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      ‘Uncommitted’ vote in Michigan a warning shot over Biden’s support of Israel

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      Standing before shimmering gold curtains on Tuesday evening, the mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud, spoke with pride about his city.“We had the audacity to choose people over political party,” he said. “We had the damn audacity to put people over president.”For many gathered at this sprawling banquet hall in the heart of America’s most concentrated Muslim population, the outcome of last night’s Democratic primary in Michigan was beyond even the boldest of predictions.Although Joe Biden took the state, it was the hastily organized but committed grassroots campaign against the president’s support for the Israeli government’s war with Gaza that took the night. Organizers with Listen to Michigan, a group that urged voters to withdraw support for Biden and instead vote uncommitted, had hoped for a showing of 10,000 votes. They returned more than 100,000 – a clear demonstration of the growing fractures among the diverse coalition that brought Biden to power in 2020.It is a warning shot to the Democratic party, and shows more signs of expanding than diminishing as the primary season wears on.In just four weeks, the uncommitted campaign mobilized a cohort of progressives concentrated in the suburbs of Detroit, a region that saw a significant rise in Democratic turnout four years ago.“This is a humanitarian vote,” said the campaign’s manager, Layla Elabed, a 34-year-old lifelong Democrat, as she sipped coffee at a Yemeni cafe on a frigid Sunday morning, two days before the vote. “Right now, Joe Biden sits in a place of power where he can actually change course and save lives.”Elabed, the sister of the US representative Rashida Tlaib – the first Palestinian American to serve in Congress – met Biden last year at the White House during Eid celebrations. The president has heard personal stories of their grandmother’s struggles living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, she said. “But it feels a lot like it’s falling on deaf ears.”Her next stop was a rally in the city of Hamtramck, where those assembled underlined not only the movement’s diverse collective of ages and race, but also the divergent outlooks on how the campaign could or should affect the general election in November.“I’m very focused on the moment,” said Dima Hassan, a Palestinian American who would be voting in her first presidential election in 2024. “What is happening right now is an active genocide so thinking about November honestly feels silly.”Yet Tuesday’s result should send alarm bells ringing for that vote, given the thin margin of Trump’s victory in 2016, which saw him swing the state red by just more than 10,000 votes. Organizers say the group is also representative of the large Democratic disapproval ratings of Biden’s handling of the war, the death toll in which is likely to surpass 30,000 in Gaza by this week.Although hastily convened, Listen to Michigan is well organized, with an effective phone banking operation making more than 500,000 calls in just a matter of weeks, according to the campaign. But with no official headquarters, meetings are held in cafes and living rooms. Elabed’s car is laden with boxes of flyers that she hauls alone, darting between locations.Although Biden sent campaign representatives to meet with members of the Arab-American community here earlier this month and on Monday expressed hope of a ceasefire, recent comments from the state’s Democratic governor that equated an uncommitted vote to effective support for Donald Trump were met with scorn.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMuslim communities in Dearborn and elsewhere endured rising rates of hate crimes during the Trump presidency, following a campaign laced with Islamophobia. Trump implemented a travel ban for several Muslim majority countries, which he has pledged to reinstate if he wins in 2024.With just a few hours left to vote on Tuesday afternoon, polling stations in Dearborn were still welcoming a steady flow of primary voters. At an intersection by the McDonald elementary school, Linda Sarsour, the New York-based organizer, was handing out flyers to those who trickled through. Most had already decided to cast their ballot uncommitted.Sarsour, who co-chaired the Women’s March in 2017 and became a prominent activist during the Trump era, expressed contempt at those within the party making the Trump equation.“Shame on them for gaslighting this community,” she said. “This is a presidential primary, this is democracy and people should be able to vote for whoever they want. Donald Trump is not part of the Democratic primary.”She continued: “But also the ball is in Joe Biden’s court. Why start pointing fingers at the voters when they should be pointing fingers at Joe Biden. They should be demanding that Joe Biden do better in order to keep these voters within the Democratic party.”Sarsour was one of a handful of volunteers from outside Michigan who had come to support the campaign on Tuesday. Others had arrived from Florida, Illinois and Washington, as the grassroots effort looks to expand beyond Michigan.Efforts are already under way for an uncommitted vote in Minnesota and also in Washington, while other states that do not offer an uncommitted ballot option may see new write-in campaigns.“This is becoming an opportunity to translate protest in the street to protest at the ballot,” Sarsour said. More

