Progressive activists are calling for a ballot protest in Michigan, hoping to send a message to President Joe Biden that the administration needs to restrain its near-total support for Israel in its war in Gaza. “The main push is Joe Biden’s stance on the conflict taking place between Israel and Gaza,” Hussein Dabajeh, an organizer for the Vote Uncommitted movement, told CBS News earlier this month. “That’s not who we voted into office. That’s not who we helped elect. That’s not who over 150,000 Arab and Muslim voters in the state of Michigan voted for.” 

The campaign to encourage Democrats to choose the “uncommitted” ballot option over Joe Biden in the state’s February 27 primary is backed by Our Revolution, a nonprofit spun out of Bernie Sanders’s first presidential bid, and a group of Arab American Democrats from Dearborn, Michigan, angered by the rhetorical and material support Biden has shown Israel throughout a war in which Israeli forces have killed at least 28,000 Palestinians in Gaza and hundreds more in the West Bank, according to Palestinian officials. According to The New York Times, Our Revolution says it’s leaning on its 87,000 members in Michigan and more than 220,000 in other states, urging them to utilize email, phone, and text banking and events to have “uncommitted” secure at least 10% of the vote.

Activists waged a similar campaign during the New Hampshire primary last month. There, nearly 1,500 voters used their ballots to write in “ceasefire.” But the Michigan protest is likely to yield a far more noticeable outcome. The state holds the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the nation. Although they account for 2.1% of its population, they represent a large enough share of the electorate to potentially sway the presidential race. In 2016, Donald Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes; Biden won it by 150,000 four years later. For Biden to repeat his 2020 victory, he would almost certainly have to win the state again. (Meanwhile, Trump, perhaps sensing Biden’s weaknesses in Michigan, added a Waterford rally to his schedule this weekend.)  

Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor and a Biden campaign surrogate, has cautioned against the Vote Uncommitted movement. “There’s a lot at stake in this upcoming election, and I would just encourage people not to lose sight of that too,” she said last week, per the Detroit Free Press. “A potential second term for the former president would be very hard on all the communities that are still being impacted by what’s happening overseas as well, and that’s something that shouldn’t be lost on people’s calculation too.” The Listen to Michigan campaign, a group within the movement to vote uncommitted, says on its website that the campaign “is not an endorsement of Trump or a desire to see him return to power,” adding, “We are sending the warning sign to President Biden and the Democratic Party now in February, before it’s too late in November.”

Last month, the Biden campaign made a haphazard attempt at appeasing Arab Americans in Michigan, dispatching its campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, to meet with community leaders in the state. But Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hammoud rejected the request, explaining that he did not wish to participate in a political ploy. Writing on X, he said, “When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.” Some White House aides have also visited Michigan to speak with Arab Americans, even apologizing behind closed doors for some of the ways the administration has handled the Israel-Hamas war and spoken about Palestinians. And while Biden has recently become more critical of Israel’s martial and settler strategies, the administration has yet to place any restrictions on military aid to the country.