If You Voted Uncommitted, This Post Is Here to Make You Feel Bad
AKA: Voting is not a form of protest for people who are too lazy to protest.
So this is a post about how you shouldn’t vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary. You might say, um, friend, super Tuesday was two weeks ago, this ain’t exactly News We Can Use. The deed is done, don’t make me feel bad.
Look, around here there’s a surfeit of Jewish mothers; making you feel bad is our job. Anyway, four separate people have come up to me since the primary to complain that I haven’t provided a full and proper accounting, in appropriately exhausting detail (as a radical old queer who thinks Biden sucks), of why I think the movement to vote "uncommitted" is harmful not only in this election but to our politics generally. And I am here to give the people what they want, even two weeks late.
Besides, we’re not done with this shit. This has come up before. Almost 25 years ago, the “protest vote” yahoos helped elect the opponent of the one presidential candidate who might have prevented the global climate apocalypse we’re all living through now. 25 years ago, some protest voters joined forces with Antonin Scalia and the most loathsome people on the current Supreme Court to decide that the world should end. Republicans learned that protest votes were useful to them. Democrats and progressives, on the other hand, learned nothing useful.
So I know this will come up again, and again, and again. You will be given endless opportunities to harm your country and poison our politics by pretending that your vote is a protest, an advocacy opportunity, a form of political speech, a form of performance art, anything at all except a vote.
And that is the main reason, no matter what you think of Biden, no matter what you think of Israel, not to vote uncommitted. Because a vote is a vote. A vote is not a protest, a vote is not an advocacy opportunity, a vote is not a form of political speech, a vote is not a form of performance art, a vote is not anything at all except a vote.
A vote is your civic duty, as a member of a democracy, to weigh in on whom you want to represent you in political office. It is your hiring decision as a member of the search committee for the job called president. That’s it, that’s all it is, and it doesn’t work if you use it as speech, use it to play 12-dimensional chess, use it for anything except your opportunity to cast a deciding vote about whom, of the available applicants for the job, you want to hold the job.
Do I want Joe Biden to have the job of president, in an abstract universe of unlimited choices? Fuck no, I do not. I have opposed Biden in every presidential primary he’s been in (including two before I was old enough to vote) except this one, as a matter of fact. Biden is a centrist Republican to the right of Eisenhower who is an excellent example of making a illustrious career out of white male mediocrity failing upwards. He used to be good buddies with Lindsey Graham. He is reason Clarence Thomas, a man entirely made out of loose pubes, Coca Cola, corruption, and wax, is on the Supreme Court. He is always going to think being bipartisan is a virtue, even when the other party is actually quoting Hitler. He’s (almost) the worst.
He’s also a great deal better in his politics and more qualified in his experience for the job of U.S. president than literally every other person (or concept) on the 2024 Presidential Primary ballot, in any party.
One thing that irritates me when people vote for third party candidates for major political offices, especially president, is this issue of qualifications. Do you seriously want a lady who writes goofy books and believes in the law of attraction to be the person in charge of the nuclear football? Does Vermin Supreme seem like the name of a guy who would be good at Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy? Or maybe the dude who legally changed his name to NJWeedman.com? Same question for literally anyone running for President of the United States on the Legal Marijuana Party ticket? When you vote you’re saying, yes, this person for the job, I want this person to win. And if they win, they’re going to be doing the job of president. Do you seriously want Vermin Supreme to be your president? You think you’d be safer and life would be better under his leadership than Joe Biden?
You fucking don’t. You just think he can’t win. You’re playing 12-dimensional chess, same as my dad, who voted for Biden in the last primary, because he didn’t think Elizabeth Warren could win. If you voted for your candidate, your candidate can win. So shut up and vote for the candidate you actually want to win.
But a vote for any human candidate, however misguided, is at least nominating someone whose leadership you theoretically endorse. A vote for uncommitted is unserious and unhelpful in exactly the same way as a vote for a protest candidate, while also being even more nihilistic and chaotic in terms of actual political outcome. What happens if “uncommitted” wins the primary? (Do you even know? Did you look into this before casting that vote? Doesn’t that seem like kind of an important civic issue?) You said, essentially, you didn’t care who won. A vote for uncommitted is a vote for sending your party’s delegates to the nominating convention without instructions. I will wager $10 that none of you voting uncommitted even know who your delegates might be, much less what they would do with the power you just abdicated to them. Is it good for America, when the opposing party is hoping to do away with elections all together, for Democrats to shrug their shoulders and say they don’t care who leads the party? Is it good for Israel? What about folks who keep this up and vote “uncommitted” in the general election? What happens if “uncommitted” wins the presidency? Is that the outcome you’re looking for?
