Gretchen Whitmer responds to calls by some Democrats to vote ‘uncommitted’ in Michigan’s primary on Tuesday
Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor, pushed back on calls to not vote for Joe Biden over his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict, saying on Sunday that could help Trump get re-elected.
“It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” she said on Sunday during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union. “A second Trump term would be devastating. Not just on fundamental rights, not just on our democracy here at home, but also when it comes to foreign policy. This was a man who promoted a Muslim ban.”
Whitmer, who is a co-chair of Biden’s 2024 campaign, also said she wasn’t sure what to expect when it came to the protest vote.
Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who is the only Palestinian-American serving in Congress, urged Democrats last week to vote “uncommitted” in Michigan’s 27 February primary.
I mean she’s right. If you register a protest vote against Biden you need to accept the moral liability of helping Trump. There really isn’t any additional conversation here. You can write a million words about how you are making the perfect the enemy of the good, and none of it will change the very simple cause and effect of a protest vote.
Every time people are saying they will vote third party in the general, I argue that it’s important to vote for the best viable candidate, and the time to vote against a Democrat they don’t like is in the primaries. When people start saying no, you can’t even vote against the party leadership’s chosen candidate in a primary, what do you think they’re going to do? BS antidemocratic rhetoric like that is exactly what is most likely to get us another Trump presidency. We start down that road and we can kiss democracy goodbye for good.
Anyone still spouting “the DNC picked Hillary/Biden” removes the agency of millions of voters who voted for Hillary/Biden in favor of their own preferences and perceived enlightenment. Honestly at this point it’s legitimately just right wing trolls who are still harping on this as far as I can tell.
The DNC admitted on record in court that they cheated and that it was their right to cheat to get their own choices elected. Your endless boot sucking won’t change the fact that we don’t get to choose our leaders in the primary. No, there isn’t a better option, but we don’t have to pretend it’s a decent org.
Man, if the DNC can just brainwash voters you’d think they’d win more reliably.
Pretending that there’s no way for the Democratic leadership to put their thumb on the scale, other than “brainwashing”, when it’s been proven that they did just that, is disingenuous at best. Doing so in defense of the fundamentally antidemocratic proposition that people shouldn’t be able to vote their conscience in the primary is shady as anything. You basically accused me of being a “right wing troll” in a previous comment. Protest too much?
So they took Bernie off the ballot then?
You aren’t even trying to argue in good faith. Not even close.
How do you figure? I was there and remember the primary very well. Bernie was in no way excluded from participating. How is that statement not in good faith? Because I merely disagree with your conspiracy laden conclusions about the role and behavior of a particular political party?
Like it or not, political parties are associations of private individuals. Bernie didn’t have to seek their nomination but he did. The DNC definitely had a preference, but in terms of historical black-dog primary candidates, 2016 was hardly unfair. Bernie knew that he had to beat an imposing superdelegate disadvantage. This was not hidden from him. And even then it didn’t matter because he lost by 8 million votes. Call me old fashioned, but removing the agency of 8M people because you don’t like the way they voted doesn’t strike me as “good faith.”
But the thing which really gets me is that after 2016, the DNC took the feedback to heart and made a bunch of sweeping changes to the nominating process intended to boost transparency, reduce the possibility of corruption by individuals (eg, DWS), and double the delegate allocation for voters. They did all the stuff “good faith” votergroups wanted, yet somehow, none of the “good faith” conversations about the DNC want to talk about that.
If we can’t even support the candidate of our choice in a fucking primary then democracy is actually dead. Shaming voters in the general is one thing, but doing so in a primary is dickish to the extreme. It’s attitudes like this that will actually help Trump. Who the fuck wants to get in line for a party that doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you think?
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What is preventing you from supporting your candidate?
Don’t be dense. Nobody is physically (or psychically?) keeping me from supporting anyone. I was clearly responding to the notion that we have some kind of moral responsibility to support the establishment Democratic candidate in, not only the general, but also the primary.
The whole notion that quickly uniting behind a primary candidate is necessary or even helpful in winning general elections is wrong headed. Obama’s first primary was far more contentious than McCain’s, and Obama won the general. Hillary’s successful primary was less contentious than Trump’s, and Trump won the general. Biden’s primary was extremely contentious while Trump went largely unchallenged, and Biden won.