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      Biden wins Michigan primary but sheds support over Gaza

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      Joe Biden has won the Democratic primary in Michigan – but a concerted effort by anti-war activists to vote “uncommitted” in the race could overshadow his win.The US president faced no real primary challenger in the contest. But a campaign that formed just weeks before the primary to vote “uncommitted” in protest of his continued support for Israel’s war in Gaza signaled the fury and betrayal some Arab American and younger voters in the state feel for Biden.The group pushing for voters to choose “uncommitted” – called Listen to Michigan – set the goal of 10,000 uncommitted votes in the primary. With more than half of the votes tallied Tuesday night, “uncommitted” had received 74,000 votes out of a total of more than 580,000 – almost 13% of the vote.For context, when the then president, Barack Obama, ran uncontested in the 2012 race, about 21,000 voted “uncommitted” against him in Michigan’s primary, with about 194,000 voting in total – just over 9% of voters.Trump narrowly won the state by just 11,000 votes in 2016 and organisers of the “uncommitted” effort wanted to show that they have at least the number of votes that were Trump’s margin of victory in 2016, to demonstrate how influential the bloc can be.View image in fullscreenAs results came in after polls closed at 8pm, members of the Listen to Michigan campaign gathered at a banquet hall in Dearborn and declared the results a victory for their campaign.. Attendees embraced and celebrated, many wearing the black and white keffiyeh.Before handing the microphone off to a series of speakers for the campaign, Abbas Alawieh, a Listen to Michigan spokesperson, held a moment’s silence “for every human life that has been taken from us too soon using US taxpayer funds and bombs”.“Thank you to our local and national progressive organizations and our voters of conscience, who used our democratic process to vote against war, genocide and the destruction of a people and a land,” said Layla Elabed, who launched the campaign in early February.The former congressman Andy Levin, an early and prominent local supporter of the push to vote “uncommitted”, called the movement “a child of necessity” and said the turnout so far was “a huge victory”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There is no hope for security and peace for the Jewish people without security and peace and freedom and justice for the Palestinian people,” said Levin, to cheers.The Listen to Michigan campaign was intended as a warning for Biden to revise his so far unwavering support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which has killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians, ahead of the general election. The campaign is especially significant in Michigan given the state’s large Arab American population, a group that supported Biden strongly in 2020.But it isn’t clear what share of “uncommitted” voters are prepared to abandon Biden in the general election this November, when he will most likely face Donald Trump – who is campaigning on a pledge to reinstate and expand his Muslim travel ban.A day before the primary, Biden announced a ceasefire could come as soon as Monday – but both Hamas and Israeli officials denied that negotiations had progressed substantially.In a statement on Tuesday night, Biden did not address the Listen to Michigan campaign or the growing tally of voters who cast their ballots as “uncommitted”, instead touting his record on labor and warning that Trump is “threatening to drag us even further into the past as he pursues revenge and retribution”. More

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      Trump scores another convincing win against Haley in Michigan primary

