S. military-led mission to build basically a peer on Gaza to deliver aid. Your thoughts about that, do you regard this as a reaction to the Uncomitted campaign?

And do you regard it as something that's likely to sort of slow the momentum of Uncomitted? Because hey, look, he's trying to get aid in by building a peer. Or is this likely only to further exacerbate the people's anger at the Biden administration over this issue? I 100% attribute this action from the Biden administration on what we've done here in Michigan and what we're doing in other states. It's a step, but we have been very consistent and very clear on our demands with Uncommitted that we need not just aid, but we need to end this genocide. We need to have a permanent and immediate ceasefire. And we need to do that by ending this unchecked, unconditional funding that we send to Israel

in the form of military aid. Well, Lee, obviously, the anger over Israel's ongoing war on Palestine has been simmering for a long time, and it certainly exploded after October 7th, given their actions in Gaza. But how did the uncommitted campaign come together so quickly? Because I mean, I know there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the Biden administration but like as far as like from my view like this seems like this came out of nowhere and picked up a lot of steam really quickly so how did how did this all come together? So I was involved as a communications advisor to some of the organizations

leading the protests in October and November and the ceasefire resolution. Starting in December I started to notice and lots of people started to notice that the protests were dwindling in impact and the media was covering them less and less. Around that time, a producer at a major cable news show reached out to me and said, hey, just got the memo that we're going to be covering the Warren Gaza way less in the new year. We're pivoting to mostly election coverage, Trump versus Biden and Trump versus Haley. And so we'll be covering our resources for war correspondents are decreasing and we're just gonna be covering Gaza way less. And so that made me think like, okay, like how do we force the media

establishment to talk about the war in Gaza in their terms, which was elections. So if we could force the frame that the media was already going to use for their coverage was elections and make it about Gaza, then we could be effective. So I wrote this memo, BCC, to a bunch of people, but a memo and an idea is only as good as the organizers who can execute it with real relationships and real heft and muscle. And so I got connected to Layla, I got connected to Lexie Zaidan, Abbas Alawiyah, who just people from Detroit and Dearborn who like have the relationships and have the skills to like bring this campaign forward. And honestly, like this campaign was $200,000 was three weeks in the making. That's nothing like one congressional race costs about five to $10 million in one congressional

district. This was a statewide campaign for half the salary of a Biden senior staffer with three weeks. And so if we just like started a month earlier with double the budget, I think we could have easily hit half a million voters and gotten even more delegates. And so I hope that people pour in their energy and time into these upcoming campaigns in Washington, Wisconsin. There are not that many states with an uncommitted option, unfortunately. So people are sometimes, people think that they can vote uncommitted anywhere, but there's only a handful of states that have that option.

So keep an eye out On our website and other places to find out if you're in one of those states Well, I think it's unquestionable that the campaign has made an impact because The reactions in the media that now have to talk about this and deal with this have been, you know, quite irate So we'll lead starting with you. What do you say to the criticism that the Uncommoned campaign is either unwittingly helping Donald Trump or just simply being useful idiots to secure his reelection? Well, this is a big tent campaign from like loyal Democrats, even liberal Zionists all the way to anarchists and socialists who've been protesting in the streets. This is a way to bring people together who are pissed off about the war and want to make their voices heard at the ballot box. And so there are definitely some people who are voting uncommitted who are not going to vote for President Biden and probably vote

third party or sit out come November. But I think the vast majority of people who are voting uncommitted would, and the polls I've seen show this, if Biden was to end funding toward Israel's war in Gaza, if Biden was to call for a permanent ceasefire, if Biden was to end funding for the occupation, these voters would come around. Obviously, you know, it is a big stretch for Biden to go from here to there, but every poll I've seen is that voters who are uncommitted right now would come around if Biden were to change his position dramatically. I think this is a warning. Everything I heard from the political establishment and like media and journalists I talked to was that Biden doesn't take these Arabs, these young people, these Palestinians, Muslims seriously. He thinks by October when Biden reminds Muslims and Arabs and young people about the Muslim ban,

they will come around and vote for him. I personally wanted to send the media and political establishment a message that these voters are serious about their uncommitment to Biden, and that it's a warning sign for Democrats that if they're going to put Netanyahu above defeating Trump, if they're going to put Netanyahu above defeating Trump, if they're gonna put Netanyahu above American democracy, then the bill will come due for disregarding Palestinian lives. And so I think the Biden campaign is starting to understand that these voters are serious.

So either they will continue what they're doing, which is to rebrand themselves as, oh, we're nice to the Palestinians, we have nice messaging about Muslims. They'll either, or they'll abandon Muslims and Arabs and young people and go for Nikki Haley voters or they'll change their position and try to earn the support of the voters who care about human rights for everybody. And so we're waiting to see a policy change. But you know, right now it's it's not good enough.

And Layla, like when you like when you campaign on this issue, do you encounter Democratic voters who maybe feel upset by Biden's support for the war on Palestine, but sort of, I guess, ultimately think that's over there, there's nothing I can really do about it, and I just can't bear the thought of Trump being president. Do you have, what do you say to these voters, or is this sort of a voice from nowhere?

