Keys to the Michigan primary: 100,000 protest votes and the candidates’ weaknesses

The leading candidates in the U.S. presidential primaries, Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump, won comfortably in Michigan, a swing state that could tip the balance in next November’s elections. But their respective victories have also come at a cost and demonstrate the problems they face with part of their electorate. Below are some of the keys to the results.

The main key: The “uncommitted” protest vote against Biden

The U.S. president received over 80% of the 760,000 votes cast in Michigan, a state of 10 million inhabitants. But he also received more than 101,000 “uncommitted” ballots (13.2%), the equivalent of a blank vote, in a gesture of protest against his pro-Israeli policy in the war in Gaza. A campaign launched by Michigan’s large Arab community and progressive groups urged Democratic supporters to choose that option to call for a permanent ceasefire and to warn Biden that his rejection of a cessation of hostilities could cost him re-election.

The campaign set a modest goal: to achieve 10,000 “uncommitted” voters. An easy number: in the last three state primaries, without an organization behind it, there were 20,000 blank votes recorded as a protest for different causes. Tuesday’s results exceeded the estimates. It is a sign of the latent discontent among the party’s grassroots that may endanger the delicate coalition of progressive groups, minorities, unions and college graduates that brought Biden to the White House in 2020. Dozens of Democratic politicians, from Michigan and out of state, expressed support for the initiative.

“The message these votes send is something that we already knew before the primaries: the president is losing support because of his endorsement of a massacre in Gaza, and he needs to change his position before he comes to ask for our votes in November,” says Abbas Alawieh, the spokesman for the Listen to Michigan group, which organized the campaign.

Listen to Michigan has received inquiries from other organizations in Washington, which will hold its primary on March 12, and Minnesota, which will host its primary next week, that want to launch similar campaigns. “We are willing to coordinate strategies with all those who wish to create a coalition against the war,” Alawieh, a former advisor to the U.S. Congress, explains.

Biden did not mention the protest vote, or the situation in Gaza, in his statement on the results of Michigan; instead, he chose to focus on his differences with Trump in areas such as abortion rights and the economy. For her part, Vice President Kamala Harris noted in a separate statement that the results of the primary “make it clear that the people of Michigan are ready” to address issues such as gun violence and reproductive rights.

Campaign participants insist that the numbers achieved in the primary demonstrate the need for the White House — and Democratic lawmakers — to change their position and pay attention to their grassroots. “If the White House is listening to us, if our leaders in Congress and at [the] State [Department] are listening to us, we need to change course, or we risk having American democracy ruined in November with a Donald Trump victory,” noted Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, a city with a majority Arab population near Detroit where the “uncommitted” vote campaign was born.

Trump also displays weaknesses

For the former president and Republican hopeful to return to the White House, Tuesday’s election offered the opportunity to demonstrate the support he has in a state where the party apparatus is very loyal to him. Michigan was key to his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, but in 2020, Biden won the state by 150,000 votes.

Instead, Michigan made it clear that a sizable portion of Republican voters, especially college educated ones, are at odds with the party’s likely November nominee. Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., won 26% of the vote, three days after she garnered 40% in her home state of South Carolina: it was not enough to win the primary, but it was significant. Some of Haley’s supporters say that they will not vote for Trump in November.

Nikki Haley begins to see her withdrawal from the race

The former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. came to Michigan hoping to capitalize on the moderate Republican vote and to rebound from her decisive defeat in the South Carolina primary. She did not succeed. The only rival still in the race against the prohibitive favorite, Donald Trump, garnered little more than a quarter of the vote. And it doesn’t look like she will raise her percentages in the next contests in conservative Idaho this weekend or on Super Tuesday on March 5.

Haley has vowed to continue the battle until at least next Tuesday, when California, Texas and Virginia will hold their primaries. “We have a country to save,” she told CNN after the polls closed in Michigan.

But, with no victory in the primaries yet, as donors begin to withdraw their support, and with the polls overwhelmingly against her, she has also begun to shift her discourse away from insisting that she can win the race to focus more on noting that Trump cannot win a general election with only the support of his base. In the same CNN interview, she acknowledged that “it is possible” that the majority view in the Republican Party no longer matches her own.

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