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MICHIGAN’S PRIMARY SHOWS BIDEN IS COURTING POLITICAL SUICIDE  
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Branko Marcetic
February 28, 2024
Jacobin
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_ The “uncommitted” vote in Michigan way outperformed
expectations last night, reflecting Democratic unhappiness with Joe
Biden’s support for Israel’s brutal war. He should change course
on Gaza immediately. _

Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud speaks during Listen to Michigan's
election night gathering in Dearborn on Tuesday., Junfu Han, Detroit
Free Press

 

In the days leading up to yesterday’s Democratic primary in
Michigan, President Joe Biden’s White House and reelection campaign
were reportedly
[[link removed]] “freaking
out” about the grassroots push to protest his handling of the
Israel-Gaza conflict by getting voters to check “uncommitted” on
the ballot. With the votes now cast and tallied up, it’s easy to see
why.

“Uncommitted” came second in the Michigan primary with 13 percent
of the vote, making up just shy of 101,000 individual votes, in a
stunning rebuke of an incumbent president by the voters meant to be
his most committed supporters. The three-week-old campaign cleared its
own, self-set benchmark of ten thousand votes in a matter of hours.

Critics, not unfairly, charged
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target had been set artificially low to exceed expectations. Yet by
the end of the night, the final total was not just ten times this
number. It was both a higher percentage and roughly five times the raw
total that “uncommitted” drew against Barack Obama in the
state’s 2012 primary
[[link removed]]. That was a year in
which Obama’s reelection chances were considered
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owing to the then president’s sagging approval rating
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one that was nonetheless still seven points higher
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low
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Last night’s “uncommitted” vote was also far higher than that of
the Michigan Republican primary four years ago, when Biden’s likely
opponent Donald Trump was the unpopular incumbent fighting for
reelection, but saw only 4.2 percent (or 28,485) of his own party’s
voters in the state rebuke him in the same way.

The result is both a breathtaking organizing achievement and a
testament to Democratic voters’ near-unprecedented
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with their own president.

The Listen to Michigan campaign, organized by a broad collection of
activists comprising, among others, young voters, Arab and Muslim
Americans, local Democrats, and left-wing organizations
like Democratic Socialists of America
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managed this after only three weeks of work and little funding. The
most high-profile support it got was from congresswoman and DSA member
Rashida Tlaib, who has been roundly attacked in the media for backing
the effort, and former congressman Beto O’Rourke. This all comes
amid a Democratic primary contest that has been specially shaped to
smother opposition to Biden and smooth his way into the general
election, from nonsensically rearranging
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primary schedule to favor the president, to canceling
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and depriving his few challengers of both airtime
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More ominous for Biden is what this result signals for his chances to
win the key battleground state in November. Biden’s winning margin
there four years ago was roughly 155,000 votes, not much more than the
number of “uncommitted” Michiganders this year — and that came
under historically favorable conditions, when Biden was viewed vastly
more favorably, and as a result of a determined organizing campaign by
many of the same groups
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involved in whipping “uncommitted” votes.

Maybe more significant was Trump’s winning margin of eleven thousand
votes in 2016, when Democratic turnout was depressed by a lack of
enthusiasm, as well as the figure that the Listen to Michigan campaign
pointedly took up as its goal. As Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hammoud put
it
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“We’re not sizable enough to make a candidate win. But we’re
sizable enough to make a candidate lose.”

Sure enough, “uncommitted” trounced the president by sixteen
points
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night in heavily Arab and Muslim Dearborn, which Biden had won in
2020
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74 percent of the vote. Similarly, Washtenaw County, home to state
colleges including the University of Michigan, saw “uncommitted”
take home 17 percent
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the vote, a sign of young voters’ well-documented
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of Biden’s unconditional support for the war. Both groups were key
parts of Biden’s winning coalition over Trump in 2020, not just in
Michigan but nationwide.

All of this amounts to a resoundingly clear message to Biden on Gaza
from the Democratic base, one that the president is showing some signs
of comprehending. On the eve of the vote, Biden told reporters
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a rare televised appearance that his “hope” was to have a
cease-fire in place by next Monday. California representative Ro
Khanna — who has visited Michigan and urged Biden behind the scenes
to change course on Gaza out of concern it could cost him the election
— has said
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timing of Biden’s announcement wasn’t a coincidence. Former
defense secretary Mark Esper told
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Israeli officials he spoke to had been “surprised” by Biden’s
admission, adding that “a cynic might say that President Biden said
that because we’re on the eve last night of the Michigan primary,
where words like that would resonate well with Arab Americans and
Muslim Americans.”

What’s not clear is whether Biden is really intending to follow
through. In the same interview, Esper disclosed that Israeli officials
were confused by Biden’s words, since what they wanted was a
“pause” or “temporary cease-fire.” The most recent 
[[link removed]]news
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that the administration has given Israel until the middle of March to
put in writing that it will let humanitarian aid into Gaza and won’t
violate international law while taking US weapons, which the State
Department will then certify by the end of the month. That suggests
that if a cease-fire doesn’t come by Monday, Biden will allow Israel
at least another month to wage its war before considering cutting off
the flow of arms, if that even happens.

Even if a cease-fire does come, it’s unclear if it will take the
permanent form that Listen to Michigan organizers are demanding, or if
it will hew closer to what Israeli officials are envisioning. Israeli
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed
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press forward with an Israeli assault on Rafah — where 1.4 million
Gazans were corralled into on the false pretense that it would be a
“safe area” — after a pause that lasts at most two months, which
would make the cease-fire functionally meaningless.

Though some disaffected voters, like organizers of the smaller
“Abandon Biden” campaign, view their goal
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convincing voters to sit out the presidential election and inflict a
political defeat on Biden, supporters of Listen to Michigan explicitly
framed their effort as a way to shake the White House awake and give
Biden a path to winning back their votes. It remains to be seen if
he’ll listen: according to 
[[link removed]]_Politico_
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morning, “presidential aides continue to believe that today’s
‘uncommitted’ voters will be November’s Biden voters once they
have a stark choice in front of them.”

This is a big gamble, especially for the president himself. Biden has
staked much of his legacy on his defeat of Trump in 2020 and came into
office with ambitions
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being a historic, consequential leader. Long resentful at team
Obama’s tendency to look down their noses at him, Biden reportedly
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the growing narrative at the start of his presidency that he was a
bolder leader than his former boss.

By ignoring the demands of pro-cease-fire voters — now the
overwhelming majority of not just his own party but virtually every
demographic [[link removed]] in the United
States
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Biden risks being remembered as a disastrous one-term president who
split his own party and brought a far more virulent, radical Trump
presidency to power, all thanks to a stubborn and increasingly
inexplicable determination to back a foreign government’s unpopular,
heinous war.

The president’s aides have reportedly
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“keeping him in a bubble” regarding voters’ unhappiness with his
Israel-Gaza policy. If this Michigan result isn’t what bursts it,
then they need to step in and do it themselves.

_Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author
of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden._

* Michigan primary
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* protest vote
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* Joe Biden
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* Ceasefire
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