An incumbent shouldn’t be polling at 42 percent in what’s supposed to be a safe state against an opponent his base hates with incandescent fury.
Joe Biden, like many mainstream Democrats, has traditionally been a supporter of Israel, at least in broad outline. So why do he and his administration keep pandering to progressive anti-Israel sentiment? We know that Biden is a hollow man who lacks the courage to stand up to his own party, and will pander to its factions even when he knows they’re in the wrong and even when he has to sacrifice long-held positions. We can also see that the progressive activist class is overrepresented among the national political press, activist groups in the Democratic Party, and the people who staff the Biden White House and Capitol Hill — and Democrats’ own worldview compels them to treat young people as a unique source of moral authority. Relations have been further strained as the Obama and Biden administrations have cozied up to Iran. There’s also the fact that Israel is run by a controversial figure of the Right, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Democrats are prone to identify foreign countries by whether or not they remind them of their domestic political enemies.
A shorter answer sometimes given is domestic politics, and the shorthand used is “Michigan.” In the home state of Henry Ford and Rashida Tlaib, where only 0.9 percent of the population is Jewish, the Democratic electorate includes a significant minority faction of its voters who are fiercely anti-Israel. In 2016, Donald Trump won the state’s electoral votes (then 16, now 15) by a margin of 10,704 votes, while 172,136 people voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson and 51,463 voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party. In 2012, the total Johnson and Stein vote was 29,694. The third party shift was accompanied by a collapse of the Democratic vote, from 2,872,579 in 2008 to 2,564,569 in 2012 to 2,268,839 in 2016, allowing Trump to win the state with fewer votes than George W. Bush got in Michigan in 2004. Biden rebuilt that vote to 2,804,045 and won Michigan by 154,181 votes, but 2016 remains as a stark reminder that it’s possible for Michigan to go red if there is depressed enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket. Vocal protests in heavily Muslim communities such as Dearborn, Hamtramck, and Ann Arbor led to 101,527 “Uncommitted” ballots being cast against Biden in the Michigan primary. Uncommitted drew 13.2 percent of the vote statewide, 16.8 percent in Wayne County (the state’s most populous, home of Detroit and Dearborn), and 17.2 percent in Washtenaw County (whose county seat is Ann Arbor). Biden defenders say that this should not be a great worry, given that even Barack Obama faced an Uncommitted vote of 10.69 percent in 2012. But that was a caucus with a much smaller electorate, and while Obama won the state handily against Michigan-born Mitt Romney, he still faced a drop-off of more than 300,000 Democrat votes — more than enough if repeated this time around to hand the state back to Trump.
The current polling is ugly. Biden trails Trump 46.2 percent to 42.6 percent in the RealClearPolitics poll average, and has trailed in the last nine straight polls; Biden has led Trump in Michigan in only one poll out of 14 taken since October 7. In a five-way race against Trump, Stein, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Cornel West, Biden trails 41.7 percent to 38.7 percent. Those polls could be misleading; there’s a long tradition in Michigan polling of early polls showing Republican leads with large numbers of undecideds in races the Democrats end up winning. But it’s also deeply alarming for Democrats: If Biden loses Michigan and Georgia (which is looking very grim for him at the moment), Trump needs to pick up only one more state to win.
The same dynamic is reflected as well in the Michigan Senate race to replace the retiring Debbie Stabenow. Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, with a huge lead in primary polls, is the likely nominee. Her primary opponents include progressive actor Harper Hill, who has called for “an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza,” and Nasser Beydoun, former chair of the Arab American Civil Rights League and liaison to the Arab League, who has said he cannot support Biden’s reelection: “Joe Biden has blood on his hands, and we are disgusted by his support of rampant violence in Gaza.” Both Hill and Beydoun are touting their claim that they turned down millions in promised support if they would run a primary challenge to Tlaib instead of running against Slotkin, who is Jewish. Slotkin, a former CIA analyst and Pentagon official who has portrayed herself as a centrist foreign-policy hawk, has responded to the pressure by trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, she has criticized Tlaib as recently as November 2023 for inflammatory language. On the other hand, she voted against aid to Israel in November in part on the grounds that “there was no aid to Gaza.” In December, she signed a letter critical of Israeli strategy, which claimed that “the mounting civilian death toll and humanitarian crisis are unacceptable.” By February, Slotkin had drifted further:
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a pro-Israel Jewish Democrat running for Michigan’s Senate seat, has grown more critical of Israel’s military operation in recent weeks, joining a letter with fellow Democrats with national security backgrounds calling for the administration to pressure Israel to make a “significant” shift in its practices in Gaza. The letter risks costing her support with both core constituencies — Jewish voters who could be frustrated that she’s taking a tougher line against Israel than Biden, and Muslim voters who are unequivocally anti-Israel. In October, Slotkin met with leaders from an Islamic center in her district that blamed Israel for Hamas’ terror attack.
