Primary Voters in New York, Wisconsin, and More Rebuke Biden With Uncommitted Votes Over Gaza

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Sensitive content warning: This article contains descriptions of violence, warfare, and death.

In a recent interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton affirmed her view that the 2024 election is about Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and that’s it. But the April 2 primary elections in Wisconsin, New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut indicate that many voters feel otherwise.

All four states saw serious campaigns deny support for Biden in the primaries, largely due to the continued US support for the Israeli military’s onslaught in Gaza, where the current death toll is reportedly nearing 33,000, “according to the enclave's Health Ministry,” as cited by NBC News.

In advance of Tuesday's elections, Abbas Alawieh, a representative for the national Uncommitted campaign, told Reuters, "The White House has changed its rhetoric on the war to where it should have been since the start, but they are still failing to demonstrate a meaningful policy shift when it comes to weapons and funding."

After launching in late March, the Uninstructed campaign in Wisconsin set a goal of 20,000 votes — the margin by which Biden won the state in 2020. Before Tuesday came to a close, they group had surpassed that number; as of Wednesday morning, nearly 48,000 Wisconsin voters — over 8% of the Democratic primary votes tallied so far — chose Uninstructed. Biden won the primary itself, but NPR described the campaign as sending “a strong message on the war in Gaza.”

"We don't want lip service and we're done with games," Listen to Wisconsin organizer Janan Najeeb told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "We want unhindered and complete access to all humanitarian aid, including clean water, food, medical supplies, and equipment for Palestinians. We want the release of all hostages."

In New York, where there was no uncommitted option, organizers ran a campaign for voters to submit blank ballots, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party. One preliminary count found that 12% of New York State voters left their ballots blank in the Democratic primary. In Connecticut, the uncommitted vote hit about 14%. And in Rhode Island, 16% of the votes in the Democratic primary went to uncommitted; journalist Daniel Denvir noted over 30% of Democratic primary voters in Providence voted uncommitted with about 90% of the vote reported.

These states join Uncommitted and other protest-vote campaigns that have occurred throughout the 2024 presidential primaries in swing states such as Michigan, Arizona, and North Carolina, as well as Minnesota, Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Washington. Although Wisconsin’s Uninstructed campaign didn’t net any delegates for the August Democratic National Convention, the movement gained at least 26 DNC delegates across states.

Teen Vogue has reached out to the Biden campaign for comment. When asked about the Uncommitted movement by ABC News before Tuesday’s elections, Biden spokesperson Lauren Hitt said: “The president believes making your voice heard and participating in our democracy is fundamental to who we are as Americans. He shares the goal for an end to the violence and a just, lasting peace in the Middle East.”

Last week, as reported by the Washington Post, the White House “quietly authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza.” Also at the end of last week, Israel petitioned the United Nations to disband UNRWA, the aid organization — one of few on the ground in Palestine — that lost significant funding over accusations that some of its aid workers were involved in Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, claims for which the humanitarian chief of the European Union said Israel has provided no evidence to back up.

On April 1, CNN reported that the White House was “set to green-light [an] $18 billion sale of F-15 fighter jets to Israel.” That same day, Israeli soldiers pulled out of Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest — also described by the New York Times as “once the fulcrum of Gaza’s health system and now an emblem of its destruction” — after two weeks and at least 21 people killed, according to the director-general of the World Health Organization. A Washington Post report described the carnage and destruction after Israeli Defense Force soldiers allowed media inside, reporting, “It smells like death.”

After an Israeli airstrike hit an aid convoy affiliated with World Central Kitchen (WCK) on April 2, killing seven, WCK and two other aid groups announced they would be withdrawing from Gaza, with WCK’s CEO calling it a “targeted attack.” José Andrés, the founder of WCK, noted in an op-ed for the New York Times that nearly half of Gaza — 1.1 million people — is at “imminent risk of famine.” He wrote: “The [WCK] team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, traveling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza.”

The Biden administration issued a statement condemning the killings; CNN reported that Biden was “actively shifting course Tuesday as he addresses increasingly loud concerns” over Gaza. After six months and more than 30,000 Palestinians killed, a figure from the enclave's Health Ministry, as cited by NBC News, voters aligned with the campaign say such statements may not be enough to make them overlook the damage done to Biden’s campaign due to his policy stances on Israel.

"Republicans offer thoughts and prayers for gun violence; Democrats express broken hearts for civilian casualties by Israel. Neither solves anything,” Listen To Michigan campaign manager Layla Elabed said in a statement. "We don’t need Biden and Democrats to issue another thousand calls for restraint and investigations. To save lives in Gaza, Biden must enact policy change by ending weapons aid to Israel immediately."

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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