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      Donald Trump has won Michigan’s Republican primary election, the latest in a string of convincing primary victories as he closes in on the GOP presidential nomination.The Associated Press called the race for Trump over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley at 9pm ET.The former president has repeatedly trounced Haley in the primaries, but she has hung on with a campaign that continues to highlight areas of weakness for Trump and offers Republicans uneasy about Trump a protest vote of their own. Haley has pledged to stay in the primaries at least through next Tuesday, 5 March, when 15 states will vote and Trump could all but sew up the Republican nomination.With almost 99% of the vote counted, Trump had received 68.2% to Haley’s 26.5%.Trump did not travel to the state Tuesday night. He instead called into a Michigan GOP election night watch party in Grand Rapids, where he stressed the importance of the state in the general election and said the results Tuesday evening were “far greater than anticipated.”“We have a very simple task: We have to win on Nov. 5 and we’re going to win big,” Trump said, according to a campaign transcript. “We win Michigan, we win the whole thing.”But there are some warning signs for Trump in his easy victory in Michigan.Early reporting out of Kent county, which flipped to Biden in the 2020 presidential election, showed Trump with a slimmer margin of victory. That part of the state is significant to the conservative movement and home to the conservative mega-donors the DeVoses.Haley’s strongest performance Tuesday night came in areas with college towns like Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, and suburbs around Detroit and Grand Rapids.Speaking at a press conference in Grand Rapids ahead of the primary, Haley argued that the bloc of Republicans who have continued to turn out for her despite Trump’s dominance in the primaries signaled trouble for Trump in November.“You can’t win a general election if you don’t acknowledge the 40% of Republicans who are saying we don’t want Donald Trump,” said Haley, referring to the share of Republican voters in South Carolina who voted for her.Her comments reflected the fact that even rightwing Republicans like Haley, who came up in the Tea Party movement, could find themselves alienated from today’s Republican party for refraining from supporting Trump.On Tuesday night, as the primary results trickled in, Haley told CNN she was continuing to campaign in preparation for the 15 primaries a week from today, and she criticised Trump. “He cannot win a general election,” said Haley.It is unclear where Haley’s campaign goes from here. Until now, she has powered through the losses, fuelled in part by Americans for Prosperity Action, a powerful funding arm affiliated with the Koch network. But AFP Action abandoned the Haley campaign after she lost in South Carolina, her home state. In a letter obtained by Politico, the Americans for Prosperity CEO, Emily Seidel, commended Haley as a “special leader with conviction, resolve, and steel in her spine”, but wrote that the group would instead focus on Senate and House races in the 2024 election cycle.The Michigan GOP, meanwhile has embraced Trump. This primary only decided about 30% of Republican delegates from Michigan – because of a scheduling change, to stay in compliance with Republican National Committee rules, most delegates will be assigned during the state’s Republican convention and caucus on Saturday, where Trump is strongly favoured.Even a factional crisis that has rocked the state Republican party has not dented Trump’s support among its leadership. “We’ve got our nominee,” the Michigan Republican party chairman, Pete Hoekstra, former US ambassador to the Netherlands under the Trump administration, told the Detroit News on Tuesday night as the results came in.Trump’s dominance of the early states is unparalleled since 1976, when Iowa and New Hampshire began their tradition of holding the first nominating contests. He has won resounding support from most pockets of the Republican voting base, including evangelical voters, conservatives and those who live in rural areas. But Trump has struggled with college-educated voters, losing that bloc in South Carolina to Haley last weekend. More

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      Michigan Republican Primary Election 2024 Live Results: Trump Wins

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      Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press. The Times publishes its own estimates for each candidate’s share of the final vote and the number of remaining votes, based on historic turnout data and reporting from results providers. These are only estimates, and they may not be informed by reports from election officials.Produced by Michael Andre, Camille Baker, Neil Berg, Michael Beswetherick, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Leo Dominguez, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Jasmine C. Lee, Alex Lemonides, Ilana Marcus, Alicia Parlapiano, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Felice Belman.
      Editing by Wilson Andrews, Lindsey Rogers Cook, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski and Allison McCartney. More

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      Michigan primary a test for Biden as key voters turn away over Gaza war

