Progressives divided about ‘cease-fire’ write-in to protest Biden in New Hampshire primary
Campaign signs on Jan. 19, 2024 asking voters to write in President Joe Biden in Tuesday’s primary. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
By Jacob Kornbluh January 20, 2024
President Joe Biden’s steadfast support of Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza may face an electoral test on Tuesday. A grassroots campaign to write in the word “cease-fire” on the ballot in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary has gained traction over the weekend.
The progressive organizers of the campaign, called “Vote Ceasefire,” said they are encouraging voters to write in “cease-fire” on their ballots to “draw attention to the urgent need to stop the violence in Palestine and the Middle East.”
Biden’s name is not on the ballot due to a change in Democratic National Committee rules about the primary calendar. (The national party made South Carolina the first primary of 2024, replacing Iowa and New Hampshire as the first contest in this year’s selection process. Candidates who appear on the New Hampshire ballot will not be eligible to accrue delegates to the national convention.)
New 2024 candidate dropped pic.twitter.com/me7GhAnoSu
Andru Volinsky, a Jewish attorney who served as counsel for the Bernie Sanders campaign in New Hampshire in 2016, told The Nation his write-in vote “is about getting a message to Biden about the urgent need for a cease-fire in Gaza.” Volinsky narrowly lost in the 2020 Democratic gubernatorial primary. He first raised the idea of a write-in campaign in a letter to the editor of a local publication.
A recent Suffolk University poll of 1,000 likely voters in New Hampshire showed that 32% of Democrats want the U.S. to push for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
Other progressives have cautioned against this method of humiliating the president on the matter. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, one of 66 congressional Democrats who have called for a cease-fire, told reporters on Saturday that weakening the president “as we are going to go up against Donald Trump isn’t going to bring peace in the Middle East. It’s not going to help stop wars.”
Khanna campaigned in New Hampshire for a Biden write-in campaign, an effort launched by Biden supporters to keep the incumbent president from losing the primary. “If you’re more progressive than the president, like I am, there’ll be plenty of opportunities to make that case to him,” Khanna said. “But the way to do it is not to have him be weakened in a rematch with Donald Trump.”
A new survey by the Arab American Institute of 1,000 likely American voters indicated that politicians’ responses to the war in Gaza, which has caused more than 24,000 Palestinian deaths, according to the Palestinian health officials, could influence voters in the 2024 elections. A recent poll with a larger sample of 1,637 voters, commissioned for the Democratic Majority for Israel, showed that 68% wouldn’t change their vote for Biden because of the way he is handling the war.
Trump, the frontrunner in the Republican primary, urged Democrats to support Rep. Dean Phillips, Biden’s rival who has failed to gain media attention in his bid to challenge the president, to “send a signal.”
On Monday, the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC sent a letter to the New Hampshire secretary of state saying that tallying “cease-fire” write-in votes is inconsistent with provisions of the state’s election law. DMFI said it would undermine the process for those writing in names of real candidates.
This post was updated.
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