The president of the United States, Joe Biden, traveled to New York yesterday to record an interview with the comedian and late night host Seth Meyers, ordered an ice cream at the famous Van Leeuwen ice cream parlor, and proceeded to launch an optimistic advertisement about the war in Gaza: “My National Security Advisor tells me that we are close, but it is not closed yet,” he said before the cameras, and ice cream in hand, about the progress of the negotiations for the cessation of hostilities: “My hope is that “Next Monday we have a ceasefire.”
The moment chosen to launch this message, on the eve of the Michigan primaries, does not seem coincidental. The Midwestern state has the largest number and percentage of Arabs in the entire country: 211,405 people, 2.1%. Their support will be decisive in the face of the November presidential elections: in 2020, Biden beat Donald Trump by just 2.78% of the votes in Michigan, one of the six key states in these elections, where the Republican magnate won. by the minimum (0.23%) in 2016.
Biden’s unconditional support for Israel since the start of the war in Gaza has generated rejection from the progressive sector of the Democratic Party and a loss of popularity among people of Arab origin and among young voters, and Michigan leads in both demographic groups. For this reason, the results of this Tuesday’s primaries, in which a comfortable victory for the president is expected – with the anecdotal competition of Dean Phillips – will put the electoral thermometer on the president’s involvement in the crisis in the Middle East.
Groups of Arab and progressive voters have called for a protest vote against the president, whom they blame for not stopping the bloodshed of 30,000 dead and two million displaced in Gaza due to the Israeli offensive as revenge for the Hamas attacks on October 7, that left 1,200 dead. Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the only one of Palestinian origin in the House of Representatives, has requested a punitive vote on Biden.
So have two influential organizations, Our Revolution and Listen to Michigan, asking citizens to vote “uncommitted,” or blank, in these primaries. Given Biden’s expected victory, the expectation is on the participation and the total number of protest votes. Our Revolution, closely linked to the base of followers of the senator, progressive and former candidate Bernie Sanders, sets its goal at 10% of the electorate.
As is often the case with a sitting president seeking re-election, Biden has faced no serious competition, and his team has not invested much time or money in the primary process, with an eye toward the November election. Especially in Michigan: the last time he was seen in the state was on February 1, at a meeting with motor unions, in which he encountered pro-Palestinian protests.
On the Republican side, which also holds primaries in Michigan this Tuesday, the race for the nomination is also almost decided: Trump has taken four comfortable victories in the first four rounds of the electoral calendar – Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina – and the polls predict a resounding victory in Michigan: they give him 79.9% of the support, compared to 18% for the only rival left standing, Nikki Haley.
Although, in all the primaries held, Trump has obtained worse results than the polls predicted, it has not been enough for Haley to establish herself as a solid alternative. But she has shown that there is a base of Republican voters disillusioned with the magnate, to which the former governor clings to stay standing in the fight for the White House.
Michigan, where 55 Republican delegates and 117 Democrats are distributed, is the last appointment prior to the decisive date of Super Tuesday, where 17 states and territories will decide around a third of the delegates sent to the national conventions, where the candidates for each party to the White House. Haley has promised not to retire until that date, March 5, but her continuity in the electoral race will be even more called into question if Trump wins again tonight.
