What to watch for in the Michigan presidential primaries

CNN —

The Michigan primary on Tuesday will not only assess President Joe Biden’s strength in a key battleground state, but also serve as a litmus test on the president’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Biden’s ardent support for Israel – whose ongoing military campaign has killed roughly 30,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health – has enraged a large bloc of American progressives, many of them Jewish, and Arab Americans, most notably in and around the Michigan city of Dearborn, home to one of the largest Arab American communities in the US.

That anger is fueling a statewide movement among Democratic critics of Israel for voters to mark “uncommitted” on their ballots. Though Biden won the state in 2020 by about 150,000 votes, the victory margin was much narrower in 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by nearly 11,000. The group leading the protest campaign has said it hopes to garner at least that many “uncommitted” votes on Tuesday. The goal: Send a message to the Biden campaign about the domestic political costs of his stance on a conflict increasingly referred to by critics as a genocide.

“This is not an anti-Biden campaign,” Layla Elabed, a leader of the Listen to Michigan campaign, told CNN. “It’s a humanitarian vote. It’s a protest vote. It is a vote that tells Biden and his administration that we believe in saving lives.”

On the Republican side, Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will again go head-to-head in the first part of the state GOP’s nomination process, which begins with Tuesday’s vote and continues, with 39 of the state Republicans’ 55 delegates up for grabs, at a state conventionthis weekend. It is the first GOP primary vote in a