Where the Anti-Biden Protest Vote Looks Like Obama’s, and Where It Doesn’t

Bill Scher, the politics editor at the Washington Monthly, produced a useful side-by-side comparison to gauge the strength of the Democratic protest vote against Joe Biden versus the dissatisfaction among Democrats with Barack Obama’s presidency:

These results suggest that, in states with a healthy number of movement progressives such that they dominate internal Democratic politics, Biden fared worse than his former boss. But in states with more conservative electorates, Biden does better.

The comparisons between the Democratic contests held on Tuesday versus those that took place twelve years ago aren’t perfect. Some of the states that voted this week didn’t hold primary contests at all at this point in the calendar in 2012. Others held only caucuses, while some states, like Virginia, canceled their primaries altogether because Obama was the only candidate to qualify for them. Still, where we have direct comparisons in places such as Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Vermont, some distinctions stand out.

The foremost being that vastly more Democrats participated in this week’s Democratic primary elections than in 2012. Over half a million Democrats turned out in Massachusetts, where Biden won 490,000 votes to Obama’s 127,000. Biden won 122,000 votes in Tennessee compared with Obama’s 80,000. About 57,000 Vermont Democrats backed Biden versus Obama’s 40,000. Only in Oklahoma did Biden win about the same number of raw votes as did Obama — 66,000 to Obama’s 64,000 twelve years ago.

This tells a story roughly similar to the one that unfolded last week in Michigan, where Biden won 81 percent of the vote. There, over 145,000 Michiganders turned out to vote against the Democratic Party’s incumbent president, but the vote for “uncommitted” and the two non-Biden Democrats who made the state’s ballot only added up to about 17 percent of the electorate.

What does this tell us? Not much, save that Biden is slightly more preferable to non-progressive Democrats than his predecessor and that Democratic voters are significantly more engaged in the electoral process than they were at a similar point in the calendar in 2012. Like the anti-Trump protest vote, the Democrats who aren’t yet sold on Biden are looking for a reason to “come home” in November. Also, like the GOP, the overwhelming consensus of their fellow Democrats might be a sufficient inducement.