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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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More ignorant uninformed questions about the American presidential election!

So - Gaza? Palestine? Palestinians? Israel? Will this affect the Democratic vote, or is this just more journalists trying to spin straw into gold?:

In Michigan, home to a large Arab-American constituency, Democratic voters had been urged to mark their primary ballots as "uncommitted" in protest at Mr Biden's Gaza policy.

With almost half of Democratic votes counted, the number of "uncommitted" voters was more than 58,000, according to Edison Research, far exceeding the target of 10,000 that protest organisers had hoped for.

Many in Michigan's Arab-American community who backed Mr Biden in 2020 are angry, as are some progressive Democrats, over Mr Biden's support for Israel's offensive in Hamas-ruled Gaza where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed.

...Campaign organisers vowed to take what they called their anti-war agenda to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.

... With nearly half the estimated Democratic vote counted, Mr Biden had 80% support, with "uncommitted" getting 13%.

...When former president Barack Obama, a Democrat, ran for re-election in 2012, he faced about 21,000 "uncommitted" voters in Michigan's primary that year. Mr Biden faced substantially more.

Michigan is expected to play a decisive role in the head-to-head 5 November US presidential election, a likely rematch between Mr Biden and Mr Trump.

Whatever about Michigan, on a national level is there a bunch of undecided/uncommitted voters who won't vote for Biden in the election (not going to vote for Trump or third party, but not voting as a protest on this one issue)?

If there are, are there enough to make a difference?

Or is it that it doesn't matter, the usual Democrat voters will turn out in enough numbers for a drop off in voting by a single-issue minority not to matter?

Will Gaza even be a live issue by the time the real election finally rolls round?

To state the obvious: Biden will not lose the primary. He’s an incumbent with a, true, not that good approval rating, but the other democrats are clowns, so it doesn’t matter that much.

I think the more interesting question is ‘will enough Arabs not vote for Biden to swing the Michigan general election’, which is much more of an open question. Personally I don’t expect so; if trump wins Michigan he’ll probably have won regardless of Arab support, and switching from Biden to trump is not what one does to find a less pro-Israel candidate.

I notice that my state broadcaster, whose staff care more about american goings on than they really should, have not even bothered to write about who the other candidates are, while I distinctly remember pieces being run about Bernie and Elizabeth Warren back in 2020. It is by and large assumed by everyone Important that Biden will be the democractic nominee.

Because in 2020 there were candidates like Warren and Buttigieg who were neither ‘who?’ Nor nut jobs. Doubtless yang and Marianne williamson didn’t get write ups.

That's pretty typical, at least here in the US. The incumbent president is generally considered guaranteed to be the party nominee. Whereas in 2020, Biden was not really sure to be the nominee even though he had previously been VP.

The difference is that in 2024 Biden is the incumbent; 2020 was an open primary. Incumbents running for re-election are generally accepted by everyone as the de facto nominee before the primary even begins. And the party machine begins closing ranks early. Biden was essentially the Democratic nominee from the moment he announced he was running again. It was the same with Trump in 2020. There were some minor candidates running a token opposition campaign. American media might make hay of the drama on a slow news day. But most Americans will not care, and it's no surprise your foreign state broadcaster would not even bother.

It's actually become accepted wisdom among political consultants that strong primary challenges against incumbents presage bad results in the general election. Ford and Carter were both primaried before they lost in the general elections, for example. So, in practice, the party machines have increasingly worked to prevent primaries against the incumbent. Legally, nothing can stop someone from filing to run for a major party nomination. But nobody is going to buy-in. This is why RFK gave up seeking to win the Democratic primary and decided to run as an independent: even though he had a decent fraction of Democratic support, nobody in the party would defect to supporting him, and so he was limited in how much progress he could really make.