What Does Uninstructed Mean? Inside Wisconsin Voters' Message to Biden
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Anyone who wanted to vote in the April 2 Wisconsin presidential primary was hit with rain, snow, sleet, and hail, in typical Wisconsin fashion. Yet voters turned out, a significant number of them motivated by the option to vote uninstructed. More than 48,000 registered Democrats in Wisconsin ultimately voted “uninstructed,” which is over 8% of the Democratic primary votes and more than double the margin by which Joe Biden won Wisconsin in 2020.
Those choosing to vote uninstructed are sending Biden a warning, expressing discontent with US support of the Israeli military’s onslaught in Gaza, where the current death toll has surpassed 33,000, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. After seeing the success in Michigan, where more than 100,000 people voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary, Wisconsin organizers worked to get the word out through the Listen to Wisconsin campaign. (Different states have different ballot options allowing register their discontent; in places like Michigan and Minnesota, it's “uncommitted,” while campaigners in New York pushed people to submit blank ballots).
“The motivation behind the campaign did not come up in a month,” says Dahlia Saba, an organizer and University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student. “These are people who have been frustrated for months, for years, about the horrific policy that the US has had in Palestine.” Saba credits the campaign's quick evolution to the existing desire for policy change.
Teen Vogue speaks to Saba and fellow Palestinian youth organizer Yaseen Najeeb about their recent efforts to educate Wisconsites on uninstructed voting and what comes next for voters across the state.
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Teen Vogue: What were your goals when you set out to encourage, or as you said, educate, people about voting uninstructed?
Dahlia Saba: There's obviously the numerical goal. But beyond that, part of the goal is to get people to understand that US policy in Palestine and Gaza isn't something that is static. It's not something that exists and is unchanging; this is something that can be changed, must be changed, and that we have the authority and responsibility to demand be changed. I think, especially as Wisconsin voters, we have a lot of political leverage. Part of the goal of this campaign is to leverage all of this discontent into political power to actually change policy.
Yaseen Najeeb: We want to push Biden to call for that ceasefire, that immediate ceasefire. We want to call for a complete order to resume humanitarian aid, UNRA aid, and to end all military aid to Israel. Those were our main goals. That's what we wanted to get through to Biden. We wanted to show him that this is a critical swing state. Without Wisconsin, you're not going to win this election. And [Donald] Trump is not a good option — no one likes Trump. Trump is going to hurt the country, and if we don't want that to happen, then what we have to do is do better. Do better as Democrats, do what the people want, what the majority of the Democratic voters want, which is a ceasefire.
TV: What message do you think the uninstructed results send the Biden-Harris administration, as well as other elected officials in Wisconsin and beyond?
DS: The message is that the Democratic Party's line, and specifically the Biden administration's line on Palestine, is untenable. It's morally outrageous. It's something that is fully inconsistent with the stated values that Biden professes to have.
More broadly, this is something that voters care about, especially when we talk about younger voters, especially when we talk about college students, who really won Biden the election in 2020. That demographic of people is not being reflected in his policy.
We saw that UW campus polling sites voted uninstructed at four times higher than the state rate [according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s student newspaper], which shows that this is a huge problem for him when it comes to young people — which, again, record turnout among young people won him the election in 2020. This is something he can't ignore, politically speaking.
YN: I believe that we're sending an extremely strong message to Biden. Our goal was 20,000; we blew that out of the park….
Many people were going into this primary not planning on voting, many people lost faith in this democracy and in the Democratic Party. Because they had this option to protest Biden and send him this message, they decided to get out and vote in that awful weather. There was sleet, there was hail, there was water, snow, rain. They went out. That's incredible.
Our votes would [likely] have been much higher had the weather not been absolutely horrendous. Many went out to vote, and clearly they were extremely passionate about this. We're really trying to send that message that a ceasefire is the bare minimum of human decency.
TV: For those who did vote uninstructed on April 2, what comes next? What do you think young people should consider before voting or not voting in November?
YN: If Biden decides to put [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu first, that's ridiculous. He's not the one who is putting Biden in office. It's the people of this country. If Biden and the Democratic Party decide that they will sacrifice the country for Netanyahu and Israel, then that shows where his loyalties lie, and it's very disappointing because he's gonna lose the Democratic Party vote in the election. Our goal right now is to wait and see how he reacts.
DS: One of the key things Biden is campaigning on is “saving democracy.” When we talk about democracy, we mean policies that reflect the will of the people. If that's really what he values, then he should listen to this message, because the uninstructed vote is a warning about what he needs to do if he's concerned about what his constituents want.
The Uninstructed campaign's goal is to change policy. The 48,000 votes show our strength, but the campaign is not successful until policy has changed. And that's really what we're looking to see from Biden.
TV: What did the campaign process look like? What kind of actions were you engaging in to get the word out?
YN: It was a grassroots effort. It wasn't us reaching out to people, necessarily, but rather people reaching out to us and asking, “How can we help? Where do you need us?” That was beautiful to see. We had people going around flyering, we had people putting up yard signs, spreading the word, attending events, press conferences. It was sprinting a marathon.
We missed a lot of Wisconsin, even though we tried our best to hit more of it. We have until November now, so that'll be no problem to spread the word if we choose to go a certain way. Biden should definitely be worried about that. We had friend banks, we had phone banks, we had people coming together…. It's not just a Palestinian or Muslim issue, but rather a wild injustice that is occurring and people really want it to end.
TV: What is next for both of you and for the campaign?
YN: What's coming from Biden? What is he going to do next? The ball is in his court, and it's quickly deflating. If he doesn't act quickly, then he's really going to lose [the vote].
I will continue this, and I'm sure the campaign will continue…. If we can't speak freely and call for Palestinian freedom without worrying about losing our jobs, losing our reputation, we're not free.
DS: The work is never done. There is still so much injustice happening right now, continuing to happen. This ceasefire is the bare minimum, it is not the end…. I don't think any of the people involved in this campaign will just dust their hands off and say, “Job done.”
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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