About 100 people turned out Tuesday at the
University of Michigan (UMich) to urge Democrats to reject President Joe Biden
in the state’s primary election, a political gathering that illustrated both
the passion and the limits of the effort to pressure him into calling for
Israel to stop waging war in the Gaza Strip.
اضافة اعلان
The rally, held by a group called Listen to
Michigan that urges voters to cast their ballots for “Uncommitted” against
Biden in next week’s primary, called for Democrats to reject the president in
the primary.
The speakers in Ann Arbor and a crowd
comprised mainly of students displayed energy, pronouncing themselves livid at
Biden’s stance on Israel. Still, when the event began, there were so few
attendees that they could, and did, all stand in a circle and hold hands.
Former Rep. Andy Levin of Michigan, a
progressive Democrat who was at the gathering, said it would be Biden’s fault
if his policies toward Israel and Gaza led him to lose the general election to
former President Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee. Levin nodded to
Michigan’s enormous Arab-American population, whose frustration with Biden and
discontent among young voters and progressives has raised questions about
Biden’s standing in the state, a critical presidential battleground.
“Do not blame us,” said Levin, who, along
with Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, has become one of the most prominent
supporters of the Uncommitted movement. “He needs votes from Arab-Americans,
from people of color, from progressive Jews, and young people. He only won
Michigan by 150,000 votes in 2020, so politically, we have a moment where we
can raise our voices.”
Layla Elabed, the campaign manager for
Listen to Michigan and Tlaib’s sister, said the goal for the campaign was to
earn “at least 20,000 votes” for Uncommitted.
“That is the number that we will need to
flex our political power,” she said.
“We will raise our voices at the ballot
box,” said Abbas Alawieh, a former congressional aide who is one of the group’s
organizers. “Vote Uncommitted, because a vote for Uncommitted is a vote for a
ceasefire. A vote for Uncommitted is a vote against war.”
The Uncommitted push has support from 39
state and local elected officials in Michigan, according to a tally by The
Detroit News. Over the weekend, Tlaib became the first member of Michigan’s
Democratic congressional delegation to break from Biden and call for an
Uncommitted vote.
This week, the Biden campaign began
dispatching surrogates to the state to urge primary voters to support the
president. On the campaign’s first day of events Monday, Mitch Landrieu, a
former New Orleans mayor who is a Biden campaign co-chair, said in Flint,
Michigan, that he did not expect the conflict in Gaza to end “anytime soon.”
“Michiganders need to be cleareyed on the
differences between Biden and Trump,” said Lavora Barnes, the chair of the
Michigan Democratic Party. “Our job is going to be to help people remember that
when there is a choice between two people in November, the only way to vote
will be for Joe Biden.”
That may be a difficult sell for activists
and officials involved in the Uncommitted push if Biden does not engineer a
significant change in US policy toward the Israeli war on Gaza.
Rima Mohammad, a member of the Ann Arbor
school board who addressed the rally Tuesday, said she could not imagine how
Biden could expect people who feel “horrified” by the death toll and
humanitarian crisis in Gaza to support him in the presidential election.
“President Biden abandoned this community,”
Mohammad said. “People are feeling increasingly betrayed as the violence
continues in Gaza.”
For months, anger within the Democratic
Party over President Joe Biden’s support for Israel in the war in the Gaza
Strip has been building. Protesters have shouted through his campaign events,
marched outside the White House, and vilified him as “Genocide Joe” on social
media.
Now, Michigan’s primary election next week
will put that discontent on the ballot for the first time, with Biden’s liberal
detractors urging Democrats to vote “uncommitted” against him. Some of the
president’s allies worry that a movement to register disapproval against him
now could have lasting effects into the general election, especially if Biden
does not alter his stance toward the conflict.
Michigan’s combination of an early primary,
a large and politically active Arab-American population, progressive students
on college campuses, and the option of a protest vote have raised the stakes of
what has otherwise been a sleepy election in the state.
There are warning signs for Biden that
frustration over Gaza has metastasized beyond Dearborn and other Detroit
suburbs, which are the heart of Michigan’s Arab diaspora, and onto the state’s
college campuses, where students increasingly feel affinity with the
Palestinian cause.
In some Michigan communities without a
large Arab-American presence, crowds have demanded that their local governments
enact cease-fire resolutions. Last week, The Detroit Metro Times, an
alternative weekly newspaper, endorsed voting “uncommitted” in the primary.
There is no public polling to indicate how
much support the “uncommitted” push might bleed from Biden. Still, Democrats at
the highest levels of Michigan politics have cautioned, most of them privately,
that the president is at risk of losing the state to former President Donald
Trump if those who disagree with his Israel policy stay home or vote for a
third-party candidate.
“Every vote that does not support Joe Biden
makes it more likely we have a Trump presidency,” said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of
Michigan, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign. “Any vote that is not cast, or is
cast for a third party, or cast to send a message, makes it more likely that
there is a Trump presidency.”
The campaign to vote “uncommitted” was
announced this month by Layla Elabed, a sister of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a
Palestinian American progressive who last weekend became the first member of
Michigan’s congressional delegation to call for voting against Biden in the
primary.
Tlaib’s endorsement raised alarms among
Biden supporters in the state’s congressional delegation, who worry that it
will be difficult to persuade voters activated by the “uncommitted” push in the
primary to support Biden in November.
Yet in Michigan, few Democratic officials
are eager to risk a backlash if they criticize the effort to vote
“uncommitted.”
“The Muslim community and the Arab-American
communities are clearly very upset, and understandably so,” said Rep. Shri
Thanedar, a Detroit Democrat. “You know, 30,000 or so innocent civilians have
been killed, including women and children. So, the concern is understandable.
