DETROIT, Michigan — President Joe Biden‘s standing in the battleground state of Michigan is about to be tested by another protest vote campaign.
Democrats are being encouraged to mark themselves as “uncommitted” rather than supporting Biden during next week’s Feb. 27 presidential primary to express their concerns about his response to the Israel–Hamas war. And unlike the ceasefire write-in campaign in New Hampshire last month, Michigan’s dynamic Arab and Muslim American communities could create political problems for the president now and in November.
With the Listen to Michigan campaign, led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib‘s (D-MI) sister Layla Elabed with a budget of $250,000, along with the similar Abandon Biden campaign, the uncommitted protest vote movement has been endorsed by community leaders, including Democratic state Rep. Karen Whitsett, and appeals to Michigan’s approximately 278,000 Arab Americans after Biden won the state by only 154,000 more votes than former President Donald Trump in 2020.
“I represent Dearborn,” Whitsett told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “They care about this war. They’re losing family. This war is hitting home. It’s not something that’s happening somewhere else. This is happening to my constituents. Some have lost entire families. And you [Biden] want to come here after you allowed a war, that you have supported and financed, continue on, and think you’re going to get somebody’s vote for murdering their family? No, we need peace. We need a ceasefire.”
Tlaib, a Palestinian American who has long been urging a ceasefire, endorsed the “uncommitted” effort against Biden, saying it’s time to create a voting bloc with “a bullhorn, to say, ‘Enough is enough. We don’t want a country that supports wars and bombs and destruction. We want to support life. We want to stand up for every single life killed in Gaza.’”
Although some political commentators, such as former Republican White House press secretary Ari Fleischer during a separate interview last month, minimize the consequences for November’s general election, considering how much Democrats dislike Trump, Whitsett, herself a black woman, conceded Biden may have lost her irrevocably.
“People are dead,” she said. “They’re not coming back. Lives are forever changed. I don’t know, I don’t know where I’m at. … He can stop this. He’s the president of the United States.”
While only 1,497 voters wrote in “ceasefire” in New Hampshire last month, compared to 77,061 who wrote in “Biden,” Michigan has more experience with protest vote campaigns. For example, former President Barack Obama’s team organized young and black Democrats to nominate themselves as “uncommitted” in 2008 after he failed to qualify for the state’s ballot. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won with 55% of the vote, but Obama earned 40%.
University of Michigan political science professor Ken Kollman described the uncommitted protest vote campaign against Biden “as a rebellion against the standard-bearer inside the party.”
“He’s not popular in the country or within his party, but he looks headed to the nomination,” Kollman said of Biden. “It’s an attempt to get some press coverage to send a message and a signal.”
Kollman also described “a sense of grievance and having been wronged by Biden” among Michigan’s Arab and Muslim American communities, however diverse, with the president not meeting with any of their leaders during a trip to the state last month as Israel counters Hamas in the Gaza Strip after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.
Instead, Biden opted to spend time with members of the United Auto Workers labor union. Outreach from his campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, was rebuffed in favor of entreaties from senior administration officials, including deputy national security adviser Jon Finer. That did not prevent Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud from writing a New York Times opinion piece, published Tuesday, in which he criticized Biden and Congress for having “turned their backs on us.”
“The most common reaction to the lack of enthusiasm for Biden is going to be people staying home and not voting,” Kollman said. “I anticipate a low, quite low turnout. That’s kind of a general statement about this upcoming election. There’s just not a lot of enthusiasm for these two candidates among a majority of Americans.”
“It could be that the Arab American community, more of that community, sits out this election than in the past,” he added. “That might also be the case for the black community. … States like Michigan are going to be decided on a margin. It’s going to be a turnout battle.”
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The Biden campaign did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment. Meanwhile, more broadly, Democrats are amplifying the differences between the president and former president, in addition to the Michigan Democratic Party and its state Republican counterpart, after early voting started last Saturday.
“As Michiganders head to the polls for early voting, the Michigan GOP is still a raging dumpster fire ahead of their dueling nominating contests — and it looks like it’s only getting worse,” Democratic National Committee spokesman Alex Floyd wrote last weekend. “After they tried to replace one problematic Trump loyalist party chair with another as part of a messy leadership fight, it appears the Michigan GOP’s logic is to just pour gasoline on the fire and hope for the best. We’ll see how that goes in November.”