'Abandon' voters telegraph danger

The White House must take heed while there is still time

Let’s say you have an administration at the helm. It doesn’t matter which party. We can take the Trump administration as a concrete example, if you wish, but it could be any administration.

Back in the Trump days, there were many instances where people, both within the pundit class and without, wondered why it was that no one was resigning with cause, as whistleblowers, to signal the level of danger and dysfunction in that administration. Why weren’t there resignations en masse? Why were people staying in their posts (yet leaking their displeasure and alarm anonymously to the press)?

Some pundits speculated that maybe some of those people felt that they would do more good in their posts than if they left. Resigning, in this line of reasoning, would mean that the administration would be left with no adults in charge. Thus these disaffected folks felt they had no real choice but to stick it out and try to create change from the inside.

We know how that went. Donald Trump was not going to be changed: he’s stubborn yet mercurial. Those people who chose to stay may have had the best of intentions. Yet they sacrificed their own power.

The power of resignation comes from doing so visibly and with a statement clarifying why one has left one’s post. That’s more than a red flag. It clearly signals to the rest of the electorate that something is direly wrong and that drastic measures are needed to correct the problem.

Many of us, especially on the progressive side, excoriated these people who would speak off-the-record but were not willing to go against Trump publicly. We knew how dysfunctional that White House was, even on the outside looking in. Why didn’t any of those people have the courage of their convictions to let the world see how bad things really were inside those walls?

Now, here we are at this moment. We have a voter equivalent of someone resigning publicly from the Biden administration: we have voters, previously committed to Biden as a figure or to the Democratic Party as a whole, stating in no uncertain terms that they will not commit to Biden in 2024 until and unless he effects a change.

Predictably, many in the progressive camp have lashed out at these voters, demanding to know why the latter are “attacking” President Biden. Don’t they know what side their bread is buttered?

These progressives with their backs up can’t see how the voters who have voiced these opinions do so in order to call attention to what they see as danger so as to have that danger attended to in time. It’s the emergency flare. It’s the signal that says, “Things are serious.” It’s a get-some-technicians-in-the-boiler-room-and-fix-this level of seriousness.

Matt Duss, former foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders and currently with the Center for International Policy, earlier this week said this:

“And I think what’s going on here, it’s not simply a matter of a difference in policy. I think everyone understands the stakes, what a Trump election or a Trump re-election would mean for this country. But the anger at Biden’s support for this assault on Gaza is really just incandescent. It is a matter of principle for many Democrats, not just Arab and Palestinian Americans but more broadly, some groups of Democratic voters who simply cannot bring themselves to pull the lever or check the box for a president who is supporting this. 

“And this is not going to be fixed by dispatching a few administration officials to certain neighborhoods in Michigan or elsewhere. This is going to be fixed, if it can be fixed at all, by changing policy and ending support for this massacre.”

Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, added this analysis:

“The dissent is striking because, given the initial attack [on October 7th], there was such deep sympathy for Israel, which is a close U.S. partner. There was such a sense of ‘We want to do something to help.’ But I think it became so clear within three or four days to people that President Biden’s approach to helping Israel was not going to be measured or strategic or involve planning, consultation, all of that. It was just full-tilt, ‘Whatever they want, whatever the consequences.’

“I think that is where you see a lot of this dissent come from. It comes from moral reasons, certainly, for some folks within government, some people in the Democratic base. [...] But this policy is being controlled in a group of, I would say, 20 to 30 close officials around the president. Right? So what’s really important to remember there is [that] there’s a real filtering of information. 

“And it’s indisputable, of course: President Biden is going to campaign rallies and events, and he’s seeing the protesters. But to what extent is he aware that many of the actual foreign policy and national security experts within his government who are nonpartisan are opposed to his policy? [...]

“I think there are heated debates in the President’s closed circle, but because especially the State Department has been so frozen out at this moment—and the way I’ve heard it from State Department officials is they’ve literally been told, ‘We understand your concern. Why don’t you try to work on another part of the world? Why don’t you look at sort of the Pacific or Latin America? Just apply your skills there.’

“I think that kind of dismissal of this really recent dissent and the response to it of listening sessions and town halls and ‘We feel your pain’ — people don’t want their pain to be felt. They want to see a shift.”

Democratic Michigan State Representative Abraham Aiyash, elaborated on his meeting with White House officials this week:

“As far as February 27th for the Michigan presidential primary, we are going to remain uncommitted. And the reason why we’re doing that is because we need to let the White House know that they have an opportunity in this moment to earn the votes. 

“As an elected official, I can tell you: when I run for office, I don’t say, ‘Well, the other guy is worse than me.’ I give them a message and a platform for why I’m running. And we expect the White House and President Biden to do the same. 

