Michigan’s Gaza protest votes below levels seen as requiring major Biden shift
While ‘uncommitted’ ballots numbered some 100k, enough for two delegates, they fell below the threshold seen as representing a clear danger to the president’s reelection campaign
With 95 percent of the votes counted from Tuesday’s Michigan primary, over 101,000 people were found to have cast “uncommitted” ballots, most of them likely in protest of Biden’s Israel-Hamas war policies.
The figure is far more than the 21,000 who voted “uncommitted” in the Michigan primary when Democratic president Barack Obama ran for re-election in 2012, and is enough to pick up the pair of delegates.
However, it only amounted to 13% of voters and Biden still won 115 delegates on Tuesday and is well on his way to clinching the nomination over marginal competition.
Before the primary, analysts speculated that a total of 10%-15% uncommitted votes would be noteworthy, but unlikely to require a change in Biden’s approach, while figures above 15% would require minor adjustments and anything above 20% would demand major shifts in the US stance on the Gaza war.
Notably, Biden still won 81% of the vote, compared to Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, who won 68% of the vote, besting Nikki Haley by 41 percentage points.
Dearborn and two other Michigan cities with large Arab and Muslim populations turned against Biden in the primary. The results in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck highlight the challenge his reelection campaign faces in a swing state that each major party has said they must win to take the White House in November.
“In the city of Dearborn we have demonstrated that the issue of Gaza is not an issue that is only of concern to Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. But this is an issue to all Americans from coast to coast,” Dearborn’s Democratic mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, told a crowd Tuesday night as votes rolled in.
The uncommitted delegates came from the 6th District, centered around Ann Arbor, and the other from the 12th District, which includes Detroit suburbs with large blocs of Arab Americans. They will be free to vote for whomever they choose at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago this summer. The people who will fill those delegate seats will be selected at congressional district conventions on May 11.
The “uncommitted” push is expected in other states. Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz said Wednesday that a portion of Minnesota’s Somali population, the largest in the country, is likely to vote “uncommitted” in his state’s primary next week. Additionally, a nationwide “Abandon Biden” campaign has seen momentum in other key swing states.
In 2020, Biden enjoyed a roughly 3-to-1 advantage in Dearborn, where nearly half of the city’s 110,000 residents are of Arab descent. In recent months, the city has become the epicenter of Democratic backlash to Biden’s support of Israel in the war in Gaza that began after Hamas’s October 7 attacks.
US Representative Rashida Tlaib, who represents Dearborn and is the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, advocated loudly for the “uncommitted” vote.
Biden dispatched senior officials from both his campaign and administration to the Dearborn area in recent months, aiming to address the backlash.
Close to 6,500 Dearborn voters cast their vote “uncommitted,” totaling 56% of the vote to Biden’s 40%. The results were starker in Muslim-majority Hamtramck, where “uncommitted” received 61% of the total vote. Hamtramck voted for Biden in 2020 by a 5-to-1 margin.
California Rep. Ro Khanna, a Biden surrogate who has called for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war, traveled to Dearborn last week to speak with community leaders. He said Tuesday’s results showed that the Biden campaign has “a lot of work to do.”
“This is showing that there are particular groups of our coalition that are upset,” Khanna said. “The White House understands that they’ve got to make certain changes in language and action to win back voters in the Arab and Muslim American community and young voters.”
Hammoud and other top Arab American leaders were joined by dozens of supporters at an election night watch party at a restaurant in Dearborn to eat, dance and celebrate as the “uncommitted” votes rolled in.
“It is not surprising that it grew this big. And we are just celebrating this victory right now. And we need Joe Biden to listen to the voice of Michiganders,” said Layla Elabed, a sister of Tlaib’s and the campaign manager for Listen to Michigan, which led the “uncommitted” push.
Questions linger over whether the backlash could swing November’s election. Trump and other Republicans also support Israel in its war with Hamas. And while Michigan’s Arab American population is the largest in the nation by density, it represents just under 3% of the entire state’s population.
