Prepared to sit out election over war abroad, a young Minnesota voter finds her way back into the fold
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Six months ago, Samia Abdulle had resigned herself to skipping the presidential race, unable to get behind either major candidate despite her Democratic leanings.
“I don’t think I would compromise my values to vote for Joe Biden,” she told MPR News in April.
Abdulle, a Somali-American student at the University of Minnesota, was and is still infuriated with the war centered in Gaza that entered its second year this week and caused substantial civilian casualties. Despite heavy pressure, U.S. ally Israel and the militant group Hamas haven’t agreed to end the fighting.
Abdulle held Biden partly accountable for the ongoing war and not doing more to end it.
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“Once months went by without him calling for a cease-fire, I was like, ‘No I’m done with him,’” she said. “And if that means that I don’t have to vote, I’ll do that. It’s more important that I sleep at night.”
But the change in the Democratic ticket in July changed her mind.
“I am going to vote for Kamala Harris,” she said in an interview this month. “I’m not going to be skipping down to the polls, really excited as some other people are, but I’ll still be there.”
Abdulle, 19, was just starting her freshman year of college when the war began. She watched the war unfold through recordings posted on social media by Palestinians in Gaza. She scrolled through video after video of Palestinians searching for loved ones in the rubble and bodies of victims in grocery bags.
She recalled a video of 30 or so Gazan children holding a makeshift press conference, begging for a ceasefire in English. She often wonders how many of those children are still alive.
“I felt like I had a moral duty to bear witness to what was happening,” she said.
In the presidential primary, Abdulle was one of around 46,000 Minnesotans — about 19 percent — who voted “uncommitted” in the presidential primary. Many of these voters selected “uncommitted” on their ballots as part of a Democratic protest vote of Biden, upset over his administration’s inability to slow or stop deadly airstrikes by Israel in Gaza.
And although the movement put pressure on Biden to urge Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire negotiations, it still didn’t feel like enough for Abdulle.
Abdulle felt conflicted. She considers herself to be civically engaged and is active in clubs on campus like Undergraduate Student Government and the Student Legal Services board. She didn’t feel like she could vote for either presidential candidate because of their policies towards Israel and Gaza.
“I felt as though if I went to the [polls] and voted for Joe Biden it was as if I was saying, ‘Yes I like you, yes continue what you’re doing,’” she said. “And I could not do that.”
Abdulle felt herself being swept up in Democrats’ renewed excitement as Biden left the race and Harris took his spot at the top of the ticket, but she was still apprehensive. After all, Harris was part of the Biden administration. Would her stance toward the war and humanitarian crisis be any different?
Ultimately, Abdulle solidified her decision to vote for Harris when she selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, someone she sees as naturally more empathetic toward the plight of civilians in Gaza.
Abdulle isn’t the only voter who cast an “uncommitted” vote that is now wrestling with how to vote at the top-of-the-ticket. Some are planning to vote third party, while others are begrudgingly planning to cast their ballots for Harris.
Earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the more pro-Palestinian members of Congress, told MPR News that while the choice might be difficult for some voters, she regards another four years of former President Donald Trump as a worse outcome.
“I am thinking about who can be a governing partner, someone that we can be in opposition with and push them on certain policies if they are not there,” Omar said. “We know that Vice President Harris and Governor Walz have a track record. Whether they were there on a particular policy or not, we’ve been able to move them with our stories, with our shared hopes and aspirations, and with some education on the impacts that those policies would have.“
Abdulle is holding on to slivers of hope that, if elected, Harris would approach the conflict in the Middle East differently than Biden had.
“I’d like to think so, I’d really like to think so,” she said. “That’s all I can really say, I’d like to think so.”
For now, for Abdulle, it’s enough.
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