Former US presidential candidate Kamala Harris has reportedly reached out to and held meetings with progressive, pro-Palestinian Democrats and activists, as she mulls running for president again in the 2028 campaign.
Harris, who served as Vice President between 2021 and 2025, becoming the first Asian and African American woman to do so, has also spoken with New York City mayor Zohran Mamdan i over the phone as recently as last Thursday, according to a report by Axios , and both are planning to talk more soon.
The two have also been in contact over the months, according to the report. Reaching out to pro-Palestinians Other than Mamdani, Harris has reportedly met with one member of the Uncommitted National Movement, the protest group founded by Layla Elabed and Abbas Alawieh, which urged the United States government to impose an arms embargo on Israel and call for a ceasefire during Israel's genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
The Uncommitted National Movement had heckled Harris during a presidential rally in August 2024, after which the former presidential candidate stressed that she wouldn't support an arms embargo on Israel, saying she remained "committed" to its security.
Alawieh, who's now running as a Democrat for a Michigan state Senate seat, confirmed his meeting with Harris and said he "reiterated his longstanding position that American tax dollars should never be used to target civilians or destroy entire communities," during their meeting.
She had also spoken with James Zogby, the Lebanese-American founder of the Arab American Institute, who has campaigned for Palestinian rights for decades. Winning back support after discontent with pro-Israel stance Margaret DeReus, the Executive Director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), said that Harris's outreach could be an attempt to sway pro-Palestinian voters and other Democratic voters back to the party after many of them were disillusioned wit its pro-Israel stance.
Speaking to The New Arab , she said that the vast majority of Democratic voters "want their next presidential nominee to cut off weapons for Israel, and contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination increasingly see that writing on the wall."
She added: "Democratic leadership failed to listen to their voters in 2024 when it came to Palestinian rights, and that helped pave the way for President Trump’s reelection."
She also stressed that the Democratic Party "can’t afford to again make the mistake" of alienating its voters.
Harris’ outreach comes after Mamdani’s congressional endorsements all won their primaries, in a landmark sweep that pulled the Democratic Party further left.
Democratic Socialist candidates such as Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Brad Ladner, who unseated incumbent candidates, all espouse staunchly pro-Palestinian views, much like Mamdani himself. New York City's first-ever Asian American and Muslim mayor has acknowledged the Nakba, or catastrophe in Arabic, which saw the forced expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes by Zionist militias to make way for the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. He has repeatedly condemned Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and the genocidal war in Gaza and has publicly endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) group, while also condemning the pro-Israel AIPAC lobbying group.
Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor last year has also seen a host of other US cities elect progressive, pro-Palestinian candidates to represent their cities, in a phenomenon known as the 'Mamdani effect'.
In 2024, Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump - with a large part of her failure boiling down to her approach to the Gaza war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which alienated scores of Muslim and Arab American votes.
This boosted Donald Trump’s election campaign, with pockets of Arab and Muslim American voters opting for him. At the time, Trump had pledged "to stop all wars".
Harris, who was a high-profile senator and attorney general of California before she became Vice-President has generally espoused traditional US views concerning Israel, having continuously supported Israel’s "right" to US military assistance.
In the late 2010s, Harris addressed the American pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC on several occasions. In 2017, she told an AIPAC crowd: "I believe Israel should never be a partisan issue, and as long as I'm a United States senator, I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel's security and right to self-defence."
She has also travelled to Israel, where she met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has gone on to support legislation accusing the United Nations of bias against Israel.
During the war in Gaza, ongoing since October 2023 despite a months-long ceasefire, Harris did call for a truce in the enclave, but insisted on the release of captives held by Hamas, and said that Israel had the right to "go after" the Palestinian group despite the dire humanitarian situation and massacres in the enclave.
There were moments in which she delivered "soft" criticism of Israel, having called out the country’s disruption of the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
However, despite mounting pressure from pro-Palestinian activists to call out the US's billion-dollar military assistance to Israel, amid a mounting death toll , Harris refused to call for an arms embargo on the country.
This occurred amid the heated exchange at a presidential rally in Detroit with members of the pro-Palestine Uncommitted National Movement, whose co-founder she recently met
Her security adviser said at the time that Harris "will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups."
However her recent meeting suggest there may be a potential shift in her stance, although it is yet to be seen how far she is willing to go to appeal to pro-Palestinian voters.