Battlefield Michigan: what Michigan and other critical Democratic primaries tell us about 2024

When Donald Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016 against expectations, particular attention was paid to the states I've come to call the rust belt trio: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Collectively, he won these states by about 80,000 votes. In a particularly brutal body blow to Democrats, Trump ended up winning Michigan by around 11,000 votes, or about 2 votes per precinct in the state. The state took over a week after the election to call, with Trump winning it 47.25% to Clinton's 47.03%. It was the closest state by margin of victory in the entire country that year.

I would argue that losing Michigan was the most preventable loss for the Democrats in 2016, owing in no small part to its strong history of union membership, especially among autoworkers, its large population of voters of color, and the fact that its rural areas are a fairly small portion of its overall vote. While there are Republican strongholds throughout the state, it has a fairly robust history of voting for Democrats even in election years that went badly for them. Both Al Gore and John Kerry comfortably won Michigan in 2000 and 2004, despite their lack of success overall (don't get me started on the 2000 presidential election - that's a blog post for another day).

Much ink has been spilled regarding rural areas in the state that came in hard for Trump, in addition to his support in big-but-purple battleground counties like Macomb County where car manufacturers such as GM have a strong economic footprint. The Obama-Trump voters of Michigan - that is to say, voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and then switched to Donald Trump in 2016 over Hillary Clinton - were a massively significant reason Donald Trump became the president for four years. Indeed, one could interpret Bernie Sanders' narrow upset victory in Michigan's Democratic primary in March of that year as an early warning sign that discontent with Hillary Clinton in the state was quite real.

Now, in 2024, a different group of voters in the state is getting attention: Arab-American voters. While they are a small community relative to Michigan at-large - they consist of about 2% of the state's voting population - they have a prominent presence in suburbs of Detroit like Dearborn. The home of auto magnate Henry Ford has had a vibrant Arab-American community going back generations, and they have made one thing abundantly clear: they are angry at President Biden.

Why? Easy. It can be said with one word: Palestine.

From many leaders prominent in Dearborn's Arab community refusing to meet with Biden campaign officials to Abdullah Hammoud, Dearborn's Arab-American mayor, penning a heartfelt op-ed in The New York Times about his angst over the Biden administration's policies regarding Israel's war on Gaza, it is indisputable that this represents a potent, real sentiment in these communities. And while foreign policy tends to not be an issue at the top of many voters' minds, when your family members or the family members of your neighbors are being killed by Israel's military, funded partly by US tax dollars, that can change one's priorities quickly. As Mayor Hammoud of Dearborn notes poignantly in his Op-Ed:

At a Dearborn City Council meeting in November, a resident testified that his family has buried at least 80 relatives in Gaza since Israel began its bombing campaign in October. Eighty relatives. Eighty innocent lives

After elaborating on the sense of betrayal felt by many in his community as a result of the Biden administration's support for Israel's aggressive bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip, he also sounds a warning to President Biden:

My greatest fear is that Mr. Biden will not be remembered as the president who saved American democracy in 2020 but rather as the president who sacrificed it for Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024.

This anger and frustration has also manifested itself in the form of Listen To Michigan - a movement that sprung up shortly before the Michigan primary that encouraged voters in the state to vote "uncommitted" in the Democratic primary in protest of the Biden administration's ongoing support for Israel's war on Gaza. Its most notable supporter and advocate within Michigan is progressive Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress. It ended up posting a respectable showing of about 13% of the vote in the Democratic primary, or just over 100,000 votes. Biden got 81% and over 600,000 votes - still an overwhelming victory, but not quite unanimous in the way his South Carolina victory a few weeks prior was, where he got 96% of the vote.

Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, still has struggled to secure unanimity within his own party - winning 68% of the vote to former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley's 27% in Michigan. Still, his march to the Republican nomination has certainly quickened, especially with his winning almost all states on Super Tuesday. I will have more to say about Trump's 2024 campaign - a campaign predicated on vengeance against his political enemies and rehashing his 2020 election lies - in later blogs.

The idea behind Listen To Michigan has caught fire, and we've seen several like-minded efforts spring up throughout other states that are encouraging Democratic primary voters to vote "uncommitted." (Note to Wisconsin residents: it's actually "uninstructed" in our case)

And while Joe Biden swept on Super Tuesday, winning the plethora of states that voted by huge margins, there were still pockets of dissent. Most notably, this time it manifested in Minnesota, where organizing around voting "uncommitted" caught fire and resulted in a respectable showing of around 19% of the vote statewide to Biden's 71%, earning several delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August. And in the Democratic strongholds of Hennepin and Ramsey County, where Minneapolis and St Paul and their burbs are located, it received about 25% of the vote in each county. Notably, these are counties with large numbers of young, progressive, and Muslim voters - groups that are soft spots for President Biden at the moment.