Do you not encounter people like that? Well, I think that Michigan voters showed the Democratic Party exactly how they felt. In Michigan, we had 73 out of 83 counties vote at 10% or over for uncommitted. And so I think that's a good example of how broad this campaign was. Well, Lee, like in terms of the reaction of the Democratic Party and its leadership, do you find that, do you think that they were maybe caught a little off guard that this movement is not just a movement of Arab and Muslim Democratic voters but has sort of crossed demographic lines in a way that can't be sort of easily cordoned off or jettisoned as a small sort of ethnic voting group. Yeah I think they're definitely caught off guard. In Minnesota

there was the New York Times did a graph showing that the majority that the biggest the largest size of the vote for Uncomitted came from voters under 35, and that multiracial, multi-faith, multi-ethnic. And so we have statistics showing that this is not just an Arab and Muslim issue, but this is particularly a generational issue. It was definitely intentional that Kamala Harris made her rebrand on Ceasefire and Selma of all places. She was speaking to an older black Christian audience. And for people who have been paying attention or several like a thousand black pastors wrote

wrote to the White House saying that they were against the funding of the war. The AME church. Well, I just wanted if I could interject Biden. That's surprising to me because I remember when protesters disrupted Biden's comments at that famous black church, I was assured that this would turn off the entire sort of African-American faith community, but that doesn't appear to have happened.

You watch a lot of MSNBC. Yeah, yeah. So that church, that church where Biden was disrupted in the entire democratic establishment said like, how rude these protesters, this is a historic black church. So that was the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the largest black congregations in the country. That denomination put out a statement a few weeks after that disruption saying they could no longer support funding of Israel's occupation or war. And so, you know, maybe people have their feathers ruffled for a couple hours, but I think those protesters got their voice across because

literally that denomination is now against the war and calling on Biden to end his support of it. Um, so like in this process, the Uncommoned campaign has picked up a number of delegates. Well, will you be sending those delegates to the convention and what does that like practically look like? I mean, it's not going to be enough numbers to deny Joe Biden the nomination, but what do like you plan to send delegates to the convention and what does that what does that practically like look like? So listen to Michigan is figuring out a plan to coordinate and organize these delegates. Each part, each Democratic Party in these states has a different, a little bit of a different

process to get the delegates, to make sure the delegates are the delegates from the uncommitted campaigns. But I imagine they will go to the convention to hold whoever the nominee is accountable to their anti-war agenda, to use the process of the convention, to put forward their vision of what the Democratic Party should stand for. And some of it is bureaucratic and arcane, but I imagine they will, you know, this is a, this is a core part of the Democratic Party. Like half of the people who voted for Biden in 2020 believe Israel has committed a genocide And so I think they'll be carrying the voices of Democratic voters who elected them in these primaries to the convention in Chicago All right, we'll need I know you have to go I don't have to go in a second

But I guess just like to conclude with you You said Wisconsin and Washington are the primaries the big ones were uncommitted is on the ballot line When are those primaries and what do you want people to know both in those states and the country at large going into these primaries? Yeah. So Washington's primary is this coming Tuesday on March 12th. There is an amazing effort underway there that's humble and low budget. But that is on Tuesday, March 12th. I don't know when this episode is coming out, but hopefully people can plug in. You can go to listentomichigan.com to get plugged in,

donate, volunteer, phone bank for that effort. And then the other one is Wisconsin, which is in April. That's also looking like a pretty significant organizing push in an organized one. That election is April 2nd. And so if you missed the Washington one and can't plug into the phone banks or can't donate it to it,

you still have a month to get involved in the April Wisconsin Democratic primary. Okay, great. Layla, I'm sorry to be lost to you there, but I just wanted to follow up the finished question I was going to ask you about when you campaigned on this issue, do you encounter voters that are angry at Biden's policies

supporting the war on Palestine, but like just can't bear the thought of Trump being president? Like how do you talk to those voters or is this even an, like a vote that sort of, sorry, or is this even an opinion that you encounter? Well, yeah, it's definitely an opinion that we encounter. But what can I say about the Arab American and Muslim American community is that, you know, this runs deep. This betrayal that we felt from the Biden administration and from the president runs really deep because we are directly affected by what is happening now in LaGaza and in that region in the south of Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen. And so we are watching our loved ones, our friends, our family members be murdered through our American taxpayer dollars. And so, yes, I do think that on one hand, you have folks that say, you know, I don't support the genocide,

I don't support our complicity in this war, but I cannot have another four years of Donald Trump. And what we say to that is that this is a primary, this is our chance to use our vote as our voice to hopefully get Joe Biden and his administration to change course and reevaluate their policies when it comes to this unchecked and unconditional military funding that we provide. And so these votes don't carry over into November and everyone is going to have to vote their conscience and hopefully that we see some change on behalf of the Biden administration. Walid, Layla, we got to leave it there. I want to thank you so much for your time and your work on this campaign.

And I would encourage our listeners to check out Listen to Michigan and maybe do some phone banking for Washington and Wisconsin coming up if you feel like contributing to a worthwhile political campaign this election season. Once again, Walid, Layla, thank you for your time and all your efforts. Thank you.