The “Listen to Michigan” campaign had hoped to convince 10,000 Democratic voters to choose “uncommitted” for president in Tuesday’s primary election as a protest to President Joe Biden’s Israel-Gaza policy. That more than 100,000 people voted “uncommitted” sends a blaring message to Biden that he must stop supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal war in Gaza. At least, that’s the message if he wants to convince those Michigan voters who chose “uncommitted” — and convince disaffected Democrats in other battleground states — to vote to re-elect him in November.
This is not an anti-Biden campaign. It’s a humanitarian vote. It’s a protest vote. It is a vote that tells Biden and his administration that we believe in saving lives.”
“This is not an anti-Biden campaign,” Layla Elabed, a longtime Democratic activist and the head of the “Listen to Michigan” campaign, told CNN the day before the election. “It’s a humanitarian vote. It’s a protest vote. It is a vote that tells Biden and his administration that we believe in saving lives.” Biden won Michigan in 2020 by approximately 150,000 votes. He won 83% of the vote in the precincts with the highest concentration of Muslim and Arab Americans and 81% of votes in Hamtramck, a Muslim-majority city.
Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, a majority Arab-American city, said in a powerful New York Times op-ed this month that he “firmly believed that Joe Biden was one of the most consequential and transformative presidents that our nation had seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
But like so many other Arab or Muslim Americans, Hammoud’s beliefs about Biden changed. After Hamas killed approximately 1,200 Israelis during its Oct. 7 attack and kidnapped at least 200 people, Israel responded with a military operation that has caused the deaths of at least 30,000 people. Thursday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number of Palestinian women and…
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