How strong is the pro-Palestine protest vote campaign?
not nothing, not enough
Since January, pro-Palestine leftists have asked Democratic primary voters to vote “Uncommitted”, including DSA endorsee Rashida Tlaib. This ceasefire protest vote campaign hopes to signal to Biden that we demand an immediate ceasefire and oppose sending bombs to Israel.
How well is this protest going? Mainstream news has given every possible answer:
Terrible: Nate Silver of 538 says uncommitted “didn’t do well by any reasonable benchmark”
Bad: The Daily Beast says the protest votes “aren’t as big a threat to Biden as they look”
Neutral: NPR notes calls the vote totals “small” but “meaningful”, especially “in what is expected to be a highly competitive race”
Good: Axios says “the movement’s existence remains an alarm to the Biden campaign”
Great: the Minnesota Reformer says the “warning lights are flashing red for Biden”
What’s the truth? In short: Moderately well.
How big are uncommitted vote results this year?
Not small, not huge.
Unfortunately, we have no simple, consistent way to compare protest votes across states.
Primary election law varies enormously from state to state. For example, not all states offer an “Uncommitted” option, offer a write-in option, or even count blank ballots, as this map from Ettingermentum shows:
Source: Ettingermentum
In addition to “Uncommitted” votes, two candidates are both nationally-known and pro-ceasefire, Marianne Williamson and Cenk Uygur. Williamson has ballot access in most states, Cenk in very few.
It gets yet more complicated: Some “Uncommitted” voters are not pro-ceasefire or would not consider themselves part of a ceasefire protest vote campaign. That’s also true of some Williamson voters and Uygur voters. And no sane man knows what darkness lurks in the minds of blank ballot voters.
With those caveats in mind, I think that combining all four categories below provides a reasonable estimate for the upper bound of the ceasefire protest vote campaign:
“Uncommitted” votes
Marianne Williamson and Cenk Uygur votes
Pro-ceasefire write-ins, such as Cease Fire in New Hampshire
Blank ballots and undervotes
The pro-ceasefire protest campaign plausibly won 16% of the primary vote in Michigan, 21% in Minnesota, 12% in Colorado, and 13% in North Carolina:
That’s pretty good! Given that 82% of Democrats approve of Joe Biden, and primaries tend to draw the most partisan Democrats, getting 10% to 20% is a good result.
The Democratic primary only awards delegates to candidates that placed above 15%. As a result, only 3 states are sending pro-ceasefire delegates: Michigan (2 of 117), Minnesota (11 of 75), and Hawaii (7 of 22).
In absolute terms, the pro-ceasefire protest campaign plausibly won a total of 634,000 votes, including 124,000 in Michigan, 50,000 in Minnesota, 68,000 in Colorado, and 88,000 in North Carolina:
Note: Results above from California, Colorado, and Utah are still incomplete.
That’s over half a million votes! These results are especially striking given how few resources protest vote organizers had: The Michigan protest vote was organized with just $200,000 and 3 weeks (and got ~15%). The Minnesota protest vote was organized with just $20,000 and 1 week (and got ~20%)!
In short: The ceasefire protest vote campaign plausibly did pretty well, given the conditions it faced.
How much larger are protest votes this year than before?
Somewhat.
All the caveats above are concerning. How many of those plausible ceasefire voters are REAL ceasefire voters?
We cannot know the exact truth. To my knowledge, no pollster has run an exit poll in the Democratic primary.
Most Democrats support a ceasefire, especially young Democrats. In January, YouGov found that 66% of Democrats and 64% of all people 18-29 think Israel should “stop and call a ceasefire”. In February, YouGov found that 46% of Democrats and 42% of all people 18-29 think “Israel is taking actions that are intended to destroy all Palestinian people”, or genocide.
If just 1/4 of these Democrats voted “Uncommitted” in the primary, that’d be enough to win the 10%-20% seen above.
Of course, that’s just voters choosing “Uncommitted”, not choosing an explicitly pro-ceasefire option. How many voters are just expressing dissatisfaction with the shoe-in Democratic candidate, which happens in every uncontested primary?
We can partially answer this question if we compare 2024 results with 2012. The graph below shows all states which have held a primary in 2024, compared with 2012 results:
Unfortunately, this has its own caveats: As you can see above, most states held no competitive primary in 2012. In addition, most “Uncommitted” voters in 2012 were conservative Democrats.
