{"id":1552154,"date":"2024-03-13T16:42:39","date_gmt":"2024-03-13T16:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2024\/03\/uncommitted-vote-washington-state-biden-primary-gaza\/"},"modified":"2024-03-13T16:42:39","modified_gmt":"2024-03-13T16:42:39","slug":"the-uncommitted-vote-isnt-slowing-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/03\/13\/the-uncommitted-vote-isnt-slowing-down\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cUncommitted\u201d Vote Isn\u2019t Slowing Down"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

The count so far in Washington shows that another nearly 50,000 Democratic voters in a solid blue state opted to vote \u201cuncommitted\u201d last night. How long will the White House resist changing course on Israel\u2019s war?<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Attendees listen to speeches during an \u201cUncommitted for Joe Biden\u201d primary election night watch party at Adonis restaurant on February 27, 2024 in Dearborn, Michigan. (Kevin Dietsch \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

As antiwar activists continue to use the Democratic primary process to push for a cease-fire in Gaza, last night\u2019s vote for the third straight week showed the depth of voter discontent with their standard-bearer\u2019s handling of the war.<\/p>\n

Washington State was the latest target of the \u201cuncommitted\u201d movement after successes across the country in previous weeks. With a fifth of the votes still to be counted, tens of thousands of the state\u2019s Democratic voters made their displeasure with President Joe Biden known. \u201cUncommitted\u201d took 7.5 percent of the vote last night in Washington, or 48,619 votes, quadrupling organizers\u2019 initial target of twelve thousand, though falling short of the higher margins similar efforts had taken in Michigan, Minnesota, and North Carolina and failing to win a delegate so far.<\/p>\n

Even so, the vote was a substantial rebuke to an incumbent president from his own party base in a solidly blue state, at a time when he faces no serious primary challenger. The anti-Biden vote looks more dramatic when including the vote counts of his two primary contenders, both of whom have taken more aggressive pro-cease-fire positions than the president, with 12.7 percent (85,811 voters) choosing one of the alternatives. The campaign only began contacting voters nine days before the primary, and many voters \u2014 including those whom phone bankers contacted in the days leading up to the vote and who were inclined to vote \u201cuncommitted\u201d \u2014 had already voted by mail, starting from February 23.<\/p>\n

Washington\u2019s primary was a caucus the last time a Democratic incumbent ran effectively unopposed, with Barack Obama ending up with 100 percent of the vote, offering a poor point of comparison. A better one may be when Donald Trump won the state\u2019s GOP primary as the incumbent four years ago, taking home 98.4 percent of the vote against write-in candidates and taking no less than 97 percent in any single county<\/a> in the state. By contrast, as of the time of writing, Biden\u2019s win total was twelve points lower than Trump\u2019s, and he won 90 percent or more of the vote in only three of the state\u2019s thirty-nine counties.<\/p>\n

In keeping with a trend seen across the primaries so far, counties with large numbers of college-age voters delivered the best results for \u201cuncommitted\u201d in the state. Whitman (home of Washington State University), Whatcom (home to Western Washington University and several other higher-education institutions), and King (the state\u2019s most populous county and housing several private and public colleges) counties gave \u201cuncommitted\u201d 7, 10, and 10 percent of the vote, respectively \u2014 its best showings across the state.<\/p>\n

In what could be warning signs for Democratic enthusiasm, several other counties the president won four years ago also delivered higher-than-average returns for \u201cuncommitted.\u201d That includes the populous counties of Snohomish (7 percent), Thurston (7 percent), Pierce (6 percent), and Clark (5 percent).<\/p>\n

Five counties (Clallam, Grays Harbor, Mason, Cowlitz, and Pacific) flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016, and Biden won all but one of them in the 2020 Democratic primary \u2014 though only Clallam stuck for the general election, in which he won the state by a huge margin. Though \u201cuncommitted\u201d didn\u2019t take more than 4 percent in any of them, the total anti-Biden vote crossed or hovered just under 10 percent in each one. In fact, in the thirteen counties that Biden carried in 2020, the broad anti-Biden vote hit 10 percent or higher in all but two (Clallam and Island), getting its highest total \u2014 or around 15 percent \u2014 in King, Whatcom, and Whitman counties.<\/p>\n

With roughly a fifth of the votes still to be tallied, these results could look very different in a day\u2019s time. That\u2019s not guaranteed to be in \u201cuncommitted\u201d\u2019s favor: in 2020, late-arriving ballots gave a boost<\/a> to Republican candidates for the state legislature.<\/p>\n

Though \u201cuncommitted\u201d was only an option for Democratic voters in Washington last night, antiwar campaigners attempted their own version in Georgia \u2014 the formerly red state that Biden succeeded in flipping four years ago by only twelve thousand votes, thanks to on-the-ground organizing<\/a> by progressive groups.<\/p>\n

The president won far more decisively last night than in other states targeted by pro-cease-fire forces, taking 95 percent of the vote \u2014 roughly on par with Obama<\/a> and Trump\u2019s 100 percent of the vote in 2012. With \u201cuncommitted\u201d not on the state\u2019s ballot, activists spent the weeks leading up to the vote urging<\/a> voters to \u201cleave it blank\u201d as a show of dissatisfaction over the Gaza war.<\/p>\n

With most of the votes counted, the results have been decidedly more modest: blank ballots, recorded as \u201cundervotes\u201d in Georgia\u2019s tallies, didn\u2019t crack 4 percent<\/a> in any of the key, Atlanta-surrounding counties where Democrats surged turnout to win the state four years ago. In some, like Richmond, Henry, and Clayton counties, it got less than a percentage point.<\/p>\n

Ten more states with an \u201cuncommitted\u201d option on the ballot are yet to vote<\/a>, including Kansas next Tuesday, and Connecticut and Rhode Island in April. Wisconsin, also set to vote April 2, is also being targeted by antiwar campaigners.<\/p>\n

The protest movement has already shown subtle but unmistakable signs of influencing the administration. The Michigan vote led to rhetorical pivots<\/a> by White House officials, including both the president<\/a> and vice president<\/a>, who took on a more empathetic tone toward Palestinian suffering in subsequent addresses and more emphatically championed the concept of a cease-fire, albeit a temporary one. The president is now embroiled in an increasingly public spat with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is threatening to invade Rafah regardless of the White House\u2019s public unhappiness with the idea.<\/p>\n

With further uncommitted successes following, the president has taken<\/a> halting<\/a> steps<\/a> toward measures that pro-cease-fire voices have spent months calling for, namely conditioning or withholding further military to Israel or letting a pro-cease-fire resolution pass through the UN Security Council. Representative Ro Khanna has said<\/a> that the president\u2019s references to a cease-fire were a \u201cdirect result\u201d of the Michigan vote, while former Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid reported<\/a> a State Department aide telling him their approach to the war had changed at its quickest pace since that campaign kickstarted. Success, however, will only come if these campaigns spur more far-reaching steps toward ending the war.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As antiwar activists continue to use the Democratic primary process to push for a cease-fire in Gaza, last night\u2019s vote for the third straight week showed the depth of voter discontent with their standard-bearer\u2019s handling of the war. Washington State was the latest target of the \u201cuncommitted\u201d movement after successes across the country in previous [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1445,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1445"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1552154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1552155,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552154\/revisions\/1552155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1552154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1552154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1552154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}