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      Polls began to close in Michigan on Tuesday, in a presidential primary that tested how much Joe Biden and Donald Trump should be worried about winning key groups of voters in the general election in the critical swing state.Though both were on track to win their races, Biden and Trump faced challenges within their respective parties. After underperforming in the polls and struggling with suburban and college-educated Republican voters in earlier primaries, Trump’s campaign in Michigan is dealing with a state Republican party whose local leaders have been embroiled in an ugly factional dispute, while Biden faces a campaign by anti-war activists to abandon him over the president’s continued support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.In an interview with the Guardian, Layla Elabed, sister of the congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and campaign director for Listen to Michigan, said organizers were hoping for a showing of between 10,000 and 15,000 “uncommitted” votes, a mirror of the margin by which Hillary Clinton lost the state to Donald Trump in 2016. They passed 14,000 “uncommitted” votes by 8.30pm, according to an Associated Press count, which could be a significant rebuke of Biden.As the sun began to set on Tuesday evening, a steady stream of voters made their way to polling stations in Dearborn, where the “uncommitted” campaign has concentrated much of its resources on election day.Volunteers sat at intersections and outside the doors of the McDonald elementary school handing out campaign literature, but many of those arriving to vote had already decided to cast an uncommitted ballot.“This is to send a message to the president,” said 41-year-old Khalifah Mahdi, a local business owner who said he was voting for the first time in a primary election. “He has lost a lot of strength and respect in this first term and he needs to win that back.”Maria Ibarra, a volunteer with the Listen to Michigan campaign, said that one Dearborn precinct ran out of voter-registration applications around 7pm Eastern standard time. The voters waiting in line, Ibarra said, “want to make sure that there’s a clear message, that they want a permanent ceasefire”. By 8pm the precinct had obtained more applications.The push by Democratic voters to vote “uncommitted” in today’s primary picked up steam since organizers launched it in early February, with dozens of local elected officials in greater Detroit publicly endorsing the push.That effort has the support of the Dearborn mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, whose Detroit suburb has the largest percentage of Arab Americans of any city in the US. He wrote in a February op-ed in the New York Times that his constituents were “haunted by the images, videos and stories streaming out of Gaza” and felt “a visceral sense of betrayal” by Biden’s support for Israel.The campaign also has support from the representative Tlaib, a Palestinian American who represents Dearborn in Congress. In a video posted on social media today, Tlaib announced that she “was proud today” to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary. “President Biden is not hearing us,” she said, citing a recent poll that showed about 74% of Democrats in Michigan support a ceasefire in Gaza. “This is the way we can use our democracy to say ‘listen – listen to Michigan.’”The campaign also earned the backing of the former congressman Andy Levin, who is Jewish and close to organized labor in the state, and the former 2020 presidential candidate and representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas.“We can use uncommitted to send a clear and powerful message to Joe Biden if we get enough uncommitted votes for a margin of victory,” Elabed, who voted for Biden in 2020, said. “If we’re able to replicate those numbers we can really send a message that he’s at risk of losing Michigan in the general election come November.” The Listen to Michigan campaign on Tuesday evening said they believed they would win at least one delegate at the Democratic national convention. Delegates can be awarded to candidates who earn at least 15% of the vote in a congressional district.Recent history offers some points of comparison for the ongoing “uncommitted” push in Michigan.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2008, when voters in Michigan, frustrated at Barack Obama’s absence from the Democratic primary ballot, launched a similar campaign, nearly 40% who cast their ballot did so for the “uncommitted” option. When Obama ran in 2012 – the last time a Democrat entered the Michigan primary as an incumbent – more than 10% of voters in the primary chose “uncommitted”.On the Republican side, Trump was expected to win comfortably against the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley – but weaknesses in his coalition that emerged in earlier primaries in South Carolina and New Hampshire could show up again in the key swing state.If Trump struggles in Kent county in western Michigan, a former Republican bastion that includes Grand Rapids and which flipped to Biden in 2020, and in Oakland county, a more upscale area in suburban Detroit where voters have also shifted away from Trump, that could be particularly telling. Haley made campaign stops in both places in the days ahead of the primary, where she argued that Trump, who won the South Carolina primary by 60% to Haley’s 40%, would struggle to pick up support from those voters.“He’s not gonna get the 40% if he’s going and calling out my supporters and saying they’re barred permanently from Maga,” Haley told a Michigan audience this weekend. “And why should the 40% have to cave to him?”But Tuesday’s vote won’t be the end of things.The Michigan GOP, to comply with national party rules on the timing of the primary, will only award 30% of its delegates to the national convention based on Tuesday’s vote. The rest will be awarded at a Saturday convention. The convention itself has been caught up in a chaotic power struggle over who the real Michigan GOP chair is – but the delegates are expected to be heavily pro-Trump. More

