Team Biden rolls the dice
The president seems content to leave some votes on the table
The movement to vote Uncommitted in the Michigan presidential primary far outstripped expectations. Organizers had hoped to secure 10,000 votes; the number of voters who marked Uncommitted on their ballots was ten times that.
Immediately, some folks, pundits among them, tried to couch the extraordinary success of this result by comparing it, rather glibly, to the conditions in 2012, where then-president Barack Obama came away with a win in the general election after shedding a similar percentage of uncommitted voters.
The problem with that analysis is that, by focusing solely on the percentage, the magnitude is lost. In 2012, 11% of Michigan Democrats voted uncommitted in the primary, which represented approximately 20,000 people. This year, a concerted Uncommitted movement garnered 13% of the vote with just about three weeks of organizing, and that represented 101,000, more than five times the magnitude of the results from 2012.
The analysis has been anemic, serving mainly to paper over what the vote actually means. Though when it was clear that the organizing effort called on voters to use the uncommitted option to express their displeasure with President Biden’s handling of Israeli foreign policy, some are still debating whether or not it’s possible to discern what message the voters intended to send.
By muddying the waters and obscuring clear facts, this superficial analysis enables voters in other parts of the country to remain mystified as to what the “protest” was all about and, being so mystified, ignore it. The vote was an emergency flare, and some want to spin it as being fireworks. Still others say it was a UFO.
Shameful. But what was even more worrisome was the statement issued by the White House immediately in the wake of the results. The same night that returns came in and showed such a remarkable showing for this rarely exercised option as a proxy for dialogue—telling the president, “Change your Israel policy now, or risk these same votes in November” — Biden released a statement that was boilerplate and that did not mention the Uncommitted movement once.
He iced those voters out of his address. It was a study in measured ignorance.
The fact that Biden did this on the very night that this message was being delivered augured very poorly. It was a slap in the face of the voters who just tried to save his campaign in the general election by taking the time to go to the polls to register their complaint this early in the electoral calendar. Biden didn’t even acknowledge them.
That was bad enough. Indeed, Biden’s deliberate ignoring of the results all but guaranteed that the movement would find legs and travel to other states, attempting to replicate or even improve the showing as occurred in Michigan. In that way, Biden has extended his pain.
Worse, his team decided to speak with the New York Times on the record whereby the newspaper of record could print this headline: “Biden Team’s message for Democrats pining for an alternative: Get over it.”
Get over it. Talk about dismissive! This shades into contempt. It’s a profound gesture of disrespect.
And, considering that 60% of newspaper “readers” glean information only from the titles and do not read the articles, it’s instructive that this was the headline that communicated the White House’s response to those earnest voters in Michigan (and those beyond, who do not reside in the state but who would have voted ‘uncommitted’ had they lived here).
Let me say here that the Uncommitted movement should not necessarily be mixed in with the chorus of people from around the country—some pundits included—who have ranged from tentative speculation to loud bellows in their calls for the Democratic Party to consider a different candidate in 2024. That was not the explicit intent of the Uncommitted vote in Michigan, though I suspect that a portion of those voters holds those views.
Still, I don’t think it’s a stretch to see that, in the same week as that significant non-incumbent vote manifested and made itself known, the Biden team decided to reprise a Don Henley lyric in the crassest way possible.
It’s shocking, the level of disconnect the Biden team is showing. They are determined to not understand what voters did their level best to communicate. They are intentionally disregarding the message and, in so doing, disregarding those very voters.
This puts the lie to the idea that this is an election where democracy is at stake. This cannot be true. Biden wouldn’t be rolling the dice in a bid for re-election, where he can “aw, shucks” a loss if one comes his way. He’d be pulling out all of the stops to rescue the country. There’s no way that, in such a state of emergency, that he would leave any votes on the table.
Yet that’s exactly what he and his team are doing. They’re saying, “We can write off those votes—we don’t need them.” Yet, if they lose, they will blame those same voters that they dismissed as the reason for that loss.
Not only is this cynical, it’s insane. You don’t double down on a shaky strategy of “Oh, it’s a binary choice, they’ll ‘come home’ in November” if you’re worried about a fascist takeover. No, you make a sacrifice.
Here, the choices are clear: either make room for another candidate so that the Democratic contest can start afresh, or change policy as it pertains to Israel.
Those are the choices. Biden cannot both stay on the ballot and maintain his policy if he expects to win.