Michigan’s protest vote a wake-up call for the Biden campaign

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Sleepy Joe Biden just got a wake-up call from Michigan.

Donald Trump conjured up that nickname for his likely general-election rival, and the alarm rang in the White House Tuesday night.

For weeks the American political world, preoccupied with any suggestion that Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump might not make it to the finish line, has been carefully monitoring an otherwise meaningless Democratic primary in a vital swing state. The result was a sizable winter embarrassment, and an important autumn challenge, for the President.

At issue wasn’t whether Mr. Biden would prevail in the Michigan primary — that was one of the few certainties in the 2024 campaign — but whether a meaningful number of Democratic voters would flick the “uncommitted” lever in their voting booths in a vital swing state, perhaps signifying general discouragement with the 81-year-old president, but more likely signifying a dangerous rebellion of Arab-Americans troubled about Biden’s Middle East policies that could endanger the President’s re-election battle.

In the end there was a substantial uprising against Mr. Biden, far exceeding the 20,000 “uncommitted” votes in the last two contested Democratic primaries.

The voter uprising was rooted in opposition, largely but not exclusively among Arab-Americans, to the President’s approach to the Gaza war and to demands for an immediate cease-fire in the region. Three counties in the greater Detroit area have more than 263,000 people whom the US Census Bureau has identified as either Middle Eastern or Northern African.

But the question is whether this expression of protest is enough to jeopardize Mr. Biden’s position in a state that he carried by some 155,000 votes four years ago but that Mr. Trump carried in 2016 by nearly 11,000 votes.

As Mr. Trump was gliding to his fifth consecutive victory in 2024 state contests, Mr. Biden’s team was coming to grips with the mini mutiny — and a challenge in two dimensions for the coming months.

How to lasso those who defected from the President back into the Biden corral?

The likelihood that these rebels would side with Mr. Trump is slight. But in an election like this year’s, where the result will be determined less by the candidates persuading undecided votes than it will be by assuring that the candidates’ supporters don’t stay home on Election Day, will these apostates go to the polls and support Mr. Biden, who almost certainly will be the Democratic nominee?

“The ‘uncommitted’ vote is a significant number but none of those people will vote for Trump,” said Charles Greenleaf Jr., a moderate Michigan Republican with ties to Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. “When it comes to the general election they are not going to vote for someone who has said the kinds of things he has said about Muslims.”

The unknown: Will some of these dissidents vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is mounting an independent candidacy for the the White House? This month Mr. Kennedy visited the state to boost the effort to gather the 12,000 signatures required to earn a line on the Michigan ballot.

Will domestic political factors affect the foreign policy of the United States?

This question raises the issue of whether a sitting president will shape for political reasons his approach to a major global crisis. There are few precedents for such presidential policy adjustments. Lyndon B. Johnson accelerated, and then backed off, the country’s commitment in the Vietnam War out of fear of being impeached and, perhaps, of jeopardizing his re-election in 1968. (He eventually withdrew from the contest.) Franklin Delano Roosevelt carefully calibrated his assistance to Great Britain in World War II because of congressional neutrality laws and broad isolationist sentiment in the years before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

But calls for such a tailoring to political factors is clearly in the air now — or at least is implicit in the warnings of an important Biden surrogate, Representative Ro Khanna of California, who warned the Biden White House, “We cannot win Michigan with status quo policies” and urged a change in policy in “a matter of weeks, not months.” Former representative Andy Levin, a Michigan Democrat, agreed.

For their part, top Michigan Democrats remain confident of the President’s prospects in November.

Mr. Biden won the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, an important force in a strategy whose identity has been shaped by the automobile industry for more than a century. Governor Gretchen Whitmer campaigned for Mr. Biden, as did transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, a 2020 presidential candidate who has established Michigan residency.

“All the mechanics are in place in Michigan,” former Democratic governor James Blanchard, a decades-long associate of Mr. Biden and a former American ambassador to Canada, said in an interview. “There is a strong party structure while the Republicans are in upheaval. I don’t think Trump will add to the support he polled last time.”

The rebellion was led by a group called Listen to Michigan, a movement supported by Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib and Mayor Abdullah Hammoud of Dearborn, which has an Arab-American population majority and is the city with the largest Muslim population in the country.

“Biden is a very weak incumbent but he is running against a very weak opponent,” said Bill Ballenger, longtime editor of an influential newsletter about Michigan politics. “He is more resilient and credible than so many people give him credit for. All things being equal, he is in a good position. But all things may not be equal once we get to November.”