A protest movement in Georgia – a swing state that President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020 – is seeking to apply pressure to the incumbent over his support of Israel before the 12 March Democratic primary election.
On Monday, a group of multifaith and multiracial groups called the Listen to Georgia Coalition launched the Leave It Blank campaign, which urges voters to submit a blank ballot next Tuesday. The push follows a similar grassroots effort – Listen to Michigan – in which more than 100,000 voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” last month.
Biden’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza, where more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed over the past five months, has been a major point of contention for Democratic voters. A majority of Democrats favor a presidential candidate who doesn’t support military assistance for Israel, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Made up of some 300 people from groups including the Georgia Muslim Action Committee, Jewish Voice for Peace Action and Arab Americans 4Ward, the Listen to Georgia Coalition highlights the growing discontent among voters who helped Biden win the state by 11,800 votes in 2020. Some 57,000 Arab Americans live in Georgia, and coalition participants hope their effort garners 1,200 blank ballots, equivalent to the votes needed for a 10% margin of victory for Biden.
At a press conference in the Georgia statehouse on Tuesday, the group said it hoped the effort would serve as a wake-up call for the Democratic party and Biden, who it said is at risk of losing the 2024 presidential election if he does not demand a ceasefire in Gaza.
“The people of Georgia do not want our tax dollars spent overseas funding a genocide,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and board member of Cair Action – a new political arm of the Council on American-Islamic Relations – said at the conference. “We want our tax dollars spent here at home, helping people across our state.”
Georgia organizers worked closely with the Listen to Michigan founders to ensure similar messaging between the campaigns and to learn effective outreach strategies. Michigan activists emphasized the need for phone banking, which Jewish Voice for Peace Action and Muslim American groups began in Georgia this week. The group also plans to spread the word through social media.
A similar effort launched in Minnesota last month, where about 19% of voters cast an uncommitted ballot on Tuesday. Washington, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Colorado activists also formed protest vote campaigns, and the nation’s largest socialist group, the Democratic Socialists of America, recently endorsed the national movement.
Ghada Elnajjar, a Palestinian American organizer and coalition member, campaigned for Biden in the 2020 election, but said during the conference that she felt “betrayed by [the president’s] policies on Gaza”.
More than 75 members of Elnajjar’s family have been killed since October, she said, and many of her relatives are now homeless after their houses were destroyed. “To me, this is painful and deeply personal and I cannot in good conscience support a president who will willfully and repeatedly supply bombs to Israel that are daily killing my relatives and innocent others,” she said.
But Elnajjar and other coalition members are adamant that they don’t support Donald Trump’s candidacy. If elected in the fall, the former president has vowed to reinstate his first-term travel ban on several Muslim countries and to prohibit the entry of refugees from Gaza.
Trump told Fox on Tuesday that Israel has to “finish the problem” in Gaza. He has otherwise said little about the war, but touted that “no president has done more for Israel” than him. During his presidency, he was particularly close to Benjamin Netanyahu, and threw US support behind much of Israel’s wishlist, from defunding the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees to moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.
“We are terrified of another Trump presidency and what it could do to all of our communities,” said Clara Green, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace Action. “But when Democrats carry out the very same policies that have resulted in over 30,000 dead Gazans, and when they refuse to listen to the overwhelming majority of the American public who want an immediate and lasting ceasefire, we have no choice but to disrupt the very system that so many of us helped to build.”
When a reporter at the Tuesday conference asked whether this form of protest could negatively affect Biden during the general election in November, Mitchell from Cair Action said: “If Democratic leaders are concerned about what impact this might have on President Biden’s chance in 2024, they should tell him that.”
Biden’s senior advisers met with Muslim and Arab American leaders in a hotel in Dearborn, Michigan, last month, during which the deputy national security adviser, Jon Finer, admitted to “missteps in the course of responding to this crisis since October 7”. Some meeting attendees said the officials were apologetic and receptive to their concerns. And last weekend, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, issued a sharp rebuke of Israel over the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, saying: “People in Gaza are starving … The Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid. No excuses.”
Listen to Georgia participants say their campaign will discuss future steps closer to the general election.
For Elnajjar, it’s not too late for Biden to change his handling of the war in Gaza and to win the support of Georgia voters. She hopes that the effort will push him to call for a ceasefire and the disbursement of aid in Gaza.
“Michigan set the way forward,” Elnajjar said, “and all the attention is on us right now.”