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      Michigan Judge Orders Kristina Karamo to Stand Down in G.O.P. Leadership Fight

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      A circuit court judge on Tuesday ordered Kristina Karamo, the deposed leader of the Michigan Republicans, to abandon her efforts to cling to power. But what that means for Saturday, when Ms. Karamo had pledged to hold a dueling presidential nominating convention, remains unclear.“I have to comply with the judge’s orders,” she told reporters after the court hearing, according to The Detroit Free Press.She also called the ruling “egregious,” and said “I’m not going to jail.” But she did not say when asked if she would abandon her plans for the convention on Saturday in Detroit.In a two-page order, Judge J. Joseph Rossi of the 17th Circuit Court in Grand Rapids, Mich., granted a preliminary injunction to the group of Republicans that voted in January to oust her. He barred Ms. Karamo from presenting herself as the party’s leader and conducting business in its name, including organizing meetings.The judge determined that a group of state G.O.P. leaders, disillusioned over transparency issues and money problems in the party, had followed the party’s bylaws when they voted on Jan. 6 to remove Ms. Karamo as chairwoman and later elected Pete Hoekstra, whom the Republican National Committee recognized as the rightful chairman earlier this month.Mr. Hoekstra, whom Ms. Karamo had denied access to the party’s bank and email accounts, said in an interview that he was “thrilled” by the ruling.“When Michigan opens for business tomorrow, we will be going to the banks,” said Mr. Hoekstra. He had a warning for Ms. Karamo’s holdouts: “If there’s individuals that are not cooperative, as we’ve done so far, we will seek compliance through the courts.”Ms. Karamo did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.The judge also forbade her from accessing the party’s bank accounts and postal boxes, and from engaging in communication on social media on behalf of the party. In recent days, she had used the party’s social media accounts to promote her “convention” in Detroit on Saturday.The gathering had been scheduled for 10 a.m. Eastern time, the same time that the convention organized by Mr. Hoekstra is scheduled to take place across the state in Grand Rapids.Both sides are loyal to former President Donald J. Trump, who weighed in on the leadership fight, backing Mr. Hoekstra, his former ambassador to the Netherlands and a former House member.Mr. Hoekstra said that he was not ruling out a situation where Ms. Karamo goes ahead with her competing gathering on Saturday.“They have shown themselves to be unpredictable,” he said. More

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      The Michigan Republican party is already in chaos. What will the week bring?

