Feelings of “deep betrayal and deep anger” underlie the growing anti-Biden “uncommitted” movement on the left, a student organizer for the Listen to Wisconsin campaign told the New York Times.
According to University of Madison Wisconsin student organizer Dahlia Saba, frustration with Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war is profound, and the anti-Biden effort that persisted in Wisconsin’s April 2 primary is not merely “nit-picking.”
“This is more than just nit-picking, like, ‘I’d prefer if it was the other way,’” she told the Times’s Jess Bidgood in an article published Monday. “This is deep betrayal, and deep anger.”
Biden faces resistance from Arab Americans, Muslims, radical progressives, and young voters regarding his administration’s handling of the war, constituting a substantial threat to his reelection bid, as Breitbart News detailed.
Intra-party ballot protests were prominent in Wisconsin, with 8.3 percent of Democrat primary voters (48,812) selecting “uninstructed”– the state’s version of the “uncommitted” option made famous by the Listen to Michigan campaign, created to convey a demand for a ceasefire and to protest Biden’s handling of the war.
The 48,812 figure is more than double the margin Biden beat former President Donald Trump by in the 2020 election in Wisconsin.
The Madison campus area polling stations saw an “uninstructed” vote share that was nearly quadruple the 8.3 percent seen in the statewide results, as the Daily Cardinal student newspaper’s Mary Bosch reported on April 3:
Roughly 32% of voters chose the uninstructed option in 20 wards on or near the UW-Madison campus, compared to 14.6% in Dane County and 8.4% statewide, per unofficial results. Madison Ward 46, which surrounds James Madison park and the Capitol and is highly populated with students, saw 48% of voters support the uninstructed option.
Bosch caught up with Saba, a member of the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group, before her interview with the Times.
“Saba said the majority of people student activists talked to were ‘overwhelmingly supportive’ of the cause,” Bosch wrote.
Notably, the Wisconsin movement occurred nearly a month after Biden became the presumptive Democrat nominee. When the Michigan and Minnesota campaigns took place, which saw 101,430 and 45,914 protest votes, respectively, he had not yet met the delegate count necessary to earn the “presumptive nominee” title and still had opponents in the race. Plans are underway for future “uncommitted” ballot efforts in some late nominating contests.
Since his embarrassing moment in Wisconsin on April 2, Biden has been working to win back these voters. He demanded a ceasefire in the war during a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday. He also conveniently visited Madison on Monday, where he unveiled his latest plans for “student debt relief,” which is really a debt transfer onto taxpayers.
It remains to be seen if Biden can win these disaffected voters back or if they will simply refuse to turn out or vote for another candidate on election day.
Iqbal Hussein hands out Leave it Blank flyers as people leave Friday prayers at Darul Uloom New York Masjid and Madrasah on March 29, 2024 in the Queens Borough of New York City. The “Leave It Blank NY” campaign seeks to persuade primary voters to submit empty ballots in protest of the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza conflict between Israel and Hamas. The campaign for blank ballots in New York echoes previous initiatives by ceasefire advocates, which resulted in significant “uncommitted” vote counts in Democratic primaries in Michigan, Washington, and Minnesota. (Adam Gray/Getty)
Democrat Party Chair Ben Wikler claims his party can appeal to every one of the 48,812 “uninstructed” voters in the Badger State.
“This is a protest vote. It’s a great American tradition of speaking your mind at the ballot box, and it’s civic engagement,” Wikler told the Daily Cardinal in a statement. “I think we have the chance to earn all of these for the Biden campaign in November.”
However, in neighboring Michigan, Muslim and Arab-American leaders who spoke with the New York Times’s Charles Blow on the eve of the Wolverine State’s Democrat primary indicated they would not return to Biden.
One “Abandon Biden” campaign organizer in Michigan named Khalid Turaani told Blow his community must “punish” Biden by denying him a second term:
After the meeting, Turaani told me that he doesn’t want the Biden administration to bargain with Muslim voters over the prospect of a cease-fire in Gaza — he thinks Biden must do that anyway. He said, “I and my community need to punish Joe Biden by making him a one-term president.” Awad said that Biden’s long career in national politics should end “with the shame and the disgrace of the genocide in Gaza.”
Palestinian-American Nihad Awad, who co-founded CAIR and made clear he dislikes Trump, emphasized to Blow that reminding Democrats of Muslim voters’ influence supersedes keeping Trump out of the White House.
Further complicating the situation for Biden is that his demand for a ceasefire also risks upsetting Pro-Israel Democrats by undermining his initial posture in the days after Hamas’s terrorist attacks, which was, “We stand with Israel.”
A Pew Research Center survey poll conducted in February and published on April 2 showed a plurality of 25 percent of Democrats aged 65 and up sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians, versus 17 percent who feel the opposite and 41 percent who sympathize equally with both. Those in the 50-64 demographic are pretty evenly split on the issue, with 18 percent empathizing with more with Israelis, while those who sympathize more with Palestinians accounted for 19 percent of the demographic.