‘Uncommitted’ in MI: Did the Pro-Palestinian Left Humiliate Biden — Or Themselves?

The Michigan primaries last night gave us the last clear look at the 2024 nomination chases before Super Tuesday. Did it produce any evidence at all that the two incumbents have anything to fear before the conventions? Or for that matter, in the general election?

First off, let’s look again at the live results so far in the count:

As of 8:47 ET this morning, it appears that almost all precincts have reported, so we can get a pretty good look at the outcome. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden won overwhelmingly in their primaries, and indeed as of now appear to have won every single county. Biden won a much higher percentage of the vote in the Democrat Party than Trump did with the GOP (81.1% to 68.1%), but Biden ran basically unopposed while Trump has an active and significant challenger still in the race — Nikki Haley. Biden’s challengers combined up for less than 6% of the vote.

However, Biden did have an active challenger of sorts: “Uncommitted.” This is a regular feature of Michigan primaries, not a one-off, and it’s intended somewhat like Nevada’s None of the Above option. Three percent of Republican primary voters chose “Uncommitted” rather than vote for either Trump or Haley, a point to which we’ll return in a moment. However, a whopping 13.3% of Democrat primary voters chose “Uncommitted” rather than vote for Biden, helped along enormously — supposedly —  by a campaign fronted by Rashida Tlaib and radical Palestinian activists as a protest of Biden’s policies toward Israel.

On a percentage basis, four times as many Democrats in Michigan rejected Biden than did Republicans in rejecting Trump (and Haley). Does that put egg on Biden’s face? Amber Duke argued last night in the Spectator that it did, but she based that argument on earlier numbers:

At the time of writing, “Uncommitted” is teetering on earning 15 percent of voters in the Michigan primary against Joe Biden. Progressive activists in the state, driven by young people and Arab Americans, organized the anti-Biden campaign as a form of protest against his administration’s position on the war in Gaza. If “Uncommitted” surpasses that 15 percent threshold, it will go into the Democratic National Convention with a delegate to its name.

“Uncommitted vote in Michigan — at 24K — already surpassing last three presidential election cycles on Dem side. And just 16 percent of vote in,” CNN reporter Manu Raju tweeted just before 10 p.m..

Barack Obama lost dozens of delegates in the 2012 Democratic primary, but mostly from states with a large contingent of “Dixiecrats” — conservative Democrats — who had largely started voting Republican by that point anyway. The Michigan “Uncommitted” vote against Obama in 2012 was 12 percent.

Either way, it seems a significant message to the Biden administration in a state that he needs to be competitive in come the general election. 

That number has slid to 13.3% this morning and will probably end up close to that figure once the vote counts are complete. That puts it only slightly higher than the 11% (not 12%) that voted against a much more popular Obama in his re-election bid, and Obama didn’t have a Palestinian problem in that cycle. In the end, the 11% “Uncommitted” vote was meaningless in 2012, and is likely meaningless here too. Obama still won Michigan handily in the general election by nearly ten points over Mitt Romney, 54.3/44.7, and he carried 92% of Democrats, almost equal to Romney’s 93% of Republicans. 

Raju’s reference to “the last three cycles” leaves out the context that the other two of those (besides 2012) were competitive primary cycles for Democrats. Democrat primary voters had real choices through which to express disaffection in both 2016 (1.6% “Uncommitted”) and 2020 (1.2% “Uncommitted”). Bernie Sanders probably absorbed most of those normally “Uncommitted” votes in both cycles, and in 2020 there were still multiple and viable candidates contending for the nomination.

The only humiliation created by the “Uncommitted” turn applies to the pro-Palestinian activists. In the context of the normal levels of discontent in non-competitive primaries, they barely moved the needle, if they did at all. The slight difference in percentage between the 2012 and 2024 results for “Uncommitted” may well have come from Democrats who think Joe Biden is too senile to serve as president. I’d bet that was a much bigger issue than Biden’s policies on the Hamas-Israel war or Tlaib’s influence. Tlaib’s campaign flopped, but don’t expect her or the pro-Palestinian press to cover it that way.

But that doesn’t mean that Biden scored a big win in Michigan either. Rather than look at the relative percentages in the primaries, compare the vote totals instead. Biden got 81.1% of 762,187 votes (as of 8:47 am ET); Trump got 68.1% of over 1.1 million votes. Trump alone got nearly as many votes as the total number of voters that cast ballots in the Democrat primary (756K to 762K). Haley got nearly half as many voters as Biden got. 

It’s possible that some Michigan voters opted for the GOP ballot in the primary because it was more competitive. However, even if you take away all of Haley’s votes, Republicans still got a better turnout than Democrats did last night. That should be a huge red flag for Democrats about voter enthusiasm for a candidate that can’t reliably go out on the campaign trail, and can barely operate from the White House podium these days. 

Given Trump’s superior vitality and campaign skills, Democrats shouldn’t just be worried about Michigan. They should be worrying about Pennsylvania and Wisconsin too. 

Update: One other point to keep in mind when comparing/contrasting 2012 and 2024 results: Dems used a caucus in 2012. That means 11% of participants who showed up did so just to oppose Obama. It’s a lot easier to express that on a primary ballot, so that may account for a slight rise in the percentage, too. 

For the record, Democrats got nearly 200,000 participants for their caucus in the 2012 cycle. Republicans used a primary instead, and got nearly one million voters to participate. Last night’s GOP turnout was even more enthusiastic, even while being less competitive (Romney edged past Rick Santorum in 2012, 41/38, with Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul getting substantial numbers of votes.).