Joe Biden’s reelection problems may be getting worse. Like Michigan, another swing state has seen a growing campaign among young liberals who are opposed to Israel’s right to defend itself after the largest terrorist attack in half a century rally to oppose the Democratic president in the primary.
In February, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Detroit, organized a protest vote against Biden in the Mitten State’s primary.
New Conservative Post reported that the congresswoman, who has been accused of fundraising from Hamas, had begun urging to vote “uncommitted” in an effort to undermine Biden’s efforts to support Israel’s war in Gaza.
The ploy worked. The Associated Press noted that “while Biden won the state with more than 618,000 votes, more than 100,000 Michigan Democratic primary voters cast ballots for “uncommitted” in the race, enough to pick up the pair of delegates. The vote totals raise concerns for Democrats in a state Biden won by only 154,000 votes in 2020. Biden was beaten by the “uncommitted” vote in both Dearborn and Hamtramck, where Arab Americans make up close to half the population.”
Now it’s Wisconsin’s turn, according to NBC News.
Biden, who has faced protest vote campaigns in several states this year over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war, is now confronting one in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary. Young progressives are leading the movement to vote “uninstructed,” the term on the Wisconsin ballot to vote for no candidate or “uncommitted,” to register their opposition to the administration’s response to the situation in Gaza.
Young voters in Democratic strongholds such as Madison and Milwaukee were critical to Biden’s victory in Wisconsin — and the Electoral College overall — in 2020, and they want to make clear to the president that he can’t take them for granted this time around. The Listen to Wisconsin campaign’s goal is to convince 20,000 voters to cast their Democratic primary ballots for “uninstructed,” which was roughly Biden’s margin of victory over then-President Donald Trump in the state four years ago.
Wisconsin’s primaries are open to all registered voters, regardless of party affiliation. In recent Democratic primaries, the uninstructed option has only received a few thousand votes. In 2020, 3,590 people voted uninstructed and in 2016, just 1,436 did. When then-President Barack Obama ran unopposed in 2012, 5,092 people voted uninstructed in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary.
Without a formidable primary challenger from the left to support, progressives have turned to states like Wisconsin with an “uncommitted,” “uninstructed” or “no preference” line on the ballot to voice their opposition to Biden’s Gaza policies.
Things have gotten so desperate for Biden that in March he announced he’d be putting American troops in harm’s way to help build a port in Gaza.
The move recently saw criticism in the liberal Washington Post, which wrote that “the Biden administration’s plan to install a floating pier off the Gaza coast as part of a broad international initiative to feed starving Palestinians will endanger the U.S. service members who must build, operate and defend the structure from attack, military experts say, a risk with enormous political consequences for the president should calamity strike.”
The vote in Wisconsin takes place today, April 2.
