What will Michigan’s primary tell us about Biden? Nothing.
“We don’t have an example of a presidential election outcome determined by an international crisis that doesn’t involve American troops.”
I made that observation in the Washington Monthly last November, with one caveat:
In the 1948 presidential election, Harry Truman lost New York because he did not lift a Middle East arms embargo, even though six months prior he made the historic decision to recognize the state of Israel.
Third-party candidate Henry Wallace hammered Truman for abandoning the Israelis as they fought neighboring Arabs, peeled off a big chunk of the left-wing Jewish vote in New York, and helped Republican Thomas Dewey win New York’s 47 Electoral College votes by one percentage point.
That political history is mostly forgotten because Truman more than offset his New York loss with wins in other states.
Today, much media attention is being placed on the possibility Arab voters will deny Joe Biden a win in Michigan because he is too supportive of Israel.
And with Michigan primary results coming tonight, political number-crunchers are poised to derive meaning from the number of Democrats who skip the Biden bubble, and instead check the “Uncommitted” slate of delegates to the party’s convention.
One of the organizations pushing an Uncommitted vote, Listen to Michigan, set a target of 11,000 votes–slightly more than Donald Trump’s 2016 margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in the swing state–hoping to prove that Biden has to support a ceasefire and an end to Israeli military aid to earn those votes back and win the state a second time.
But meeting or clearing that bar will tell us absolutely nothing about Biden’s general election prospects in the state.
I’ll explain, but first, here’s the latest from the Washington Monthly:
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Supposedly, the number of Uncommitted votes today equals the number of people who supported Biden in November 2020 who won’t vote for him in November 2024 because of his Middle East policies.
But we can’t make that assumption. Different activists urging people to vote Uncommitted have said different things about what that vote represents.
There’s a “Listen to Michigan” campaign. Those organizers say “Biden must earn our vote through a dramatic change in policy”: calling for a cease-fire and ending military aid to Israel.
There’s also an “Abandon Biden” campaign, which wants Biden defeated in November.
The Michigan chair of the campaign is also urging people to vote Uncommitted today. “We’re going to continue to abandon Biden no matter what,” she said, “For me, the only way I would vote for him is if he pulled a Jesus and resurrected all those dead children and civilians.”
So we have one group of Uncommitteds who say they can still be persuaded by Biden by policy changes, and another who say they’re already lost to Biden.
And it gets even more complicated.
One prominent Listen to Michigan supporter, former U.S. Representative Andy Levin, is voting Uncommitted today, but otherwise appears to actually be committed to Biden.
In January, Levin said, “I’m supporting Joe Biden. I’m super proud to have served with him.” But he’s voting Uncommitted because he thinks Biden needs to change his Middle East policy in order to win. He told Politico today, “I need Biden to win reelection and I can’t help him win reelection in Michigan, I don’t think, without him changing course.”
Listen to Michigan is also hoping to goose the Uncommitted numbers by urging Republican voters to vote in the Democratic primary.
In a “Frequently Asked Questions” series of Instagram posts, Listen to Michigan instructs, “If you typically vote Republican but want to support this cause, we encourage voting Uncommitted on a Democratic ticket to emphasize human rights over party lines.”
On top of all that, we must keep in mind that in primaries with an “Uncommitted” option, some portion of voters break from the incumbent even without any sort of organized campaign.
In the February 2012 Michigan primary (which Democrats did not use to select convention delegates that year), just over 20,000 voters–about 11 percent of the electorate–chose Uncommitted over the incumbent Barack Obama, nearly twice the target set by Listen to Michigan for today’s vote.
But in November, Obama beat Mitt Romney in Michigan by about 450,000 votes. The 20,000 or so Uncommitteds were a meaningless blip.
Eight years later, Trump gave up a little less than 33,000 to Uncommitted in the Michigan primary. (That’s more raw votes than Obama ceded in 2012 but a smaller percentage, about 5 percent.)
Trump did end up losing the state, but Republican uncommitteds–if they all remained opposed to Trump in November, which we can’t know for sure is what happened–did not represent the margin. Biden won it by about 150,000 votes.
To sum up, we will have five categories of Uncommitted voters tonight:
Lost Biden voters: Supported Biden in 2020 but will not now under any circumstances.
Never Were Biden voters: Didn’t support Biden in 2020 and won’t again.
Only-If-Ceasefire voters: Supported Biden in 2020 but will only do so again if there is a ceasefire and/or military aid to Israel is suspended.
Send-a-Message voters: Will support Biden in 2024 but want to push Biden to change Middle East policy.
Randos: People voting uncommitted for miscellaneous reasons.
Without exit poll questions asking explicitly about their planned November vote (which we didn’t see in South Carolina and New Hampshire Republican exit polls), we can’t draw any firm conclusions about the composition of the Uncommitted vote, and in turn, about what the Uncommitted vote says about Biden’s Michigan prospects in November.
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Best,
Bill
The post The Washington Monthly Newsletter: February 27, 2024 appeared first on Washington Monthly.
