On The Michigan "Uncommitted"
Is the Michigan "Uncommitted" vote overblown? We are about to find out.
The stakes for our 247-year old democratic experiment-in-progress could not be higher in the run-up to tonight’s Democratic primary vote. And while, no, democracy does not end tonight, we will get a clearer picture of the relative strength of the democratic candidate — as opposed to the authoritarian-friendly candidate — by night’s end …
Candidate Trump has already signaled that he would radically transform the Justice Department, “revamp” intelligence agencies (with inexperienced loyalists) restrict reproductive freedoms, conduct massive deportations, splitting up families and quite possibly altering the fundamental nature of NATO — among other policy agendas. In 2016, Trump didn’t have any policy agendas, per se, just a general mood, which was ornery, boorish and, of course, anti-brown.
That was then; this is now. Trump, 2.0, is far less tentative, more — if one can call it this — competent in how to enact his far-right and, quite frankly, thoroughly anti-democratic agenda. He has assembled around him an entourage of far-right sycophantic enablers, like social mountaineer Elise Stefanik, Tim Scott, Steve Bannon, bigot Steve Miller, Vivek Ramaswamy and And actual plans, like The Heritage Foundation's multimillion-dollar Project 2025. By contrast, Trump 1.0, circa 2015, seems utterly unprepared (Trump, we know now, did not expect to win).
Which leads us to where we are now. I think we are (finally) beyond the beltway fan fic chatter about replacing the President with a newer, shinier model. One of those names once anxiously mentioned in that context, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has been a ferocious surrogate for the Biden campaign in the state. And tonight, Michigan votes in the Democratic primary, offering the first real test of the Biden administration’s strength in the party after the so-called “Netanyahu hug,” which I thought at the time was a huge mistake.
The demographics are quite clear here. Michigan, we cannot fail to note, is 2% Muslim-American. And to those voters and to their stalwart allies (young, brown and progressive), the snugness of the Netanyahu hug can only be properly construed as virtue signaling to the Silent Generation. And by that I mean that the Holocaust loomed large and darkly over President Biden’s childhood. He even took all of his children and grandchildren to Dachau when they turned 14, in remembrance of Never Again.
The Holocaust, however, is a distant memory to voters under 40, only highlighting the age issue for the President among Progressive voters. “For example, only 41% of those aged 18-29 had a favorable view of Israel, compared to 69% of those aged 65 or older,” write Jordan Muchnick and Elaine Kamarck of Brookings. “Among those aged 30-49, 49% held a favorable view of Israel, and among 50–64-year old’s, 60% held a favorable view.” Further, factor into this that Netanyahu is the longest-tenured prime minister in Israel's history, having served for a total of over 16 years (again, the age and out-of-touch issue arises). Voters 29 and younger know Israel primarily through the far-right policies of Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel is, to them, whether you agree or not, an apartheid state.
Which leads us to the mechanics of the Netanyahu hug. In what universe is granting a “No Limits Partnership” to a man like Netanyahu — who has confounded at least four American Presidents, both Democrat and Republican — a smart political move? That single act, after the massacre of 1400 Jews — the largest mass murder of Jews, it must be noted, since the Holocaust — has unglued Biden’s Progressive coalition more than anything Trump has said on the campaign trail thus far. It was an unforced error on the part of a man that has spent over half a century in the game and ought to have known better. At the time I wrote in this Substack of its possible impact in Michigan:
Many Progressives within the Democrat Party — including former President Jimmy Carter — equate Israel’s position in the Gaza Strip and West Bank to tantamount to apartheid. From 1948 to the early 1990s, the minority white government in South Africa subjected the indigenous majority to a life nasty, brutish and short. College-educated Progressives largely equate South African apartheid with the Palestinian situation in Israel, at rallies and in letters of solidarity. The far-left, by the way, has always advocated this position, entirely complicating matters in this war, after the murders and the kidnapping. "End All Aid to Zionist, Colonial, Apartheid Israel!," exclaims, breathlessly, the LA Progressive. It is, of course, not quite that simple.
