Kamala Harris Is Winning Over College Students in Michigan. The Uncommitted Movement Could Still Cost Her the Election.

EAST LANSING, Michigan — Jesse Estrada White is torn about what to do in the voting booth, in part because he knows the stakes.

The 21-year-old Michigan State University senior was a leading activist in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus. Heading into the primary in February, many such activists withheld their votes from President Joe Biden in protest of his support for Israel, hoping to pressure him into a policy change. But now that the general election looms and there’s still no concrete policy shift in sight, Estrada White faces a dilemma that many college-age voters in the state are wrestling with: He is reluctant to support Kamala Harris, whom he sees as supportive of Israel’s actions in Gaza, but he really doesn’t want to see Trump win.

He dreads a Trump return to power, the sort of Democratic doomsday scenario that might look something like this:

Donald Trump flips Nevada, Arizona and Georgia, giving him 268 electoral votes. Kamala Harris carries Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and sits at 255. The race comes down to Michigan. Wayne County numbers show that Harris has hit her marks in Detroit. But in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights, which have large Arab American populations (both Muslim and Christian), there’s surprisingly strong support for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Both there and in Hamtramck, Trump outperforms his 2020 levels, especially among more conservative Muslims who’ve drifted to the right on social issues . Then sprinkle in votes from the remnants of the “uncommitted” movement on college campuses — young voters who can’t bring themselves to vote for a candidate they see as overly supportive of Israel. In a state that Trump won in 2016 by just 10,704 votes, that could be enough to hand him the presidency again.

There’s a reason to think this could happen. Back in February, during the Democratic primary, the uncommitted movement showed its strength in Ann Arbor and East Lansing, the college towns that house Michigan’s two largest schools, winning 19 percent and 15 percent of the vote, respectively. That vote happened while those two schools’ student bodies were out on spring break. But this November, they won’t be: The roughly 75,000 undergrads at MSU and U of M will be in Michigan. If enough of them vote uncommitted or third party — or stay home from the polls — it could tilt the election.

Estrada White worries about that outcome.

“I feel this fear of a Trump presidency, and I’m committed to not letting that happen,” he tells me, his voice barely a whisper so as not to disturb the other students studying at Michigan State University’s main library. He has Mexican ancestry on his mother’s side and “feels the sort of anxiety and impending doom that a Trump presidency brings.”

Yet he is unsure whether he can bring himself to vote for Harris.

“I’ll never not vote,” the 21-year-old senior vows. “I’ll always vote down-ticket. And I don’t believe voting third party is an effective strategy here in this state. It’s a swing state; we have a lot to win and lose. … For me, my vote is — like, Harris has to do something to win it. I need to see [a] policy that says something in Israel is going to change.”

Behold, the predicament of one “uncommitted” college-age voter in Michigan.

In this, Estrada White has company on campus. The question of just how much, and what they ultimately decide to do, may determine the presidency.

You never forget your first.

If you were a progressive 21-year-old college student in 1960, it might’ve been John F. Kennedy; you felt inspired. If it happened in 2008, perhaps it was Barack Obama; you felt hope.

Consider then, being a progressive 21-year-old college student in 2024.

For your entire adolescence, Trump has been a political force, his Sturm und Drang ways more the norm than the exception. A year, maybe longer, of your high school life was spent in Covid; your graduation might’ve been virtual because of it. Your college years coincided with the presidency of Joe Biden, a moderate in both temperament and policy; the oldest president ever; a man given not to inspiring rhetoric about tomorrow but instead discursive asides about yesterday.

It’s February 2024, the first time you can vote for president, and, surveying your options, you cast your first ballot not for a candidate, but for “uncommitted.” It might feel…

“Shitty,” says Estrada White.

In February, he was among 101,623 Michigan voters — 13.2 percent of the electorate — who cast ballots for “uncommitted” in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, a coalition of leftists, Arab Americans, Muslims and young voters propelled by opposition to the Biden administration’s support for Israel amid its ongoing bombardment of Gaza, which has killed more than 41,000 people.

In the months since February, two things have happened that have pulled that “uncommitted” coalition in opposite directions: The human toll in Gaza has only grown worse, and Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee. While the former has led many Arab and Muslim voters to dig in on their opposition to the Democratic ticket, the latter has lowered opposition to the ticket among college-age voters, many of whom are excited about a new generation of leadership and animated by issues like defending abortion rights and preserving democratic norms.

Beyond growing support for Harris among college students, the uncommitted movement faces the same endurance issue weighing on Gaza demonstrators. “People are burning out,” says Estrada White. “Month after month, almost going on an entire year, we see this genocide happening. I think there’s large sections of campus — ones who aren’t having to readily interact with their family being in Gaza — who are getting desensitized to the violence.”

One of those students with family in Gaza is Saba Saed, a 22-year-old studying neuroscience. She grew up in Palestine in a not particularly religious Muslim family and immigrated to Michigan when she was 12. Though she’s active in the campus’ pro-Palestinian demonstrations, she understands her fellow students who’ve become numb to the death and destruction in Gaza.

“You kind of have to be,” she tells me at a coffee shop just north of campus, as students at nearby tables fret over exam scores and clack away on their MacBooks. “Should a rational person be able to conceptualize what’s happening there, day to day?”

I ask her about the war and Israel’s military assault on Gaza. She bristles, seeing my word choice as a sign of desensitization or worse.