You shouldn’t be casting votes for candidates you don’t want to win. Because if the candidate you vote for wins, they win. And we all have to live with the consequences of that.
Of course, nobody voting uncommitted thought their man would win. They were protesting. The argument for voting uncommitted was that if enough people registered their vote as a protest, instead of a vote, that Biden would be unequivocally sent the message that he must stop supporting Netanyahu’s unconscionable war in Gaza.
I don’t find this argument in anyway convincing, first of all. Biden has been supporting Israel militarily since Golda Meir was prime minister. If you don’t know who she was, when she led, or what she was like as a leader of Israel, let me assure you that Joe Biden thinks you don’t know enough about the history of U.S.-Israel relations to even be offering an opinion. He doesn’t care what you think. The “uncommitted” voters register to him (and to his opponents) as a sign of his vulnerability and political apathy on the part of people who ought to care, headed in to yet another really important presidential election. But I’m confident that although these votes may amp up a media narrative that that old man Joe Biden can’t win — and that might indeed make Biden nervous, or in fact harm him in the general election — they will have zero impact on our military or diplomatic response to Netanyahu. And make no mistake, Netanyahu doesn’t necessarily care what Biden thinks or does anyway. For him, a Trump win is far preferable to a Biden win, and Biden’s machinations in the present moment may not have nearly as much of an impact as those of you voting “uncommitted” seem to think.
But even if you believe, ardently, that Biden can and should stop the war and suffering in Gaza, voting “uncommitted” doesn’t accomplish that goal. It weakens Biden modestly in the general election and weakens the civic power of voting modestly in general, but it doesn’t move the ball forward on Gaza or any other political end. Maybe it makes you feel self-righteous and proud of yourself, but for what? Voting isn’t advocacy. It isn’t art. It isn’t protest. It isn’t speech. It’s voting.
By confusing voting with protest and advocacy and art and speech, you confuse yourself into thinking that you have done something politically important and valuable when you have not. You could have done all kinds of useful political advocacy actions, made moving pieces of art, offered compelling speech and protests, that actually would cause change on the issues you care about, such as Gaza, but you felt proud of your imaginary protest vote and went back to bed instead.
And I empathize — it’s actually really hard, as a caring individual, or even a diplomat or a president, to cause meaningful political change in someone else’s country. But if you wanted to help the people of Gaza, there are some effective political and social actions you can take. You can give money to World Central Kitchen, which is finding ways to feed starving people in Gaza. You can support organizations like Standing Together, Seeds of Peace, and A Land for All, who are working to find sustainable, safe, political solutions that support both Israelis and Palestinians. You can meet with your legislators and ask them for their ideas, and share yours. You can put coherent political pressure on our leaders and Israel’s through protest and political speech and boycotts.
And if you loathe your choices of candidates in this or any election, there are abundant opportunities and desperate needs for you to engage in advocacy around having better choices. Doorknock for ranked choice voting initiatives. Volunteer for candidates you actually love. Run for office yourself. Work on getting money out of politics. Engage in powerful artistic activism. There is so much important work to be done, and voting doesn’t let you off the hook for having done any of it.
So don’t pretend a vote is a protest. By doing so, you communicate to young people that their votes are not votes, that they do not matter as votes, and you also simultaneously communicate that voting is all a concerned citizen has to do or can do to participate in democracy and make change. Part of maintaining a democracy is believing and behaving and insisting on the dream that you as an individual have a civic duty to elect your leaders and have voice in your government, that that is a serious moral and political obligation that every citizen should soberly discharge. Part of maintaining a democracy is believing in government by and for the people, which means you have to participate in it, in a thousand different ways, not just voting. By engaging in a “protest vote,” you participate in the intentional cheapening of our democracy by supporting the idea that votes aren’t a big deal, that yours doesn’t really make a difference, that you might as well skip the whole thing, and that nothing else you do really matters, either. It harms your hope. It harms our culture. It harms our future.