Joe Biden celebrated another primary victory on Tuesday, even though it was a rather humiliating one. More than 100,000 Democratic primary voters selected "uncommitted" rather than cast their ballot for Biden. While that may not be as humiliating as Nikki Haley losing to "None of these candidates" in Nevada, it qualified the protest voters to send a noncommitted delegate to the national convention.
The protest vote in Michigan against Biden was far more successful than its organizers had hoped. Anti-Israeli War group Listen to Michigan reportedly set out to win just 10,000 votes — roughly equivalent to the number of votes that Donald Trump won the state by in 2016 — in the hopes of showing Biden that he could lose the state over his public support of Israel in its war against Hamas.
One of the more telling results came out of Dearborn, the city with the largest population of Muslim Americans in the country.
"The 'uncommitted' vote in Dearborn won 57% support while Biden received 40%, according to the unofficial tally of every precinct in Dearborn posted on the city clerk's website," the Detroit Free Press reported. "It marks a nearly 17-point loss for Biden in the city's primary. In total, 11,340 Dearborn voters participated in the Democratic presidential primary with 4,526 voting for Biden and 6,432 selecting 'uncommitted.'"
And that wasn't the only city in which Biden had troubling results.
Biden also suffered electoral blows in other cities with significant Arab American and Muslim communities. Biden also lost to "uncommitted" in Hamtramck where 828 "uncommitted" votes accounted for 61% of the total vote share in the city's Democratic presidential primary, according to unofficial results. In Dearborn Heights, a plurality but not a majority of voters picked "uncommitted" over Biden, according to the unofficial tally.
There's no guarantee that everyone who voted "uncommitted" in the primary will reject Biden in the general election, but in a state that's probably going to be close, a fraction of those protest voters leaving their ballots blank for president could make the difference. On its face, that prospect could be enough to influence Biden's public position on the Israel-Hamas war, though even that would be risky. As PJMedia's Rick Moran noted, "there are five times the number of Jewish voters in the U.S. than Muslim voters," which means there's "no chance that Biden will withdraw his support from Israel."
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Biden has been trying desperately to please both Jewish and Muslim voters by publicly supporting Israel while simultaneously advocating for a ceasefire, and I think he will continue to try. The battleground state of Michigan is crucial for Biden's chances of victory in November, and as of now, he's already in trouble there. Currently, polls have Donald Trump in the lead, and Tuesday's primary shows much more energy for Trump in Michigan, as more voters backed him than Biden and "Uncommitted" combined.
If you're in the Biden White House or the Biden-Harris campaign, alarm bells are going off.