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      Michigan is holding its presidential primaries on Tuesday, with campaigns by pro-Palestine activists to abandon Joe Biden and factional chaos in the state Republican party defining an otherwise sleepy election day.There’s little drama in predicting the winners: Biden and Donald Trump are expected to romp in their respective races. But the dynamics of the contests hint at the deep divisions within the Democratic and Republican camps as the nationally unpopular candidates prepare to square off in a presidential general election rematch this fall.Neither candidate is popular statewide. Only 17% of respondents in a January poll commissioned by the Detroit News said they believed Biden deserved a second term in office, while 33% said the same about Trump. When asked whether they would support Trump or Biden in the general, respondents favored Trump by 8 points.Neither candidate faces much opposition in their respective primaries. Trump’s only serious foe is the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, whom he just beat by a wide margin in her home-state primary on Saturday.Biden’s greatest threat isn’t a candidate, but a movement: activists have launched a coordinated campaign to withhold votes from Biden to protest against his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. If they are successful, their efforts could embarrass him in the critical swing state – which has one of the largest Arab American communities in the country.They are furious at Biden for his unwavering support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which has killed more than 29,000 people.Eyeing this primary as an opportunity to pressure the president to revise his position on the war, a coalition of activists are calling on Democratic voters to select “uncommitted” on their ballot. The Listen to Michigan campaign, which activists launched in early February, has gained traction among some prominent political figures on the left, including the progressive former state representative Andy Levin and the US representative Rashida Tlaib, whose sister is spearheading the campaign.“President Biden needs every vote he can get if he’s going to prevent Donald Trump and his white supremacist buddies from taking the White House again,” said Abbas Alawieh, a spokesperson for the Listen to Michigan campaign and the former chief of staff for the Missouri congresswoman Cori Bush. “Our votes on February 27 for ‘uncommitted’ hopefully will be a reminder of that.”It’s not the first time Michigan Democrats have rallied around the “uncommitted” vote. In 2008, the Michigan Democratic party generated outrage by moving their primary to 15 January, shaking up the presidential primary order and prompting most candidates to drop out in protest. With Hillary Clinton as the only real contender on the ballot, a movement to vote “uncommitted” took hold. Nearly 40% of voters chose “uncommitted”, an embarrassment for Clinton and an early win for former president Barack Obama’s campaign.In the 2012 Michigan Democratic primary, nearly 21,000 people voted “uncommitted” instead of for Obama – more than 10% of the total votes cast.Alawieh argued that one metric for measuring the campaign’s success would be 10,000 people casting their votes as “uncommitted”, given that Trump won the state by roughly that margin in 2016.“If we see that at least that many people vote for ‘uncommitted’, I think that sends a very, very strong message,” said Alawieh.On the Republican side, a very different kind of split has driven the state party into feuding factions – making an already logistically complicated election even more confusing.Trump is expected to beat Haley definitively in Tuesday’s primary. The primary margins and turnout will be telling, however – especially in traditionally Republican areas that have shifted away from the GOP during the Trump era, like parts of western Michigan and Detroit’s more upscale suburbs.But the real chaos isn’t for the primary – it’s for the state convention that is scheduled a few days later. Or, to be more precise, the state party conventions: right now, two warring factions have scheduled their own meetings, and it’s not totally clear which meeting’s delegates will count towards the presidential nomination.The Michigan Republican party is holding a separate caucus on 2 March to comply with Republican National Committee rules after Michigan’s Democrat-controlled state legislature moved the state’s primary date earlier than the RNC permitted. The winner of Tuesday’s primary will earn only 30% of the state’s delegates – party activists who vote at the Republican national convention to nominate the presidential candidate – while 70% will be chosen at a state party convention on Saturday.Chaos within the state party has further complicated that plan.In early January, a group of party activists held an election to oust the former Michigan GOP chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, accusing the fervent conspiracy theorist of mismanaging the state party’s finances. They later voted to replace her with Pete Hoekstra, a former congressman and Trump’s former US ambassador to the Netherlands. On 14 February, the Republican National Committee declared their support for Hoekstra, recognizing him as the official state party chair.Karamo has continued to claim she is the rightful chair of the party despite what the RNC says, and is forging ahead with her own plans for a party convention on Saturday near Detroit even as Hoekstra plans one in Grand Rapids, a few hours away.“The political oligarchy within the Republican party has done everything possible to destroy me,” Karamo said in a podcast released just days after the RNC officially recognized Hoekstra’s leadership on 14 February.Given the national party’s support for Hoekstra, it’s unlikely Karamo’s convention will carry any official weight. But the courts may have something to say about that.On the same day voters head to the polls on Tuesday, the dueling factions will see each other in Kent county district court. Karamo’s opponents are asking a judge to determine whether she was properly removed from office, in hopes that a legal finding will push her to step down, allow them to seize control of the party’s finances and confirm that Hoekstra’s convention is the official one.All that drama is overshadowing the primary.“A good strong showing for Trump with a high turnout in key areas will bolster the Republican party if they can pull it off,” said Ken Kollman, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. “But they’re riven by pretty deep splits right now.” More