Joe Biden Should Pay Close Attention to the Michigan Results

The Michigan primary results are in—and the number of “uncommitted” Democratic votes is astounding.

As of Wednesday morning, more than 100,000 Democratic voters chose to check the “uncommitted” box rather than back Joe Biden in his reelection campaign, according to the Associated Press. That’s about 13 percent of people—or one in every seven—who voted “uncommitted,” thanks in large part to a protest campaign urging the president to reverse course over his reckless support for Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza. Biden won the primary with only about 80 percent of the vote.

That 100,000 “uncommitted” number is a much bigger deal than it seems. Organizers of the “Listen to Michigan” and “Abandon Biden” campaigns had set a goal of just 10,000 voters—and they flew far past those expectations.

Uncommitted vote campaign organizers spent weeks reaching out to Democratic voters, urging them to make their voice known—and help send a wake-up call to Biden on his horrific support for Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.

The number of “uncommitted” votes is also concerning if you recall what the 2020 election looked like. Biden won the state of Michigan by a mere 154,000 votes, a much narrower margin than most polls and pundits at the time had predicted. That margin is only about half of the number of people in Michigan who listed Middle Eastern or North African ancestry in the 2020 census. About 146,000 Muslim Americans voted in Michigan’s 2020 general election, according to an analysis by the Muslim advocacy group Emgage, nearly Biden’s entire margin of victory.

These aren’t just random numbers. Polling indicates that a majority of Muslim and Middle Eastern Americans backed Biden in 2020. The Associated Press reported that 64 percent of Muslims across the country supported Biden in 2020, while only 35 percent supported Trump. And in heavily Arab American counties in Michigan, voters backed Biden by nearly 70 percent.

All of this was a safe assumption in 2020, given that the race was between Biden and the guy who pushed the Muslim ban, which targeted several Middle Eastern countries. But by November 2024, that may be no longer enough.

“The overwhelming shift of voters away from Biden makes one thing clear to the Biden administration: complicity in genocide isn’t up for debate,” the Abandon Biden campaign said in a statement Tuesday. “And if Michigan’s message says anything, it is that what awaits Biden in November isn’t victory but loss. And what awaits the Democratic Party is irrelevance.”

Many Arab and Muslim activists from Michigan speculated that the large uncommitted vote means that it’s not even just Middle Eastern or Muslim Americans who are concerned about Biden’s policies in Gaza.

“The uncommitted results are showing that this isn’t just Arabs and Palestinians. This is an issue for all Democrats in [Michigan],” Abed Ayoub, the national executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, warned Tuesday evening. “We’ve been saying this for months, but the experts and paid consultants tried their best to refute this point.”

Michigan Representative Debbie Dingell, who before the Michigan primary tried to warn that Trump would be much worse than Biden and “nuke” Gaza completely, had another dire warning after the results came in.

“We’ve watched too many innocent people die there. Gaza is in terrible shape,” Dingell said on CNN Tuesday evening. “But I think [Biden] does need to sit down with this community when feelings are quite so raw.”

Dingell also warned that it’s not just Arab Americans responsible for the protest vote. “It’s young people,” she said. “They are watching innocent civilians being killed.”

For nearly five months, Biden has ignored a huge swath of Americans worried about Israel’s relentless bombing turned ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza. He has downplayed the death toll in Gaza, studiously avoided using the word “cease-fire,” overseen the vetoing of multiple U.N. resolutions calling for a cease-fire, and bypassed Congress twice to deliver more than $250 million in military aid to Israel. The Biden administration keeps saying it’s doing something behind the scenes to stop these atrocities—but as Michigan’s primary results show, far too many Americans no longer believe him.

While congressional leadership met with President Joe Biden Tuesday ahead of yet another government shutdown deadline, one Senate Republican couldn’t contain his discontent at the stupendous amount of time wasted by his own party on skirting one of Congress’s primary jobs: funding the U.S. government.

“This was supposed to be done in September. I mean this is now almost March? I mean, this is just ridiculous. They have agreement on the [budget] top line. They’ve had it since January,” Hawley told CNN’s Manu Raju.

Apart from the meeting at the White House, practically nothing has changed since Congress passed its last continuing resolution one month ago to extend the shutdown deadline. The new deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown is Friday.

A proper budget is still being held hostage to the aggressive demands of House Republicans, who claim to want more funding for the U.S.-Mexico border, but capitulated earlier this month when that became a possibility, all because President Donald Trump wanted to leverage the issue in the general election.

“This is why I voted against the last [continuing resolution],” Hawley continued. “They’ve just been kicking this can down the road. I can’t believe that they didn’t get work done over the weekend. They’ve had months to do this stuff, I mean my patience has run out.”

“They’re all to blame. And at this point it’s just absurd, I think,” he added, saying that includes Republican leadership but refusing to name names.

Meanwhile, Schumer described the communal meeting with Biden as “productive and intense,” particularly with regard to sending more military aid to Ukraine, which recently surrendered the city of Avdiivka to Russian forces.

A key witness who was supposed to testify against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis seemed unable to answer a single question on Tuesday.

Donald Trump and several of his co-defendants in their Georgia election interference case have accused Willis of an improper relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. Trump’s team says that Willis and Wade began dating in 2019, while the couple says they didn’t start seeing each other until 2022, after Willis hired Wade for the Georgia case.

Trump’s lawyers have argued the romantic relationship provides a legal basis to disqualify Willis and throw out her case against Trump entirely. On Tuesday, lawyers Ashleigh Merchant and Steve Sadow questioned Terrence Bradley to try to establish a timeline of the couple’s relationship. Bradley is Wade’s former law partner and divorce attorney, and was meant to be a key witness in the case against Willis.

