Simon sums it up
The press loves a horse race like the kid in the story assumes in a room full of manure there must be a pony. Naturally, the Washington Post reports “warning signs for Biden, Trump and Haley” in the Michigan primary results from Tuesday night. The race is on! And it’s a nail-biter!
President Biden and former president Donald Trump won the Democratic and Republican primaries in Michigan by huge margins Tuesday night — but there were serious problems for both candidates lurking under the surface.
Trump crushed Nikki Haley by over 40 points.
Biden, meanwhile, won the Democratic primary by an even more overwhelming margin — but 13 percent of voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” following a campaign to persuade voters to not to support Biden in protest of his support for Israel and his refusal to call for a cease-fire in Gaza.
The protesters want a cease-fire. They don’t want Biden to call for one. Biden and his team have been pressing Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu unsuccessfully for a cease-fire for weeks.
The press wants to build suspense, though.
While Trump has won every primary so far, Haley’s ability to keep winning so many votes even though she lacks a clear path to the nomination raises questions about how many of her voters will back Trump in November.
There’s trouble for Biden as well.
More than 100,000 Democratic primary voters marked their ballots “uncommitted,” far exceeding the modest goal of 10,000 votes set by Listen to Michigan, the group that organized the campaign.
It wasn’t just protest votes by Palestinian Americans and allies horrified over carnage in Gaza. Protest votes by Armenians muddy the waters further. They mounted their own “uncommitted” effort over Biden’s support for Azerbaijan “which launched a military offensive in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region last year. The region had been under the control of Armenian separatists for decades.”
With no exit polls conducted in Michigan, what the “uncommitted” vote means is unclear (New York Times):
A vote for “uncommitted” was a serious form of protest against Mr. Biden, but it’s just not the same as voting for Donald J. Trump in the general election. That simple fact limits how much we can read into the results for November, especially as there was no exit poll to offer insight into the attitudes of protest voters.
At the same time, it’s also possible that Mr. Biden’s problems go well beyond those who voted uncommitted in a primary. The typical Democratic primary voter is disproportionately old, white and loyal to Democrats. Mr. Biden might be faring even worse among the kinds of Democratic-leaning voters who stayed home.
But despite overwhelming wins by both Trump and Biden, anything could happen!
Simon Rosenberg doesn’t have to sell papers or advertising. His message to Democrats has remained consistent for months: “I would much rather be us than them.”
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