Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib defeated her Republican opponent in Michigan’s 12th congressional district election on Tuesday, securing a fourth term as the only Palestinian-American woman in the US Congress.
The Associated Press called the race with just 18 percent of the votes counted.
Tlaib secured 77 percent of the vote, defeating the Republican Party’s James Hooper who received just 19 percent of the vote.
Her victory comes amid the backdrop of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians so far and has been diplomatically and militarily supported by the Biden-Harris administration for more than a year.
Tlaib has been a vocal critic of the war, calling for the US to withhold weapons from Israel. Her opposition to the war on Gaza and support for pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses have drawn harsh criticism from both Republicans and Democrats.
Look, it’s such an exhausting night, and I really do believe that you want to see a better world. I do too.
I’m just so shattered that we’re looking at four years of chipping away at the rights of women, LGBT, and transgender people. Four years of degrading all the checks and balances against the president. Four years of political retaliations going unchecked. Four years of aggressive anti-climate policy, inhumane border policy, and pandering to a Russia (and now North Korea!) that is also slaughtering innocents in Ukraine. Four years of middle east policy that is at least as bad as Biden/Harris’s, but likely far worse. And four years of slamming our economy with tariffs to “own the Chinese” I guess.
A vote for Harris was a vote to make things better. Not everything. Good lord she wasn’t the answer to so many major issues facing the US and the world. But it was an objectively better vote, by every metric, than a vote for Trump, or a no-vote. I just can’t argue any more on that.