That fact is obvious in the protest vote count graph below. The number of “Uncommitted” protest votes declined in most conservative states (see Alabama and North Carolina). In contrast, leftist, progressive, and “Uncommitted” protest votes increased by 2 to 6 times elsewhere (see Michigan, New Hampshire, and Texas):
Almost certainly, more leftist and progressive Democrats are protest voting in 2024 than 2012. If take the “excess” votes in 2024 as the proportion caused by the ceasefire protest vote campaign, then we won about 1/2 to 5/6 of the protest votes in 2024.
When we look at protest vote share, the same pattern emerges: Protest vote shares went down in red states, up in purple and blue states:
Detailed data within states supports this pattern.
In Michigan, turnout was ~50% higher in places that leaned Uncommitted, closer to the 2024 competitive primary than the 2012 uncompetitive primary. Turnout was especially high in places with large Muslim and college-student populations.
In North Carolina, the 2012 protest vote was unusually high. Contemporary accounts blame conservative and racist Democrats. This is exactly what the data shows: Compared to 2012, liberal places in North Carolina increased their protest vote share (orange), while conservative places places decreased (blue):
Source: Maeve A
In short: The evidence above strongly suggests that the 2024 protest votes are not mere routine. A large portion of the “Uncommitted” and left protest votes, maybe 50-80%, is a pro-ceasefire message to Biden.
How will the protest vote affect the general election?
It’s unclear.
Both progressives and centrists have argued that protest voters could cost Biden the election:
Progressive activist and pollster James Zogby argued to Democracy Now that Biden “ignore[s] this vote at [his] own risk”.
Center-left Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer claimed uncommitted voting could help Trump win.
BIG NEWS enthusiast Dash Dobrofsky said that “uncommitted” voters are “Trump supporting terrorist[s]”.
What do the ceasefire protest vote campaign supporters say themselves?
Some ceasefire protest vote activists actively argue against voting for Biden. Others prefer strategic ambiguity, such as Rashida Tlaib, who encouraged Democrats to vote downballot but did not say whether she would vote for Biden. According to Listen to Michigan campaign manager Layla Elabed, many “Uncommitted” voters are also questioning whether they should vote Biden in the general:
[Voters] weren’t even talking about the primary. We were talking about the general, […] because nobody wants to vote for Trump and nobody wants to vote for Biden. We’re tired of choosing between the lesser of two evils.
Other activists argued that this protest mobilized low-turnout groups who would later vote Biden in the general, including Listen to Michigan field organizer Seth Woody:
We are not demobilizing people for the general. To the contrary, we are registering people who have never voted to participate in politics[.]
Rashida Tlaib also made this argument:
When I talk to folks that voted [“Uncommitted”], they say: “Rashida, I would’ve stayed home. But now I felt like I had an option, a way to speak my truth[.]”
I lean toward this latter view. If you want to know whether someone will vote in this election, the strongest predictor is whether they voted in the previous election. That’s because voting is habit-forming and contagious. However, it’s unclear whether these facts apply to protest votes.
Obviously, the biggest factor here is Biden himself. If Biden pursues (or rejects) a progressive foreign policy and demands an immediate ceasefire, he might win (or lose) these uncommitted voters.
So far, Biden has simply downplayed the effort and argued that Muslim voters will pick the lesser of two evils in November. At the State of the Union, he announced that the US will build a floating Mediterranean port for Gaza aid deliveries, which may be a result of this pressure campaign.
Biden’s choice here is simple: He can demand a lasting ceasefire, stop an ethnic cleansing, and win new Democratic voters. Or he can kowtow to a reactionary apartheid government and risk a Trump victory.
In short: Nobody knows for sure. I think the uncommitted protest vote campaign will probably have a small, positive effect on Democratic vote shares in 2024. I hope that we have a positive effect on Biden’s policy.
Summary and shilling
In summary: The protest votes are larger than expected in both vote share and total vote count, but not enormously so. The protest vote campaign is doing moderately well.
If Biden does not deliver a lasting ceasefire, I will vote “Uncommitted” in Maryland’s primary election. If you want a ceasefire, I strongly encourage you to vote “Uncommitted” and join the DSA.
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photo by Ashley Fairbanks @ziibiing