Democrats are giving ‘uncommitted’ pro-ceasefire voters some space

In a few hours, Joe Biden will cross the 1,968-delegate threshold he needs to claim the Democratic nomination. The 2024 primary, the shortest in decades, will be over.

Sort of.

In Washington, where Democrats can mark “uncommitted” on their ballots instead of Biden, a coalition of pro-Gaza ceasefire politicians and labor unions are trying to maximize the protest vote.

Next week, they’ll try again in Kansas. Next month, they’ll do it in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin — all states where “uncommitted” efforts have come together quickly, inspired by campaigns in Michigan, Minnesota, and Hawaii that have denied Biden 20 delegates so far.

“We’re focused on ensuring that President Biden and his campaign listen to us,” said Rami Al-Kabra, the 47-year-old deputy mayor of Bothell, a city in Seattle’s suburbs. “What happens in November? Hopefully we will not be having the same conversation again.”

The activists organizing “uncommitted” votes don’t expect to defeat Biden, or even carry a state; they did best last week in Hawaii, where an ad hoc coalition of progressives and pro-Palestinian groups won 29% of the vote in a low-turnout caucus. They agree on some demands — a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to military aid to Israel without human rights conditions — and don’t fight about the others.

So far, they’re also meeting little resistance from the Biden campaign or state Democratic parties. After a brief frenzy in Michigan, where Biden surrogates barnstormed the state to turn out more votes for the president, Democrats are taking a light touch.

Al-Kabra got involved in the “uncommitted” campaign after he learned that a friend had thrown out his mail ballot instead of casting a protest vote. He and local Democratic leaders agreed: Keeping voters active, even if they’re temporarily undermining the president, was preferable to watching them drift away and sit out the November election.

“We welcome the discussion,” said Shasti Conrad, the chair of the Washington State Democrats. “We want people to feel as though this party is a space that they can participate in, where they can hold opinions that are different than the majority. That’s why we’re not a cult. That’s why we’re different than the Republican Party.”

Not every state allows primary voters to cast a recordable protest vote. The option doesn’t exist in today’s other major primaries, in Mississippi and Georgia — which are likely to push Biden over the delegate threshold before polls close in Washington.

But in every place that offers the option, there’s an “uncommitted” campaign underway, inspired by and often in contact with the national organizers who kicked things off in Michigan.

“These are mostly low-budget, grassroots efforts around the country of Democrats expressing that Biden has a real moral and electoral problem on his hands due to his funding of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza,” said Waleed Shahid, an organizer and spokesman for the effort. “Whether it’s through protests or voting uncommitted, democratic expressions of discontent will continue as long as Biden’s policies remain the same and jeopardize his chances of defeating [Donald] Trump in November.”

From state to state, the effort has come together in similar ways; conversations between frustrated activists, then some organizing, on the smallest budgets possible. A “Listen to Wisconsin” campaign was launched this month, taking its messaging and inspiration from Michigan, using the same tactics to support the state’s “uninstructed delegates” option.

“We have red lines related to funding governments and supplying weapons when it relates to mass destruction and genocide,” said Omar Daoud, 28, a Palestinian American with family members in Gaza who were living in tents after their home was destroyed. “The ‘vote uninstructed’ campaign is designed to say, polling has clearly shown what we want, yet you continue to do otherwise.”

Wisconsin votes on April 2, along with Connecticut and Rhode Island — both states with an “uncommitted” option, both with campaigns just now getting underway. “This is a worthwhile moment to think about what primaries are,” said Lex Rofeberg, a 33-year old rabbi who said he’d just started having conversations about a grassroots Rhode Island campaign after reading about which states allowed a countable protest vote.

The Hawaii campaign, which was organized even quicker than Michigan’s, showed how this could work even in places with few Muslim or Arab American voters. Cindy Franklin, an academic at the University of Hawaii, said that the effort that would win nearly a third of all caucus votes came together when people already organized in “Palestine solidarity” campaigns realized they could pull it off.

“I would like to see complete defunding of Israel,” Franklin, 61, said of her own goals. “I would like to see condemnation of Israel as an apartheid state. I would like to see the United States stop making possible not only genocide, but decades of settler colonialism that include practices of apartheid, military occupation, ethnic cleansing, and dispossession.”

There is no serious organized Democratic Party effort to stop these campaigns, which highlight an issue that separates the president from most of his voters. (The Hawaii Democratic Party voted to endorse a permanent ceasefire in December.) State party chairs who talked with Semafor about the campaigns agreed on two points — that the president was trying to get a ceasefire that nearly all critics should be able to support, and that they’d rather those critics cast ballots than throw them out.

“We don’t censure our members for disagreements on policies,” said Nancy DiNardo, the chair of the Connecticut Democratic Party. “We have that all the time. We just hope that, later, we can talk to them and convince them why it’s important that they do vote Democratic in November.”

The end of the competitive phase of the primary is a boon to protest-voters and organizers, who have flooded the zone that Nikki Haley and Dean Phillips just abandoned. These primaries are going to happen anyway, and a press corps hungry for a story — this is me, breaking the fourth wall — will have one until the war ends.

What’s new, since Michigan, is how little the Democratic Party’s institutions are worried about the protest vote. There was audible grumbling from Biden HQ about how much attention last month’s “uncommitted” vote got in Michigan, including equal time on cable news panels and live coverage from a Dearborn election night party. Biden allies pushed back with facts about the previous uncommitted vote, downplaying the meaning of 101,000 Michiganders voting against Biden, when more than 623,000 voted for him.

The grumbling phase is over. “Uncommitted” got just 0.4% of the vote in Washington four years ago, when Bernie Sanders was still in the race and came 22,000 votes away from beating Biden. Democrats expect a decent-sized protest vote tonight, and maybe in the following weeks. But they are viewing it less as a threat and more as a safety valve for unavoidable frustrations over a difficult topic.

“The President believes making your voice heard and participating in our democracy is fundamental to who we are as Americans,” a Biden campaign spokesman said in a statement. “He shares the goal for an end to the violence and a just, lasting peace in the Middle East. He’s working tirelessly to that end.”

• In The Stranger, Seattle’s alt-weekly, editors urged Washingtonians to cast protest votes. “If the two genocidal geriatrics leading the polls this primary season do not excite you, then you’re in good company.”
• In the Ettingermentum Newsletter, the eponymous author maps out every state where protest-voters can go for uncommitted. “How many prospective uncommitted voters out there actually know what their options are?”