In that context — of viewing Israel as an apartheid state — some Progressives refuse to see what Hamas has done on October 7 as an act of pure and simple terrorism. They either reject the word altogether or quibble with the usage in this case. Even the Anglican Church of South Africa, which directly struggled against apartheid, now characterizes Israel an apartheid state, further complicating life for the defenders of the innocent Israeli civilians killed and kidnapped.
I wrote that on October 23, 2023. Since then Netanyahu, as the leadership of Hamas predicted, overreacted. Palestinian architecture has been rendered unto ash. Palestinian deaths near 30,000. The count of wounded is about 60,000, overwhelming the remaining doctors. The President of Brazil — one of the leading voices of the Global South — is vehemently comparing Israeli’s military overreaction and the consequences to Palestinian lives as comparable to the Holocaust. In embracing Netanyahu, President Biden has drawn us precisely into the type of foreign entanglement that Washington, in 1796, warned us against; the type of foreign entanglement that could lead dissatisfied general election voters to go in for an America First candidate.
That having been said, tonight’s primary will be seen as the first barometer of the political temperature of the Midwest region, which contains two of the most important swing states in this year’s Presidential election — Wisconsin and Michigan — and thus will be closely analyzed and pored over by the cablers. “Michigan has the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the nation,” notes Seung Min Kim of the AP. “More than 310,000 residents are of Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. Nearly half of Dearborn’s roughly 110,000 residents claim Arab ancestry.”
But it is also more than that, with regards to Democrat party mainstays. How much will the Netanyahu hug impact the African-American vote? The college Progressives? Allies of the Palestinian cause are pushing voters to write in “uncommitted” instead of voting for the incumbent. How will this affect the primary? We will know, for good or ill, by the end of the night. Perhaps this is entirely overblown, underserving of such attention on my part. But if Michigan “uncommitteds” surpass 100,000, it will be a very big deal indeed, and rightly so. Could such an event, if it occurred, alter Biden’s support of Netanyahu?
And what of Trump? There is indeed a double standard in the way that the down-the-center journos cover both campaigns. This is, of course, to offset the perceived “liberal media bias” that the right obsesses about. One need look no further than the performance of the Biden campaign in South Carolina and the performance of the Trump campaign in the same. An FT headline described Trump’s victory in the Palmetto State as “crushing;” Al Jazeera said Trump “breezed by” Haley; The Guardian described it as “bruising.” There is no question that there is a double standard in operation here. From Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast:
As Paul Glastris, editor in chief of Washington Monthly, complained recently: “If Trump wins [South Carolina] by 70 percent, [the] media will say ‘crushing victory.’ If Biden wins [Michigan] by 80 percent, it’ll be ‘catastrophic underperformance.’”
Well, the South Carolina votes are in. And Trump garnered 60 percent of the vote in the Palmetto State on Saturday, which is to say he lost nearly 40 percent of Republican primary voters in a deep red state. (It’s worth noting that South Carolina has an open primary, meaning Democrats and independents can vote as long as they didn’t vote in the Democratic primary.)
And, like clockwork, headlines touted how Trump easily defeated Nikki Haley in her own home state.
Glastris has a point. Most mainstream media types would be writing Biden’s political obituary and demanding he drop out “for the good of the party” if he turned in a similar performance.
Oh, for sure. President Biden won 95% of the votes in South Carolina — as opposed to Trump’s 60% — and yet where were the “crushing,” “bruising” and “breezed by” headlines for the incumbent? It is a classic example of the mainstream media overcompensating in their coverage of the right.