Most recently, Slotkin signed on to a letter to Biden demanding a cease-fire.
Michigan, however, is not the only place where Biden and his party face a real threat that the war in Gaza will split their voting base and drive down turnout. There’s also Minnesota, the home of Ilhan Omar, which carries another ten electoral votes that are a must-win for Biden. The Uncommitted share of the vote, 18.9 percent, was even higher in Minnesota than in Michigan, and that’s on top of 7.8 percent voting for Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips. The 45,914 Uncommitted votes are slightly more than Hillary Clinton’s 44,593 margin of victory over Trump in 2016, although Biden won the state by a comfortable seven-point, 233,012-vote margin in 2020. Uncommitted drew 25.6 percent of the vote to Biden’s 63.5 percent in Hennepin County (the state’s most populous, home of Minneapolis), 23.6 percent in Ramsey County (the state’s second-largest county, home of St. Paul), and over 20 percent in Anoka County and Rice County, also in the Twin Cities metro area that makes up the heart of the Democratic base in the state. This came after an organized campaign for Uncommitted votes at mosques across the state, many of them catering to Minnesota’s Somali-American population.
The polling situation is less dire for Biden in Minnesota than in Michigan, but it should worry Democrats. Biden currently leads Trump 42.3 percent to 39.3 percent. An incumbent still shouldn’t be polling at 42 percent in what’s supposed to be a safe state against an opponent his base hates with incandescent fury. Minnesota, where even the Democrats run under the Democrat-Farmer-Labor brand, has a tradition of third-party voting that suggests Biden won’t need to win a majority of the vote, but also that he faces a larger threat than in most places of defections to his left. In 2016, 2000, 1992, 1984, 1916, 1912, and 1892, neither party won a majority of the presidential vote in Minnesota; it went Democrat by 1.5 points in 2016 and 2.4 points in 2000. In 1998, it elected independent Jesse Ventura to the governorship. Republican Tim Pawlenty won two terms as governor without ever cracking 47 percent of the vote, and Mark Dayton retook the governorship for the DFL in 2010 with just 43.6 percent. In the Senate, Tina Smith was reelected in 2022 with 48.7 percent of the vote, and Senate victories for Al Franken in 2008, Norm Coleman in 2002, and Dayton in 2000 were all with less than a majority (Franken got 41.99 percent). While Amy Klobuchar is almost certainly safe in her reelection campaign, even she starts it off at 49 percent against a totally unknown opponent.
Minnesota has been a bit of a white whale for Republicans in the past decade and a half, as the state has followed regional trends of rural and white working-class voters drifting to the right, but they’ve been outvoted by losing lopsided margins in the Twin Cities and their suburbs:
In spite of a poor nominee for governor, Republicans improved their share of the vote in Minnesota in 2022 in House and state senate races (compared to the last midterm in the House and compared to 2020 in the state senate), but nonetheless lost control of the state senate, resulting in a Democrat trifecta that has governed as if it won a mandate to turn the state into California. As the chart above reflects, one problem for Democrats is that Hennepin and Ramsey turnout dropped relative to the rest of the state from 33.7 percent of the vote in 2018 to 32.1 percent in 2020 to 31.6 percent in 2022, while Republicans dominated the rest of the state in 2016, 2020, and 2022. This fall, Republicans need to pick up four seats in the state house to bring back divided government, and polls show the DFL leading 46 percent to 41 percent, with Republicans targeting one open seat and two rural Democrats. That may be a lesser risk specific to Gaza, where discontent with Biden is concentrated in the urban and suburban core, but it reflects yet another reason why Democrats are worried about Minnesota as well as Michigan — and that will continue to drive their policy toward Israel and Gaza at least so long as the war continues.