Joe Biden Wins Michigan Primary, Casting Further Doubt On Viability As Nominee

Oh wait, the New York Times already wrote that.

Biden at a 2020 Get Out the Vote event in Detroit. Photo: Adam Schultz, Creative Commons License 2.0

President Joe Biden and former “president” Donald Trump won their respective parties’ primaries in Michigan yesterday, which we suppose someone will say proves there’s little difference between the two. Biden received 81 percent of the primary vote, and a protest campaign to vote “uncommitted” drew 13.2 percent in an effort to push Biden to change his policy on Israel’s war in Gaza. (More on that in a moment.)

Also, in news that could upend the race in some other universe but not this one, Marianne Williamson, who suspended her campaign three weeks ago, finished ahead of Dean Phillips on the Democratic side, even though he actively campaigned. Williamson’s three percent showing encouraged her so much that she has, we shit you not, unsuspended her campaign, because why not?

On the Republican side, Nikki Haley managed to get 26.5 percent of the primary vote, far less than the 40 percent she got in previous primaries, including in her home state, South Carolina, but enough to remind us there’s a substantial portion of Trump’s party — especially college-educated voters in the burbs — that doesn’t want him back in office. The question for November is how many of them will come back because Joe Biden is, like all Democrats, the Antichrist, and how many will just stay home singing “Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.”

The “Uncommitted” protest vote came to just over 101,000, far surpassing campaigners’ low-bar goal of 10,000, which was roughly the margin by which Trump won Michigan in 2016. (Biden won by more than 150,000 votes in 2020.) If the final tally ends up with “uncommitted” reaching 15 percent, then that would give “uncommitted” one delegate at the convention, although so far, with 95 percent of the vote counted, “uncommitted” is only 13.2 percent of the total.

Driven mostly by the state’s large Muslim population and young progressives, the “uncommitted” organizers wanted to send Biden a message against his military support of Israel’s war in Gaza. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo explains (gift link), the “uncommitteds” actually have quite a few divisions among themselves, too. He notes there’s an “abandon Biden” group that wants exactly that, to persuade people to vote for anyone than Biden, or stay home, the “consequences of that decision be damned.”

There are also quite a few people who saw an “uncommitted” vote in the primary as a “safe harbor of sorts for Democrats who want to signal outrage or opposition without refusing Biden support in the November election,” although Marshall notes that some in the “uncommitted” campaign are “setting the threshold for what Biden has to do so high that they seem to be all but foreclosing the chance to support him.”

The difference that matters most, says Marshall, is that dissent during the primary can be a fine and honorable thing to make protesters’ views clear to the party, and hooray for vigorous disagreement, but when we get to November, not voting for Joe Biden really does contribute to electing Donald Trump, and all the disastrous outcomes for democracy (and women’s rights, climate change, civil rights, foreign policy, LGBTQ+ rights, oh, and rather famously “ban all Muslims,” which Trump already tried in his first act in his term) that would follow. That’s not disrespect to dissenting voices, that’s just the fact. Marshall:

There are two possible outcomes: a Trump presidency or a Biden presidency. There’s no running away from that choice. For members or erstwhile members of the Democratic coalition, sitting it out is a vote for Trump. No getting away from that. The power of this kind of high octane protest politics is precisely that the stakes are so high. It simply doesn’t wash to brandish those stakes and then cry foul when anyone else invokes them back at you.

It’s also important to note that the protests are in fact being heard, and, as Marshall puts it, the “Biden administration has been practically falling over itself in an effort to mend fences, and has also been shifting its actual policy.” That may not be enough to bring back the Never Biden voters, but it’s still not clear how many of them there are, or whether they’ll have enough weight in the November vote to offset the surge in voting interest among people motivated by the Republican war on women and everyone else.

Oh, and just to make good on the promise in our dek, here, as side-eyed by Southpaw on Blue Sky, is the New York Times doing its New York Times thing:

Biden “facing significant opposition,” 78-16. Trump “again coasting,” 65-31.

[AP / NBC News / WaPo (gift link) / TPM (gift link) / Photo: Adam Schultz, Creative Commons License 2.0]

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