In Chicago last August, the Democratic Party staged the version of itself it prefers: lights on cue, music in major keys, speeches polished for unity. For those of us who organized the Uncommitted campaign, the absence onstage told the real story.

In the fall of 2023, I was pitching stories to mainstream media outlets about antiwar protests and how Muslim, Arab, and young voters were souring on the Democratic Party over Joe Biden’s Israel policy. Meanwhile, at Thanksgiving, several of my own relatives told me outright this would be the first election where they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. Around the same time, a producer at a major network told me that soon I’d have a harder time getting Gaza stories on air, because by January “everything will be about the election.”

That was the strategic dilemma. We knew mass mobilizations, marches, and campus protests had moral power, but inside the party they weren’t treated as political power. Most party elites, mainstream media journalists, and the White House itself didn’t believe Gaza would matter in November; they thought the issue would fade and that the anger was confined to young, leftist activists “who are always mad about something.” So the challenge was to make it political in the language the party does understand: votes and elections.