Contentious primaries put the party’s platform in front of voters for tons of free media. They also give even the losing side(s) a chance to have their positions heard, which gives them at least the impression that the party cares what they think.
What damages Democratic candidates is low voter turnout. One thing that absolutely kills voter enthusiasm is the impression that their voice is irrelevant. You are effectively telling them that their voices shouldn’t even be used, nevermind listened to. That is what will loose elections.
I think you are misunderstanding my position here. Again, I voted for Bernie twice, donated thousands of dollars to him, and put in many full time weeks volunteering for his campaign. I understood going into it how primaries worked, which is why I understood it was going to be a long shot. Which is why I went so hard.
The issue isn’t a contentious primary, it’s the division and discontent sown by sore losers after the fact which is literally still happening in this thread (and all over the Internet) that I’m talking about. This is not an abstraction. This sour grapes behavior literally contributed to Trump’s win whether you want to admit it or not. So yes, the ongoing temper tantrum absolutely creates moral liability for those who insist on picking that scab a decade later.
In my mind, a good faith participant in this conversation would have moved on long ago. Take the lumps, work to change things, but don’t fucking go around sabotaging democratic engagement. This is why I view this continued relitigating of 2016, in a year where none of those participants are even running, with extreme skepticism. And yes, even prejudice.
That would be fine, except it ignores important context.
This is still the Democratic primary that is being discussed. Nobody disputes that Biden is going to win, but that doesn’t mean people are being somehow disloyal to vote for their candidate of choice, or for “uncommitted” to send a message to the party.
Bernie voters overwhelmingly supported both Hillary and then Biden. Those that didn’t were almost entirely right-wing voters who either mistakenly thought Bernie was a sabotage candidate, or were primarily motivated by getting an outsider candidate. There is no universe in which right wing anti-establishment voters are going to flock to someone like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. All of this is backed up in the exit polls.
Hillary disingenuously scapegoated Bernie supporters for her loss to Trump, and continues to do so today. If you really feel the need to scold somebody for destroying party unity, that is where you should start. Thanks to Hillary’s bullshit, the left wing of the party is understandably a bit hypersensitive to accusations of party disloyalty, and the line that you are taking is only going to exacerbate that issue.
Right wing troll farms are all over the place trying to drive a wedge into this issue. I don’t know what percentage of the loudmouthed “third party” advocates are right wing trolls, but I think it’s pretty high. Feeding the trolls usually just makes it worse, but it’s reasonable with reasoned arguments about that being a terrible strategy. What’s not reasonable is to assume those arguments are representative of a large segment of leftists, then assume that to be the position of people discussing an ongoing primary.
I certainly don’t “admit it”. Exit polling showed no significant tendency for leftists to vote against the Democratic nominee. Bernie voters voted for Hillary in greater numbers than Hillary voters voting for Obama, even including the right wing Bernie voters I mentioned above that were not a real factor for Obama. Obama also didn’t piss on the left after winning the way Hillary did.
Lets talk about your language. Using terms like “sore losers”, “sour grapes”, “temper tantrum”, and even “admit it”, and also accusing people of “sabotaging democratic engagement” for literally engaging in and discussing a Democratic primary is not an effective strategy to achieve a Democratic victory. All you are doing is driving potential voters away.
Nobody in either this post or the thread leading up to this comment has mentioned the 2016 election at all. It’s mentioned in other threads, but why would you bring it up here? I never said anything of the kind. However, I will say that the Democratic primary process is extremely undemocratic because it is designed to be easily manipulated by the Democratic establishment and their allies in establishment media. As long as it remains as fucked up as it is, the 2016 primary, and every other fucked up primary, will continue to be relevant.
This is in the primary. Voting uncommitted isn’t going to hurt Biden’s chance on the general. For that reason, this is one where I support a protest vote as it does nothing to the general in of by itself. If the youth and Muslims actually voted uncommitted, that’d be a good gauge on how much people dislike seeing Israel supported over their action. I would vote uncommitted if I was in Michigan because of Israel’s support toward settlers, and lack of belief toward their civilian to military casualty ratio because of the questionable definition of soldier being 18+ males.
To clarify I am explicitly talking about protest votes in the general. The primary would definitely be the right place to register a protest vote.
Probably a late response, but it seems like 16% uncommited vote, but let’s move on to the pinned thread.