“And the expectation is: we are letting him know from now—it’s February, the election is in November—we are letting him know now that we are uncommitted to his presidency until we see some changes in the policies that have affected both Americans here and so many abroad, as well as their families in the Gaza Strip.”

(I’ll reiterate, as I have over the last few entries, that I’m not in the Abandon Biden movement. I am, however, trying to do my best to interpret that movement for more moderate elements of the Democratic coalition so that perhaps it’s clearer where these people are coming from.)

Amer Zahr, an activist and comedian from Dearborn, Michigan, appeared on Al Jazeera’s The Stream and pulled no punches:

“The movement is real. I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years doing electoral political activism work here in Dearborn and in the Arabic American community around the country. I’ve never seen the energy the way it is now to basically tell Biden that we are not voting for you under any circumstances. 

“And we don’t care what the alternative is. We don’t care. We know Trump. We’ve seen Trump; we’re very familiar with who Trump is; and if we are telling you that we don’t care that Trump is the alternative, that should tell you a lot about how we’re feeling. 

“Instead, the only messages we get from the White House are, ‘Look, Trump banned you, so I’m not going to ban you, so trust me. I’m better.’ Or Biden’s press secretary saying, ‘When he comes to Michigan, his message to Arab voters will still be that Israel has the right to defend itself.’ 

“Because they think that we have nowhere to go. They think that we’re going to, by default, have to come back to them. They think we’re going to forget. And our message is that the lives of our people and the blood of our people is too valued. We will not forget.”

These voters in the Abandon Biden movement are resigning en masse, in a way. Not resigning entirely, because many (not all) are still open to Biden making a course correction and demonstrating a clear change in policy. If Biden is able to do this, he has an excellent chance of regaining these people’s confidence and re-securing their vote.

In the meantime, however, they are going public with their concerns, so as to alert everyone to the danger that Biden finds himself in, electorally.

Here’s the thing. They’re not the only ones saying this. Polls have been indicating this for months, too, each one a flashing amber light on the dash. Yet, one by one, these polls have been dismissed by those in the party faithful as either skewed, alarmist, or simply too much of a snapshot in time. It is true that polls are data points that track people at discrete moments—but it’s up to us to read the data and put it into a broader context.

In Michigan, the battleground state is in play, due to the sizable Arab American population here who are demonstrating over Biden’s policy with regards to the Israel-Palestine conflict. That type of protest is easy to understand. 

Why is Wisconsin in play? Why are four other states blinking amber (at least as of a couple of months ago)? Why is this happening? More to the point, now that these cues are occurring, will we as a party pay them due attention?

Some may dismiss what I say here as so much Chicken Littling the situation. I say to those people, I am not reacting due to panic. This is not something that’s emanating from my gut. There’s no nervousness in what I’m saying. I’m communicating this with clear eyes looking to a very possible future horizon. I take no joy in this. I’m trying to say there’s danger.

Again, that’s perfectly in line with my training in the social sciences. I observe culture and I report on the trends that I see. I don’t propose policy; that’s not my field. But American culture? That’s my wheelhouse. I’m telling you that there’s a problem. 

Those people in the Abandon Biden movement? They’re telling you that there’s a problem. 

Moderates and progressives, you do yourselves no favors by shutting them out and acting like they’re petulant, as though they can’t think rationally. There is a sensitive time window by which these issues can be ironed out. Truth be told, that window may have closed already; it’s really hard to tell at this point. But we should evaluate where we are at the moment and see if we can make changes that can salvage our position come November. There still yet may be time.

Now, some of those moderates and progressives may be asking, “Why should we trust these data? We haven’t been alerted to anything like this before now.” That actually answers your question: much of the disaffection that is driving the Abandon Biden movement has been carefully curated out of American media for the last four months. So now, as the results of this growing and quite bitter sentiment in certain communities are finally making themselves known, bursting out of its containment so to speak, those in the broad middle of the Democratic coalition are left wondering, “WTF is this and why TF is it threatening to interfere with our plans for 2024?”

I understand that this dissent may seem like it came out of—no pun intended—left field. But it’s not any one person’s fault why this has been under wraps, except for those who make the decisions as to what news makes it to the broad populace. American news has been really compromised over the last four or so months. The mainstream viewpoint is quite skewed (as this article from the Guardian on CNN details). The tails of the opinion bell curve have been trimmed off, cut completely out of the conversation.

Hearing of this dissension is a nasty surprise, I understand. But at least these voices are finally beginning to break through so as to raise an early warning, instead of such results being laid upon the doorstep with only a month or so before the election when there would be nothing at all to be done about the situation in time.

So, really, moderates and progressives should thank our brothers and sisters in the Democratic coalition—cousins in common cause—who are voicing their dissatisfaction now, exercising what they see as their right and their moral duty to “resign” in full public view. Now we, as a party, can look around and see what needs to change.