While President Joe Biden's 2024 reelection campaign said it was taking Michigan's protest vote seriously in Tuesday's Democrat primary there, a veteran state pollster shrugged off the campaign — and the results — against him.
Biden easily won the primary, but what has the campaign's attention is the "uncommitted" vote against him, an effort spawned by two pro-Palestinian groups that are unhappy with Biden's soft-on-Israel approach to the war in Gaza, they say.
"We're taking this seriously," a senior Biden campaign official said, according to Reuters. "The president himself has said repeatedly that he hears these demonstrators and that he thinks that their cause is important."
However, a longtime Michigan pollster said he was not taking the initiative seriously.
While the "Listen to Michigan" and "Abandon Biden Coalition" were hoping for a 10% to 12% "uncommitted" protest vote against Biden, which they were on track to hit, pollster Richard Czuba said the groups would have to double that for Biden to be in jeopardy in November.
"Twenty percent gets my attention. If it rises to 25%, that gets a lot more attention and if it rises above 30%, I think that's a signal that Joe Biden has issues pretty substantial issues in his base," Czuba told The Associated Press.
As of 10:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday, the "uncommitted" vote was at 14.6%, or 30,406 votes (23% of votes in).
When Barack Obama ran for reelection in 2012, the last time a Democrat presidential incumbent sought reelection, the "uncommitted" option received close to 21,000 votes — or 11 percentage points.
Much of Tuesday's "uncommitted" vote was expected to come from the east side of the state, in communities such as Dearborn and Hamtramck, where Arab Americans represent close to half of the population.
Biden won Dearborn by a roughly 3-to-1 advantage in 2020 and Hamtramck by a 5-to-1 margin.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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