They are using this time to get attention, and make a point, and make a case.
And I really do not blame them.”
However, Thanedar said he would vote for
Biden because “I am not a single-issue voter.”
Michigan Democrats expressed uncertainty
about how many people will vote “uncommitted” in Tuesday’s primary. While the
Biden campaign is bracing for Arab Americans and young progressive voters to
oppose the president in the primary, Lauren Hitt, a campaign spokesperson,
stressed that union workers, suburban women, and Black voters remained
supportive.
“His investments in infrastructure and
green energy have created thousands of union jobs. He walked the picket line
with UAW. He is standing up for reproductive rights, an issue that motivated
hundreds of thousands of Michiganders to flip the statehouse in the midterms,”
Hitt said of Biden. “He recently met with Black voters in Detroit to talk about
his administration’s efforts to create record-low Black unemployment. And he is
working tirelessly to create a just, lasting peace in the Middle East.”
Two weeks ago, Biden’s White House
dispatched a delegation of senior aides to Dearborn to try to ease tensions
with Michigan’s Arab American community. Jon Finer, a deputy national security
adviser, told the local leaders that the Biden administration had made
“missteps” in dealing with Israel and Gaza and had left “a very damaging
impression.”
The same day, Biden declared that Israel
had gone “over the top” in its response to October 7, 2023.
But students, Arab-Americans, and other
Michiganders said in interviews that Biden’s alliance with Israel’s government
was unforgivable and would prevent them from voting for him in November if he
did not call for a ceasefire and halt US aid to Israel’s war effort. Perhaps
more concerning for the president as he tries to win over skeptical young
voters, students with no family connections to the Middle East described their
advocacy for the Palestinian cause as part of their social identity.
Ruthy Lynch, 21, an undergraduate student
from Traverse City, Michigan, said she had not known much about the Israeli
occupation of Palestine before October 7.
Lynch now wears a black-and-white scarf
known as a kuffiyeh around campus to demonstrate to friends and others that she
sides with the Palestinians.
“I am wearing it as a show of solidarity,”
Lynch said. “It feels good to walk around campus. I see other people also
wearing kuffiyehs, and we are sort of trying to normalize it and bring more
visibility to solidarity with Palestinians.”
Lynch said she had voted for Biden in 2020
but that she would not in November if he did not call for a ceasefire and halt
US military aid to Israel. “I am not sure I can bring myself to do it,” she
said.
A Fox News poll of registered voters
released last week found Biden narrowly trailing Trump by two percentage points
in a head-to-head matchup in Michigan. With third-party and independent
candidates included, Trump’s lead grew to 5 points.
Abbas Alawieh, a former congressional aide
from Dearborn who helped organize the group Listen to Michigan, which is
leading the “uncommitted” effort, said it was Biden, not those protesting his
foreign policy, putting his electoral prospects in jeopardy.
“President Biden has brought risk onto
himself in a general election by making it so that his policy on Gaza is
indistinguishable from Netanyahu’s most murderous instincts and actions,”
Alawieh said after the Ann Arbor rally, referring to the Israeli prime
minister. “He has already lost people, and what we are trying to tell him is,
if you take a different approach, that is something that people here in
Michigan need to see. Help us prevent Trump from becoming president.”
Biden’s political toxicity in Ann Arbor and
Dearborn was evident in his campaign’s scheduling this week. Vice President
Kamala Harris is expected to visit Grand Rapids on Thursday, and the campaign
dispatched surrogates, including Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor
and Reps. Sara Jacobs of California and Joyce Beatty of Ohio to address voters,
but there are no events scheduled in the congressional district that includes
Ann Arbor.
Instead, Rep. Ro Khanna of California is
hosting an event Thursday that posters across the UMich campus call a
“ceasefire town hall” and is scheduled to appear alongside Tlaib in Dearborn on
Thursday evening. Khanna’s role as a Biden surrogate is not mentioned, a
conspicuous omission to avoid advertising his affiliation with the president’s
campaign.
“If we do not have a change in the
situation in Gaza and in our policy approach, there is a risk of losing,”
Khanna said. “Any day that bombs are falling on innocent children and women in
Palestine is not a good day for our party and our prospects.”
Listen to Michigan has set a public goal of
10,000 votes, slightly less than the margin by which Trump carried the state in
2016 but about half the number of votes for “uncommitted” in Michigan’s 2016
and 2020 Democratic primaries. Our Revolution, the political group formed by
Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters, said it aimed for 10 percent of the primary
vote. Sanders has disavowed the effort, a spokesperson said.
While the “uncommitted” supporters have
held events in Dearborn and on Michigan’s college campuses, they have not built
a presence in Detroit’s Black neighborhoods. Branden Snyder, the executive
director of Detroit Action, a progressive organizing group in the city, said
voters there would be more inclined to support a Biden protest effort if the
focus were on domestic issues.
“There are a ton of Black folks and brown
folks who are disgruntled with Biden’s policy and looking at Biden spending
resources abroad instead of at home on issues we cared about,” he said. “If
messaging really focused on those people, you would have some serious
concerns.”
Some Michigan voters say Biden has already
lost their support in the general election.
Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an Iranian
American environmental toxicologist from Ann Arbor who has run repeatedly for
local office, distributed business cards Tuesday highlighting her latest City
Council campaign. Her platform includes cleaning the city’s contaminated water,
enacting a $15 municipal minimum wage, and telling Congress to “stop funding
Israeli wars.”
Savabieasfahani, 64, said she would not
support Biden, even if doing so would help Trump return to the White House.
“We cannot be held hostage between two
terrible choices,” she said. “Pick between these two elderly white men who do
not know what you want and do not agree with what you want.”
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