“Is it not concerning, slightly, how violent this past year has been?” she asks. “And we’re still debating whether or not it is, like … you’re using ‘assault’? ‘War’? No. Gen-o-cide .”

That word was used even by young voters I spoke to who enthusiastically support Harris.

“Obviously, there’s a genocide going on,” says Matthew Anderson, a 22-year-old political organizer who graduated in spring and was running a voter registration table on campus on a recent Thursday. “But we can still do our part on women’s rights, environmental rights and stopping a would-be dictator.”

He’s voting for Harris.

Gaza burnout happened, of course, as Biden was replaced on the ticket by Harris, who is more able to drive a clear message and prosecute a case against Trump. Among students here at State, “a lot of the feelings around [Biden] were that, ‘We held our noses in 2020; why are we doing it again in 2024?’” says Anne Ginzburg, a 21-year-old statistics major who supported Biden in the primary. Now, under Harris, Ginzburg says, “enthusiasm has definitely gone up.”

Partly, that’s because Harris’ relative youthfulness and lack of a concrete profile meant that young voters “projected whatever they want to see onto her ticket,” says Jaiden Higgins, a Harris-supporting freshman who, at 17, is agonized that he is three days too young to vote in this election.

But it’s also because Democrats have made a compelling case that students have skin in the game. Recent political ads in The State News , the student-run newspaper on MSU’s campus, show this playbook in action, with threats that “Trump’s Project 2025 agenda will kick students off their parents’ health insurance at age 19” blaring on the front page, while a back-page ad from the Harris campaign writes of the “fundamental freedoms” at stake in the election — among them, the “freedom to live safe from gun violence,” which is not a theoretical concern on a campus where, in February 2023, a 43-year-old gunman killed three students.

Also part of the ad’s appeal: “the freedom to make decisions about your own body.” Michigan voters enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution in a 2022 ballot proposal that passed with more than 56 percent of the vote — including nearly 70 percent support in Ingham County, where State students stayed in line late to vote in a midterm election. And though Trump recently said he would not sign a national ban on abortion, fear of one — and concerns about the accessibility of abortion medications and even contraception — is widespread.

For many students, enthusiasm for Harris goes “hand in hand” with excitement about opposing Trump, says Liam Richichi, the 21-year-old president of the MSU Democrats, who reports that turnout at the chapter’s events has skyrocketed, with nearly 150 students showing up for the semester’s first meeting — a record, per Richichi.

“People are excited to have somebody who is new blood, someone that’s … kind of passing the torch,” he says.

Even so, Gaza remains “a really big conversation that we have on the regular, and I’ve had it multiple times already this year,” Richichi says. But with Biden stepping aside, it isn’t the hurdle for campus Democrats that it once was.

Which is not to say that Harris’ emergence or the chance of Trump’s return to the White House is enough to motivate everyone. Multiple students I spoke with aren’t ready to commit to Harris, and in such a marginal swing state, their ballots could make a difference. Some are even dismissive of the Trump threat altogether.

“I’m not scared of him. He’s all, like, bark and barely any bite,” says Saed, who said she does not feel that any candidate has yet done enough to earn her support, though she intends to vote in November. (She said she had a good idea who she’ll be voting for, but declined to identify the candidate.)

“I just blame the Democrats if they lose to Trump; it’s not my responsibility at that point,” she tells me.

She’s familiar with the questions that come up when someone suggests that not supporting Harris could tip the White House to Trump: “‘As an Arab-American, are you going to [be OK] with a Muslim ban? Is that going to be fine with you?’” she parrots. “You know what? If it comes [with] saving people from genocide.”

Saed’s first election was 2020. She told me she “settled for Biden.” She’s tired of settling.

That also applies to Harris: Some students say she has not carved out a meaningfully different position on Gaza. “You really have to question whether this ‘cease-fire’ rhetoric [from the Harris campaign] is genuine, because it’s always caveated with ‘cease-fire, but we want a hostage deal’ — as if a hostage deal hasn’t been on the table since October,” Estrada White says. “And also, like, what is the role of the vice president in the cease-fire deal? Working day and night? Well, where is it? We haven’t seen it yet. … If we actually cared about getting a cease-fire deal, the vice president would call for an arms embargo.”

Where does this all leave his ballot? Filled out for Harris, or blank on the presidential section? He’s not sure. I ask him if it matters to him why someone wouldn’t vote for president, noting that the ballot skipped out of apathy and the ballot skipped in protest have the same effect on the election’s outcome. He wrestles with the question.

“I think divorced from the reality in which they’re happening, the effect is the same. But I think … oftentimes, the act of an election campaign is saying, ‘Hey, we’re making a collective decision that we want this person or this policy in place so that things can get better for us because we believe what they’re saying.’ And so, if you’re saying, ‘I’m not going to vote because I don’t care,’ that to me is weird, because why abandon a way in which we could, if marginally, improve our lives? But if you’re saying, ‘I’m not voting because I actually don’t believe anyone on the ticket right now is going to benefit me or the people that I love and care about,’ I would say, ‘OK, that makes sense to me.’”

Estrada White would prefer not to leave his ballot blank — he would love an excuse to vote for Harris, a plausible explanation for how she’d be better on Gaza than Biden.

He hasn’t yet heard it.

“At the end of the day,” he says, “I’ll decide when I get into the voting booth.”