So what does it all mean?

First, if you'll forgive me for the indulgence, a few more numbers: Joe Biden won Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in 2020 - there's that rust belt trio again - by about 258,000 votes. This is a more commanding margin of victory than Trump's 2016 win in these crucial states. But in actuality, it's mostly Michigan's raw vote total that makes that number look so good: Biden won the state with about 2.8 million votes to Trumps 2.65 million, or about 150,000 votes. In the heavily rural state of Wisconsin, Biden's raw vote margin of victory was actually smaller than Trump's in 2016 (~21,000 votes versus 23,000 votes for Trump in 2016).

And that solid victory in Michigan was won partly because places such as Dearborn came in hard for Biden in 2020. Trump notably improved among many minority communities in 2020 versus his first run in 2016, especially Latinos. But with groups like Arab-American voters, he slipped. Hillary Clinton won Dearborn with 63.0% of the vote to Trump's 30.7%, while Joe Biden won it 68.8% to 29.7%.

As things stand right now, it's hard to see Joe Biden posting up such impressive numbers again with Dearborn's Arab-American voters in 2024. While uncommitted in Michigan had other strongholds, such as places like Ann Arbor, where there is a large presence of university students, its beating heart was in Arab-American and Muslim-dense Detroit suburbs like Dearborn and Hamtramck. In Dearborn, uncommitted beat Joe Biden 56-40%, and in Hamtramck, it won 61-32. Electorally speaking, it's clear that the ongoing carnage of Israel's military campaign in Gaza remains an issue near-and-dear to the hearts of these voters.

In essence, Biden could well be in trouble in Michigan, a state that was critical to both his and Donald Trump's victories. The problem, as reinforced by Super Tuesday's results in Minnesota, isn't just among Arab or Muslim voters, but among wider portions of the Democratic coalition. Young people and progressive voters were never terribly gung ho for Joe, and now his numbers are looking much softer with these groups than was the case in 2020. While Biden has shown considerable strength in the 2024 primary among Black voters, a core Democratic constituency - notably, "uncommitted" has tended to underperform in heavily Black areas - it remains true that there are cracks in his coalition that will need to be sealed up if he wants to be in good shape for November. One of the most important ways to do that is to successfully broker an end to the violence in Palestine.

Speaking from my own heart, it's impossible to witness Gaza's suffering at the hands of Israel and not think of Russia's war on Ukraine. It's a war I have been following for over two years, from the tense, frightening weeks before the invasion (that smug jackasses told me wasn't going to occur) to the slog of the full war entering its third year just recently. Civilians suffer horribly in war, especially vulnerable people such as kids, people with disabilities, and the elderly. Tens of thousands have been killed in both conflicts. I have seen images I will not describe on this post. In Gaza, starvation and disease are beginning to spread. Children are going hungry and are not able to access needed medical care. Sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed by Israel to such an extent that 100s of Palestinians share just one toilet. Some 30,000 people have been killed there, the vast majority civilians. The situation is incredibly dire. The war crimes carried out by Hamas and its allies on 10/7 do not justify the collective punishment of every single person in Gaza.

So here's what I will say: Ukrainians and Palestinians both deserve to live rich, full lives free of bombs, displacement, military occupation, and death. That's it. It's that simple.

I was proud to work to elect Joseph R. Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020. So many people I know gave their all to elect them to the White House amid the chaos, heartbreak, and isolation of the pandemic, myself included. There is still time to do the right thing. Although the admin has been trying to broker a more enduring ceasefire for several months, the more urgent recent calls by both President Biden and Vice President Harris for a ceasefire and a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza are good to see, and there's a chance a ceasefire deal for a period of 6 weeks is on the horizon, pending agreement by Hamas. A prolonged ceasefire such as that could be used to buy time to further lay the groundwork for a permanent end to the carnage. And it's clear that this is partly the result of efforts to organize around an end to the violence and forced displacement being committed by Israel in Gaza.

A lot can change in the course of a campaign. Nothing is yet set in stone. And I pray that the Biden administration is able to successfully broker an enduring ceasefire in Palestine and Israel, not merely for the sake of political self-preservation, but also for the sake of justice. Gaza has already been bled white. Too many precious lives have been lost already, too many killed in both Israel and Palestine. A ceasefire-for-hostages deal is the way forward to staunch this bleeding.