The uncommitted vote to protest President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war in Maryland’s Democrat primary on Tuesday is on pace to eclipse the 70,000 threshold, showing the pro-Palestinian anti-Biden movement continues to grow three months out from the Democrat National Convention.
Results from the primary stalled out early Wednesday morning and remained mainly unchanged throughout the day. With just 67 percent of the vote reported as of 4:25 p.m. ET, the uncommitted number sat at 47,358, for 10.4 percent of the vote, the New York Times election results show. Biden garnered 394,266 votes for 86.3 percent, while Marianne Williamson and Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) pinged at two percent and 1.3 percent, respectively, as of this writing.
The 70,000 mark would be one of the best uncommitted showings outside of the swing state of Michigan, where the movement began. The Listen to Michigan campaign smashed its goal of turning out 10,000 uncommitted votes, as more than 100,000 protested Biden at the ballot box.
Similar campaigns bloomed in other states, including Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, leading to some 600,000 protest ballots against the president nationally. The Listen to Maryland coalition led the effort ahead of Tuesday’s primary, as WUSA noted.
The national movement, which consists of Arab Americans, Muslims, young voters, and far-left progressives, is threatening Biden’s reelection odds. Some Arab American and Muslim leaders have signaled that Biden can never win them back and that they are willing to endure a Trump presidency if it means conveying the importance of their voting blocs to Democrats. The gravity of Biden’s problem is evident in crucial swing states where Trump won in 2016, but he won in 2020.
In the Wisconsin primary on April 2, 48,812 selected the “uninstructed option” (the Badger state’s version of uncommitted). The figure is more than double the 20,682 vote margin Biden won the state by in 2020. Moreover, Biden had officially won enough delegates to be crowned the presumptive Democrat nominee nearly a month before that primary.
The 101,430 uncommitted votes in Michigan’s February 27 primary approaches the 154,188 margin by which Biden won the state in 2020. Write-ins in Pennsylvania exceeded 60,000, though a breakdown of that vote is unclear. The protest vote goal was 40,000, but how many ballots were “uncommitted” write-ins remains to be seen. For reference, that goal is roughly half the 81,660-vote margin Biden beat former President Donald Trump by in Pennsylvania in 2020.
Despite Biden’s apparent efforts to salvage these voters, the movement’s persistence in deep blue Marland indicates that he has not made inroads with key disgruntled portions of his base. While this does not put the state in play for Trump, it shows that the sentiments of those in the movement have remained essentially unchanged since February, with the August convention and the election rapidly approaching.
Maryland’s primary came two months after Biden earned the presumptive nominee title and more than a month after he demanded an “immediate ceasefire” while speaking on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the heels of the Wisconsin primary. Moreover, it also followed the Biden administration’s withholding of weapons from Israel last week and his threat to pause more arms shipments if the nation moves into Rafah.
