AP Photos/Carlos Osorio and Evan Vucci
- Over 100,000 Michigan voters chose "uncommitted" over Biden in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.
- It comes after Rep. Rashida Tlaib and activists led a campaign to make him change course on Israel.
- Trump won Michigan by under 11,000 votes in 2016, and activists say they're leveraging their votes.
President Joe Biden may have handily won the Michigan Democratic primary on Tuesday, but the results came with a significant warning sign for his continued support for Israel.
Over 100,000 voters cast "uncommitted" ballots, accounting for over 13% of the vote, according to Decision Desk HQ.
It comes after the "Listen to Michigan" campaign urged voters to withhold their support for Biden until Israel enacts a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. The campaign has been led by Layla Elabed, a Michigan activist and the younger sister of Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress.
"I was proud today to walk in, and pull a Democratic ballot, and vote 'uncommitted,'" Tlaib said in a video message on Tuesday. "President Biden is not listening to us. This is the way we can use our democracy to say: listen. Listen to Michigan."
A statement from @RashidaTlaib on voting uncommitted in Michigan today. pic.twitter.com/xOfOcYTFQn
— #ListenToMichigan (@Listen2michigan) February 27, 2024
The results illustrate the unique challenges that Biden faces in the crucial battleground state amid the war in Gaza, where almost 30,000 Palestinians have been killed since the October 7 Hamas attacks.
Tens of thousands of Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans live in Dearborn and metropolitan Detroit, including some whose family members have been killed in recent months.
"President Biden has funded the bombs falling on the family members of people right here in Michigan," Elabed said in a statement on Monday. "Thousands of Michigan Democrats who voted for Biden in 2020 now feel completely betrayed."
It remains unclear how many of the "uncommitted" voters will continue to withhold their support for Biden in the general election, but organizers have argued that it's on the president to earn their support — and they say it won't be their fault if Biden ends up losing Michigan to former President Donald Trump in the general election.
"President Biden himself, by failing to call for a cease-fire, is on track to deliver the presidency back to Donald Trump and his white supremacist buddies," said Abbas Alawieh, a spokesperson for Listen to Michigan, during a press call earlier this month.
Listen to Michigan organizers had set an official goal of garnering 10,000 votes — around the same as Trump's roughly 10,700 vote margin in 2016. Biden defeated Trump by more than 150,000 votes in the state in 2020.
Ahead of the Tuesday primary, officials with the Biden campaign had pointed out that around 20,000 voters have opted to select "uncommitted" in recent presidential primary elections — though the circumstances have varied.
"Uncommitted" accounted for less than 2% of the vote in recent competitive primaries, including 19,106 uncommitted voters in 2020, and 21,601 in 2016.
In 2012, when President Barack Obama faced a non-competitive reelection, and there was no organized effort to push voters to cast uncommitted ballots, 20,833 did so anyway, accounting for 10.7% of the vote.
Four years earlier, when Obama did not appear on the ballot, many of his supporters cast uncommitted votes over his opponent Hillary Clinton, leading to 238,168 votes that accounted for roughly 40% of the electorate.
In a memo to reporters on Monday, the campaign said that it had spent about $200,000 on mail and digital ads, organizing, and other expenses.
In seeking to highlight the uphill nature of the effort, the group claimed that some sympathetic Democratic organizations, elected officials, and operatives kept their distance from the campaign "due to fear of retaliation from the Democratic Party establishment."