Merchant had multiple text messages from Bradley stating that the couple began dating in 2019. But when she began questioning him, suddenly, Bradley didn’t know a thing—including when they actually began dating, how the relationship began, and the trips they took together.

When asked why he initially said Willis and Wade began dating in 2019, Bradley said he was just “speculating.” He said he’d actually only had one conversation with Wade about the relationship, and Bradley couldn’t remember when that discussion had taken place. He repeated that he was only speculating so many times that many people on social media began to point out that Bradley seemed more like an office gossip than a credible witness.

Bradley also continually said he couldn’t remember telling Merchant certain details. Merchant kept asking him to confirm things he had previously told her, but Bradley only answered, “I don’t recall.” It got to the point that presiding Judge Scott McAfee told Merchant to move on, because the line of questioning was going nowhere.

Trump’s legal team allege that Willis and Wade had an “improper intimate personal relationship,” and accuse the couple of taking extravagant vacations that Wade paid for in part by billing Willis’s office.

Willis has denied the allegations. She says the relationship began in 2022, after Willis joined the case, and that they each paid their own share of the vacation bill. But the most important thing to remember, Willis has stressed, is that Trump and his co-defendants are currently on trial for “trying to steal an election.”

If Willis is removed from the case, that would deal a massive blow to one of the four criminal trials that Trump currently has scheduled ahead of the 2024 general election. The process to replace Willis, or even decide to completely drop the case, would significantly delay Trump’s day in Georgia court.

Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, who apparently only learned what in vitro fertilization is last week, has a message for the people affected by the Alabama Supreme Court ruling: it’s all good.

The ruling is little more than a week old, but it has already wreaked havoc on Alabama’s IVF industry. Multiple fertility clinics have paused their IVF services, and at least one embryo shipping company has temporarily halted business in Alabama, as well.

When asked Tuesday about the ruling, Tuberville (who, again, has had more than a week to prepare some answers) looked visibly flustered.

“I support that people wanna have IVF,” he told ABC reporter Rachel Scott. His voice rose a bit at the end of his sentence, as if he were asking Scott to confirm that he was even talking about the correct topic.

“The state’s getting ready to pass a law,” he continued haltingly. “It’s gonna be ok. They’re gonna pass it, then it’s, then it’s, then it’s gonna be positive.”

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled two weeks ago that embryos created through IVF can be considered children and are thus protected under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. Since it’s common for fertilized eggs not to survive the IVF process, the ruling puts doctors and clinics at risk of being charged for wrongful death of embryos.

When asked about it last week, Tuberville at one point referred to the ruling as a “bill” and said he was “all for it.”

“We need to have more kids, we need to have an opportunity to do that, and I thought this was the right thing to do,” he said of the ruling.

When a reporter pointed out that the ruling actually made it significantly harder for people to have kids, Tuberville became tongue-tied.

The Alabama state legislature is rushing to pass a bill that would explicitly state embryos, fertilized or not, cannot be classified as children. But even if the measure becomes law, it is already coming too late for many people.

Since the ruling, at least three fertility clinics have paused IVF treatment in Alabama. The CDC lists just eight clinics in the state that provide assisted reproductive technology services.

Patients can still ship their embryos out of state and continue seeking IVF treatment elsewhere, although this increases the already considerable amounts of time and money required to get IVF. But Cryoport, one of the leading embryo shippers, said Friday it would pause shipping in and out of Alabama to avoid legal prosecution. This makes it even harder for people to seek out-of-state care.

People who are preparing to undergo IVF will now have to stop their extensive medication routines, which are part of preparing their body for embryo transfer, until they can find a new clinic that will treat them.

Scott told Tuberville Tuesday that she had spoken to a woman named Kimberly in Alabama. Kimberly was supposed to get her fourth and final embryo transfer on Wednesday. But her clinic was one of the ones that has paused IVF treatment, and now Kimberly will have to start the entire process over again.

Donald Trump has an unexpected list of demands for his Manhattan criminal trial, including a plan to keep key witnesses away from the stand.

Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He’s facing 34 felony charges in the case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

But a list of proposed exclusions submitted by Trump’s legal team to the judge on Monday indicates that it wants Cohen and Daniels nowhere near the courthouse, despite their testimony being central to the entire case. The list also contains several other outrageous requests, including keeping prosecutors from showing the jury quotes from Rudy Giuliani from May 2018 regarding the payments, and excluding the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump confessed to sexual assault by claiming he grabs women “by the pussy.” Trump defended those comments in his first E. Jean Carroll trial, and the video again made a reappearance in his second defamation lawsuit brought by Carroll. After both trials, Trump owes Carroll $88.5 million.

Trump also filed to prevent any mention of Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, with whom Trump had a covert affair beginning in 2006, and one of Trump World Tower’s former doormen, Dino Sajudin, who claimed that Trump fathered an out-of-wedlock child with a former housekeeper. On top of that, Trump’s team asked to ban the use of the phrase “catch and kill,” referring to plans uncovered by the Manhattan District Attorney to kill negative press on both those stories about Trump before the 2016 election.

Meanwhile, the district attorney’s office submitted their own motions in limine, asking that the court exclude a campaign finance expert proposed by Trump’s team, selective prosecution claims, and info stemming from a related case against Cohen in the Southern District of New York.

Speaking to reporters after attending his first criminal trial hearing in person on February 15, Trump claimed he “shouldn’t be in a courthouse.”

“Even if he was guilty of something, there is no crime,” Trump said, speaking in the third person, before demanding “delays,” which he will decidedly not get.