Michigan shows why democracy is worth saving | Will Bunch Newsletter

One thing about being a senior citizen who belongs to a union is that — unlike most Americans — I get a lot of vacation time. Luckily, I didn’t miss anything during my two-week staycation, other than a major (and majorly frustrating) Supreme Court announcement, Mitch McConnell stepping aside, the rise of Christian nationalism, the further unraveling of Gaza, a protest vote in Michigan, Texas wildfires, and a blizzard at Donner Pass. Just typing that makes me want another vacation.

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This Sunday was unseasonably warm in the Upper Midwest. In a crowded park in Minneapolis, scattered among the seesaws and swing sets, were dozens of parents who’d brought their kids, both for play and for politics. As organizers of the pre-Super Tuesday event showed attendees how to take a Democratic primary ballot and vote the “Uncommitted” line, Amanda Purcell of MN Families for Palestine led them in a chant: “Gaza kids! Our kids!”

The event, which was covered by a reporter for the Guardian, spotlighted a hastily put-together movement seeking to replicate, and maybe even improve on the coalition of Muslim Americans, college students, and other progressives in simpatico Michigan who also voted “Uncommitted” in the Wolverine State’s Feb. 27 primary. Their goal, as in Minnesota, was to send a message to President Joe Biden, who most of them had voted for in 2020: Change U.S. policy on the war in the Middle East to make an immediate cease-fire the No. 1 priority.

“I’m hoping that President Biden listens, because I don’t want to have to organize my community out of becoming Republicans or just sitting at home,” Asma Mohammed of Vote Uncommitted MN told the Guardian — referring to possible bad outcomes for Biden in November if resentment over Gaza lingers. “And it’s not just my community.”

In the Michigan primary, more than 100,000 voters, or just over 13%, pulled the lever for sending uncommitted delegates — free agents not bound to any candidate — to this summer’s Democratic convention in Chicago. It was enough to capture two of the state’s 117 delegates, with the rest going to Biden.

There are two ways to look at this.

The political-science major in me could dismiss the result as not too significant. In 2012, with a Democratic incumbent, Barack Obama, and no flashpoint issue like Gaza, “Uncommitted” got about 11%. But the line also drew fewer than 21,000 votes that year. So 2024′s surge of an additional 80,000 “Uncommitted” votes apparently struck a nerve with top Democrats — coming from a key swing state that went from a narrow Trump win in 2016 to a slightly bigger Biden victory in 2020 to a 50-50 tossup now.

It can’t be a coincidence that after the Michigan votes were tallied, with a healthy amount of media coverage, there was a palpable change in the way that top Democrats talked about a war that has killed 30,000 Palestinians, including more than 12,000 children. Two Philadelphia-area members of Congress — Montgomery County Rep. Madeleine Dean and the city’s Rep. Dwight Evans, both stalwarts of the party’s mainstream — came out strongly in favor of a cease-fire, as well as increased humanitarian aid and release of the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas. Dean, returning from her second trip to the war-torn region, said Israel has a right to defense, but “what is happening is beyond self-defense and unacceptable to me.”

The new support centering the demand for a cease-fire was accompanied by a clear shift in focus from the Biden White House, which had seemed to embrace Israel’s right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu in the early days of the war. Stunned by Israeli attacks on food convoys, the administration launched a campaign to airlift food into hunger-ravaged Gaza. Although the pallets contained just a fraction of what’s needed by the starving Palestinians, the effort did send a signal. The move echoed 1948′s Berlin airlift, when the blockading USSR was our adversary. What does that make Israel today?

On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Selma, Alabama — a mecca for the American civil rights movement, where marchers endured blows to the head and tear gas to embarrass the federal government into doing the right thing and passing the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It was fitting, then, that the first Black woman vice president stood before the Edmund Pettus Bridge to issue the White House’s strongest plea for peace since Oct. 7.

For sure, the Biden White House is far short of the steps — such as cutting off arms shipments until Israel stops hitting civilian targets — sought by activists on the left. Some of the new Team Biden rhetoric is just that — rhetoric — and marks a very belated falling-in-line with an outraged world community. But I believe words do matter, and the Biden line has clearly changed since the Michigan primary.

There are other big issues involved besides Gaza. Here at home, Biden has said repeatedly that “democracy is on the ballot” in 2024 — but what kind of democracy are we fighting for? To me, the activists and voters in Michigan who technically lost an election yet actually won, by getting some politicians to listen and even act on their life-or-death cause, strike me as the very essence of government by the people. It’s a shame that some elites still don’t get it.

I was infuriated over the weekend at a viral clip of a politician whom I greatly admire — Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a relentless fighter for gun control — insisting that Biden should ignore the voice of more than 100,000 Michiganders. “I would hope that the president doesn’t make decisions about what to do in Gaza or the Middle East based upon how the votes line up,” Murphy told an interviewer. I won’t argue there are some Profiles in Courage moments when a senator is heroic for bucking public opinion on a tough moral issue, but this is not such a time. Like the 1969 Vietnam protesters who stopped Richard Nixon from further escalation in Southeast Asia, today’s “Uncommitted” voters are desperately trying to get our leaders to listen, using methods that are peaceful and effective.

