After weeks of media hype, the push by a fringe group of Democrats to oppose President Joe Biden in Michigan’s Democratic primary ended not with a bang, but with a whimper.
In Michigan, a handful of prominent local and national activists urged Democrats to show their dissatisfaction with Biden’s supposedly pro-Israel policies by opposing him – just in the uncontested primary, and not when it could actually harm him and the Democrats in November – amounting to nothing more than a pointless virtue signal.
Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, correctly noted that yesterday’s vote was a free pass. “Those who voted ‘uncommitted’ in this Michigan primary did so knowing that President Biden would easily win,” she said, all but daring them to try it again in November – knowing that won’t happen. “That will not necessarily be the case the next time he’s on the ballot.”
However, when push came to shove, only about one in ten voters in Michigan’s Democrat primary will have ended up voting “uncommitted” in opposition to Biden’s support for a nonexistent Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. The campaign, called "Listen To Michigan," saw more raw votes cast for uncommitted than in recent years, but it follows a pattern of low-double-digit percentages of Michigan Democrats regularly voting against their party’s frontrunner in the state’s primary.
Michigan Democrats are also far more left-wing than their counterparts elsewhere. This is the state in whose primary Bernie Sanders vanquished Hillary Clinton in 2016, after all. Fast forward to 2020, when almost 11 percent of the state’s Democrat primary voters cast ballots for uncommitted, or for Democrats like John Delaney or Joe Sestak who no one even remembers ran for president. That vote count totals around 170,000 votes for candidates who were no longer even running, and it didn’t stop Biden from winning Michigan over Trump in November 2020.
But, given that Palestinian history is based on fact-free narratives and outright lies, it’s no surprise to see that the movement claimed victory anyway, in a grammatically incorrect statement. “Our movement emerged victorious tonight and massively surpassed our expectations,” the group claimed after their 68-point loss. “Tens of thousands of Michigan Democrats, many of whom who [sic] voted for Biden in 2020, are uncommitted to his re-election due to the war in Gaza.” Some supporters are already turning to other states where uncommitted is an option. Perhaps the thinking is that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again to vote for Hamas’s priorities in an American election.
However, when you read in between the lines, you realize that Listen To Michigan’s radicalism is purely performative. As with the socialist Squad in Washington, they will cave to their party bosses after screeching on X, formerly Twitter, for a few weeks. “Our delegation plans to hold the Democratic nominee accountable to our community’s anti-war agenda at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,” the group wrote. “See you there.” All purported accountability it seeks ends as soon as Joe Biden is renominated.
At the end of the day, communist college students at the University of Michigan, and small slivers of voters in cities like Dearborn, are tiny segments of the Democrats' base–and are wholly unrepresentative of widespread American support for Israel. In fact, recent polling from Harvard shows that a majority of voters both support Israel’s ground offensive against Hamas terrorists in Gaza and that the majority of every single age group in America supports Israel over Hamas – counter to what the White House seems to think.
Of course, this makes Biden doing handstands for the Palestinian Authority completely unexplainable. There simply is no meaningful coalition in American politics that supports rewarding the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust with a Palestinian state, except perhaps in Biden’s White House or State Department.
In fact, despite what some on the online left insist, there’s some evidence that even far-left Democrats are realizing that there’s more to lose than gain by allying with radical anti-Semites. Congresswoman Summer Lee just canceled plans to appear at a gala for the Philadelphia branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) due, in part, to its national executive director’s history of support for Hamas and of “shocking, antisemitic statements” in the words of the Biden White House.
None of this is to suggest that Republican strategist and "Ruthless" podcaster Josh Holmes is wrong in insisting that Hamas has a constituency in the Democratic Party. Congressman Jamaal Bowman, for example, is hosting a joint fundraiser with Tlaib outside his district next week. Bowman laughably accused Israel of genocide following the mass slaughter of October 7th, which was carried out by Hamas terrorists alongside both Palestinian so-called civilians and reporters for outlets like the Associated Press. Apparently, Tlaib’s lengthy history of anti-Semitism and promotion of fundraisers tied to both Hamas and the Taliban isn’t a problem for Bowman. Let’s hope there are no fire alarms in that building.
For weeks, sweaty Democrats like Beto O’Rourke and anti-Semitic Democrats like Rashida Tlaib and Nina Turner begged Americans to #ListenToMichigan. Well, the results speak for themselves: even the most organized opposition to Joe Biden’s presidency from the left can barely muster a tenth of the vote in an uncontested primary.
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