Up until Tuesday’s presidential primary in Michigan, President Joe Biden has met little electoral resistance as he rolls towards renomination as the Democrats’ candidate for president. This is partly to do with Biden-friendly changes the Democratic National Committee made in this year’s primary calendar, but also reflects an unwillingness by members of Biden’s own party to attempt to question his renomination, even amidst ominous signs for Biden’s reelection.
That may have changed Tuesday night after a grassroots movement encouraging voters to cast an “uncommitted” ballot in Michigan’s presidential primary startled Biden and his team. The campaign to vote uncommitted, dubbed “Listen to Michigan,” had asked voters to voice their displeasure with Biden’s support for the ongoing carnage in Gaza by voting uncommitted. After months of downplaying the extent of the discontent among rank-and-file Democratic voters over Biden’s obeisance towards Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza, the president and his team will be hard pressed to ignore this protest vote. And, the stunning erosion of support among constituencies that ardently supported Biden in this critical swing state in 2020 should renew calls for the Democratic Party to take a hard look at the viability of Biden’s candidacy.
With 98.5% of the vote counted, the 100,960 votes cast “uncommitted” in Tuesday’s primary far outstrip the 10,704 votes by which Donald Trump won the state in 2016, and come within striking distance of the total margin that Biden ran up against Trump in 2020. That election saw record-high turnout across the U.S., as progressives, people of color, and young people turned out in droves to unseat Trump. Most prognosticators agree that we are unlikely to see that level of voting this year.
If even a significant percentage of the primary electorate that voted uncommitted in Michigan either does not vote, votes third party, or, God forbid, chooses Trump over Biden in November, then Biden will surely lose the state. If Biden loses Michigan, as Hillary Clinton lost it to Trump in 2016, his path to electoral victory becomes exceedingly difficult. In that scenario, he would probably have to take four of five remaining swing states: Arizona (where he currently trails in polling by about three points); Georgia (he is behind there by an average of seven points); Nevada (Biden trails by seven points there, too); Pennsylvania (where Trump clings to a one-point margin); and Wisconsin (where Biden is behind by two points). This is not to say that the task is impossible — many of these differentials are within the margin of polling error — but, taken together, the calculus for Biden looks incredibly grim.
Simply put, Biden needs to come up with votes, and quickly, at a time when he only seems to be capable of losing them. His administration’s unflinching support for Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza has alienated core constituencies that Biden needed to win in 2020. Despite that, Biden and company appear paralyzed by an inability to abandon Democratic Party orthodoxy around its support for Israel and adopt a more even-handed policy. The administration is incapable of even allowing the UN to pass an........