The question of “the Michigan uncommitted” plays into this somewhat. The story is certainly getting wind beneath its wings because reporting on it shields news organizations against “liberal media bias.” There is also the desire to make things into a horse race, more compelling to eyeballs than the event actually is. But the Michigan Uncommitted is ultimately a legitimate news story in that it involves the anger of the Progressive left, a key constituency in this election. How angry is the left? We will have after tonight some metrics in some of the largest Muslim-American districts in a swing state. But the reporting on “uncommitted” — or, honestly, the overreporting on the issue of which I myself am probably guilty — alters the calculus of the state, creating (perhaps) a permission structure that will probably add to uncommitted vote.
I would argue, in closing, that tonight is one of the most important primaries of the 2024 race to date.
“Indeed, new polling this week reaffirmed the idea that other issues take precedence over abortion for many people—including key voting blocs. An Economist/YouGov survey asked Americans whether each of 15 issues was important to them. Among the ones they prioritized most were jobs (97 percent), inflation (96 percent), healthcare (95 percent), national security (94 percent), and taxes (94 percent). By comparison, only 76 percent said abortion was important, placing it 14th of the 15 issues. Notably, this was the exact same placement given by two groups whose interest in this issue could theoretically give Democrats a major boost—women and independents.” (Michael Baharadeen/Checks and Balances)
“Katharine Graham was the esteemed proprietor of The Washington Post Company when it owned The Washington Post, Newsweek, and enough other enterprises to be trading at $800 and more per share, for which you didn’t actually get the possibility of voting control. She once described the strength of the newspaper (and by extension, the news business generally) as: ‘Woodward & Bernstein and Woodward & Lothrop’ — the great Watergate reporting team and the great downtown department store. What she meant was that the news business operated in two distinct lanes: the content it reported and the advertising revenue that paid for the content. The business side, as it was called, was responsible for paying the bills — supported, in the case of newspapers and magazines, by subscriptions, which was a valued but less lucrative factor. And then, in the twenty-first century, advertising fundamentally changed: To this day, most of the vast revenues of Alphabet and Meta come from a different kind of advertising, shaped by algorithms to the extent that if you once click on, say, a shoe, you’ll be getting pitches for shoes, shoes, and shoes. I should say here that for the people in the news business this is no revelation, and the formula for how advertising revenues are apportioned is a tug-of-war that is overwhelmingly on the side of big tech and the internet-based sites like YouTube (owned by Alphabet) and Facebook (owned by Meta). These companies contend that they link and send people to the originating news sites, though in fact they do this much less often than they used to. Why bother?” (Peter Osnos)
“Kara Swisher: Let's be clear: A lot of what's happened is the fault of the media ... it's a fault of the media letting technology take the business — like really impact the business in ways they did not anticipate. By not continuing to iterate and change cost structures, they've got themselves in a situation that was already headed that way from back when Craigslist collapsed the classified advertising business. Right? This isn't fresh news that everything is going digital. It's how do you make a business out of it in a new environment? And they didn't anticipate that these tech companies were going to get into media. They were going to become media. And they are media. They are entertainment. What is Instagram except entertainment? For them to just think they were huge techies as a big error.” (Reliable Sources)
“The first time I went to CPAC, I was writing about how and why young conservative women were hating on ‘feminism’ - a movement that had arguably enabled them to get out of the kitchen, don the F-me shoes, and mingle with the likes of Ted Cruz and the John Birch Society. In my memory, the bowels of a DC convention hall were thick with vendors who got weirder the farther into the hallucinatory fug you walked, where finally there was a table with a larval-complected trio in white robes and red crosses … members of one of the medieval Catholic orders last heard from in the 15th Century until Leonard Leo raised them up from obscurity when he bought the U.S. Supreme Court. Somewhere in that circle of hell is where I first encountered future NRA shill and school shooting apologist Dana Loesch. The footwear of choice for her and most of the women was the red-soled Louboutin stiletto. The chief complaint the young femme extremists had about feminists was that we didn’t know how to be sexy and that we hated men. They refused to believe that wasn’t true, evidence of liberal babies notwithstanding. Perhaps because I entered this subculture through that lens, I have always seen the extreme right as a product of repressed attitudes toward gender and sex.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
Great article!