If we are fighting to save democracy in November — and I believe we are — let’s build a democracy worth saving. I agree with the political figure who once said, “If democracy cannot deliver on the disconnection and the disaffection that Americans feel, Americans are going to give up on democracy.” That wise man was also Sen. Chris Murphy. He should listen to himself. And Biden should listen to the American people.

Question: Are these polls way off? I don’t understand how [Trump] could be influencing voters. — Jared Beloff (@Read_Instead) via X/Twitter

Answer: Jared, my attitude about the polls is, to steal a phrase, to take them seriously but not literally. With the general election still eight months away, today’s polls don’t tell you who’s going to win, but what the candidates need to work on. The thing about Donald Trump is that he’s not actually influencing anyone at this point; his numbers stay around 46-48% come heck or high water. President Joe Biden trails in surveys like last weekend’s over-discussed New York Times poll because groups that cast ballots for him in 2020 — under-30 voters, or Black and brown working-class folks — haven’t yet committed to him for 2024. But they could come home with the right words and policy actions on the issues they care about. Team Biden should be grateful for these polls, which are screaming at them what to do to win.

A lot of you responded to my pre-vacation question about President Joe Biden’s age, whether he should drop out at this late date, and who might replace him. Despite the liberal bent of newsletter readers, many of you are clearly worried about Biden’s ability to handle a second term and open to the idea of a switch, even now. Most striking was how many of you picked the same potential replacement: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “I do not see Biden’s age as the issue,” Frank Friedman wrote. “I see his physical and mental infirmities as the issues.” But Barry Rosen argued for keeping Biden — both because of his first-term accomplishments and because “Democrats cannot allow the equivalent of Republican memes to dictate our choices for anything, let alone President.”

📮This week’s question: Pennsylvania’s freshman Democratic Sen. John Fetterman has delighted some former detractors and outraged some of his more progressive 2022 voters with outspoken stances on Gaza and the border. Would you vote for him in 2028? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Fetterman” in the subject line.

Despite the balmy weather outside, the calendar insists that it is still winter — not normally a time to worry about deadly wildfires. But tell that to the good people of the Texas Panhandle, where the largest uncontrolled blaze in the recorded history of the Lone Star State — spreading rapidly in 82-degree heat that is 26 degrees above normal for this time of year — has already killed two humans, obliterated herds of cattle, and continues to get bigger. Climate scientists say higher temperatures — the first month of 2024 was the world’s hottest January on record, a story you see almost every month now — and drier air has turned Texas into a tinderbox. “There were clear fire seasons for Texas in the past, but fires have become a year-round threat,” Yongqiang Liu, a meteorologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Research Station, told the New York Times.

And yet the nation’s second-largest state remains ruled by climate deniers such as Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s raked in at least $30 million and probably much more in campaign cash from Big Oil. But now a new book by a longtime friend of the newsletter — Dana R. Fisher, the American University sociologist who’s a top expert on modern protest movements — argues that disasters like the Texas wildfires and likely bigger ones to come are probably the only catalyst for the kind of massive change that will be necessary for humankind to get serious about the climate crisis.

In Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action, Fisher — who grew up in Philadelphia’s western suburbs — synthesizes what she’s learned in a lifetime of researching all sorts of protest movements and her recent work on climate activism. Her kind of “Eureka!” moment came with the COVID-19 crisis that exploded four years ago this month, when a deadly disaster caused people to radically change their behaviors, sometimes for good. Fisher now calls such a moment an “AnthroShift,” and says that seeing that social change is possible and understanding the types of major events that causes it has turned her into an “apocalyptic optimist.”

Fisher notes that early expectations that normal politics could deal with climate change the way that other environmental problems like the ozone hole were successfully tackled have proved wrong, because folks underestimated how deeply Big Oil and Gas have polluted our political and other social structures. In Saving Ourselves, Fisher looks at how the glacial pace of reform has driven the current wave of climate extremism. But she firmly believes “people power” can ultimately save the planet, even if that only happens when the planet stares into the brink of an abyss. It’s striking how similar her message is to what people are saying about American democracy after the failures of Congress, the Supreme Court, and our other broken institutions.

No one else is coming to save us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Remember Jon Stewart from The Daily Show? Whatever happened to that guy? Wait, they’re telling me in my earpiece that Stewart just returned, with great fanfare, as executive producer of the Comedy Central show and as its Monday night anchor. Well, whatever he churns out in 2024 won’t be as good or as influential as a piece he aired just over 15 years ago. On March 5, 2009, I raved about Stewart’s epic takedown of the financial journalism on CNBC and elsewhere that slept before Wall Street burned in the prior year’s financial meltdown. I argued that journalism, which was really beginning to struggle in 2009, could be saved with the kind of deep research and passionate point of view that you could find on a comedy show, but not in a newspaper. Think about the ensuing decade-and-a-half as you read: “What battered newsrooms can learn from Stewart’s CNBC takedown.”

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