Sophia Medzoyan’s mail-in ballot arrived at the Barnard College mailroom on a Tuesday in early October. “It’s staring at me,” she said, a small smile on her face. Medzoyan, nineteen years old, is registered to vote in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state in November’s presidential election, where there are estimated to be more than 48,000 Armenian American residents.
Medzoyan grew up in a predominantly progressive household in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where she and her family were the only Armenians in the area. She says that neither candidate has earned her vote so far. She isn’t the only first-time Armenian American voter to feel this way.
Since announcing her presidential bid, Vice President Kamala Harris has attempted to use social media as a key form of outreach to win over young voters. But, for the Armenian American community, particularly first-time voters, her lack of concrete policy on the issues that matter most to them has had an adverse effect, leading to a sense of complete disengagement from electoral politics.
Medzoyan, for instance, feels disillusioned with the Harris-Walz campaign, especially after its recent statement aimed at the Armenian American community. On September 23, Harris commemorated Armenia’s independence day, touching on the right of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh to return to the region after the war that began there in 2020. The longstanding conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan ended last September, when Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive into the region following a nine-month-long blockade, forcibly displacing more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians from their homes.
“It was like a slap to the face,” Medzoyan says of the statement. “The whole thing felt very performative.” When the ethnic Armenian population was forced to flee from their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Biden-Harris Administration was largely silent on what advocacy organizations like Freedom House have called ethnic cleansing. With the election just days away and Harris’s history of passivity on Armenian issues, the timing of this statement felt disingenuous to many Armenian Americans.
Despite Harris’s attempted effort to appeal to the community, many Armenian Americans remain uncommitted to voting for her. They face a challenging decision that forces them to pick a candidate who is the “lesser of two evils” in a political landscape that continuously overlooks their needs.
“A lot of young Armenian Americans feel like they shouldn’t have to make that choice,” says Gev Iskajyan, who serves on the national board of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA). Iskajyan says Harris’s statement was a welcome acknowledgment of issues that matter to Armenians, but that it was not the first time a presidential candidate offered empty words to the community.
In 2021, Joe Biden became the first United States President to use the term “genocide” to refer to the 1.5 million Armenians who were deported, massacred, and marched to their deaths by the Ottoman government during World War I. Many considered this recognition a triumph for the community, since several countries refuse to formally acknowledge the genocide.
During his run for office, however, Biden pledged that he would enforce Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, which was created to prohibit U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan during and after the first Nagorno-Karabakh war. Biden fell through on that campaign promise, and waived Section 907 restrictions on U.S. aid to Azerbaijan throughout his presidency.
When, in September 2023, following Azerbaijan’s nine-month-long blockade of the ethnic Armenian population of the region, Azerbaijan launched its final offensive, the Biden-Harris Administration did nothing to stop the violence.
Nagorno-Karabakh is not a distant issue for Armenian American voters. Ara Chalian, a national board member of the ANCA and a political organizer in Pennsylvania, says that the use of “U.S. weapons, drones, or parts from American hardware and software companies” shouldn’t be used to “attack Armenians,” many of whom are relatives of Armenian Americans.
Because of the administration’s inaction on the matter, he said Harris’s statement rang hollow—similar to Biden’s recognition of the Armenian genocide. “The statement is a statement,” he says. “Weight comes with action.”
The ANCA estimates there to be over 206,000 Armenian American voters across key swing states. Dzovinar Hamakorzian, who serves as the chair of ANCA Michigan, says there are more than 50,000 Armenians in Michigan. In February, the Michigan Armenian community established its own branch of the “uncommitted” movement, which aims to bring accountability to Democrats’ foreign policy by withholding votes from them. “The community wants action, not words,” says Hamakorzian. “We’re tired of words and empty promises.”
Her son, Garod Hamakorzian, a first-time voter from Michigan, says he is uncommitted to either candidate. The eighteen-year-old Wayne State University student is likely to cast his vote for a third-party candidate because he doesn’t believe Armenian issues are a priority for Harris or Trump. “I don’t want that weighing on my [conscience],” he says.
Garod notes the strong parallels between the uncommitted Arab American and Armenian American populations, which is especially discernable in Dearborn, where there is a high concentration of Arab Americans and Muslims. “Of course I’m going to stand with them,” Garod says. “We have the same opinions on this issue.”
To court Armenian American voters, especially young progressive voters, Harris must adopt a stance that deviates from the current administration’s policy, or lack thereof, on Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. If the status quo remains, voters like Medzoyan and Hamakorzian will continue to struggle with the idea of settling for a “lesser of two evils.” Medzoyan says Harris’s attempt to garner Armenian votes won’t work so long as the United States continues to send arms to Israel, which has historically been a key ally of Azerbaijan.
According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israel accounted for 69 percent of Azerbaijan’s major arms imports from 2016 to 2020. Many of these weapons were used against Armenia during the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. “Those are really the weapons that made [Azerbaijan’s] victory more decisive,” says Medzoyan.
With the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon, Armenians, many of whom have their own ties to the region, feel they cannot commit their vote to the Harris campaign. For those who see and feel the devastating impact of this triangular relationship between the United States, Azerbaijan, and Israel, casting a vote for either presidential candidate presents a profound moral conflict that goes beyond politics.
“The younger person wants to see a vision,” Chalian says, “where a superpower like the United States is going to create a world that’s just, fair, and based on real principles as opposed to geopolitical tangibles like oil, energy, and the ability to sell arms.”
With just days to go until the election, Harris is running out of time to win over young Armenian voters. If Harris stays tethered to the status quo, willfully avoiding any meaningful dialogue with uncommitted voters, Armenian Americans will be left at a crossroads.
This post was originally published on here
