President Joe Biden’s State of the Union remarks on Gaza weren’t enough to persuade some of his former supporters in Georgia to end their protest vote campaign against him ahead of Tuesday’s Democratic primary.
Interfaith organizers launched their “Leave It Blank” initiative earlier this week. They’re asking Democratic primary voters who want a permanent stop to the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza to leave their ballots blank on Tuesday instead of voting for Biden. Their goal is to send a message to the president that his ongoing support for Israel’s military campaign could cost him reelection in November.
Among the biggest supporters of the plan are local Black adherents to the Islamic faith, who say they feel betrayed by a candidate they helped propel into office four years ago.
Campaign organizer Edward Ahmed Mitchell said Biden’s State of the Union remarks in support of a six-week temporary ceasefire in Gaza and his promise to send ships carrying humanitarian aid to the embattled Palestinian territory didn’t go far enough for him and his interfaith allies.
The Morehouse graduate also serves as a board member for CAIR Action, the lobbying arm for the Council on American Islamic Relations.
“He still refuses to use American leverage to secure an immediate and permanent ceasefire,” Mitchell said Friday morning of Biden. “We need to keep the pressure up through the Leave It Blank campaign to ensure that the actual policy changes.”
The 37-year-old Mitchell is among several local Muslim faith leaders working in support of Leave It Blank.
Since Tuesday, an estimated 300 interfaith activists have been making phone calls, passing out flyers and doing door-to-door canvassing across Georgia to spread their message and rally supporters to their cause.
Mitchell said Leave It Blank isn’t advising Georgians not to vote for Biden in November — at least not yet. But the president’s position on Gaza, he said, has completely turned off many Muslims in Georgia as well as young, progressive, and Black voters — all key voting blocs that Biden needs to win reelection.
He noted that Biden defeated Trump in Georgia four years ago by a razor-thin margin of more than 11,000 votes.
“He is at risk of losing way more than 11,000 votes if he does not change course,” Mitchell said of Biden during a Tuesday morning press conference inside the Gold Dome in Atlanta.
The Gaza protest vote’s impact
Leave It Blank is a continuation of the Gaza protest vote launched in Michigan last month ahead of the Midwest state’s Feb. 27 Democratic primary. More than 100,000 people voted “uncommitted,” in Michigan as a result.
Thousands more voted “uncommitted” or “no preference” in Super Tuesday primaries across the nation, though Biden still won all but one primary race by huge margins, according to NBC News. Biden’s smallest margin of victory on Super Tuesday was 51 percentage points in Minnesota, where more than 46,000 people voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary.
When combined with a community of interfaith allies in Georgia, the state’s Muslim population could help swing an election. CAIR estimates there are 150,000 Muslims living in Georgia. In 2016, there were 85 mosques across the state. That number has grown since then, Mitchell said, especially in metro Atlanta.
Many hoped Biden would call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza on Thursday ahead of a scheduled campaign stop in Georgia on Saturday. His remarks echoed ones made by Vice President Kamala Harris over the weekend during a visit to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to help marchers there mark the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
The timing and location of the speech delivered by the first Black woman to serve as vice president seemed to acknowledge the high level of support Gaza’s civilians have among Black Americans.
Hamas leaders have rejected the temporary ceasefire terms in favor of demanding a permanent ceasefire and an end to Israel’s Gaza invasion.
Humanitarian crisis
Both Mitchell and local Imam Nadim Ali oppose the Israel-Hamas war for humanitarian reasons.
Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel claimed the lives of 1,200 Israelis and resulted in Hamas taking an additional 240 people hostage, actions that Mitchell and Ali have condemned.
Since then, Israel’s military has used bombs and other weapons purchased with U.S. military aid funds to kill more than 30,000 people in Gaza, most of whom were civilian women and children, according to the United Nations.
Ali is the 68-year-old head of the West End’s Community Masjid of Atlanta and one of many Black people who converted from Christianity amid the rise of the Nation of Islam during and following the Civil Rights Movement.
He and others from his generation have rejected some of the “heterodoxical” tenets of the Nation of Islam in favor of a more mainstream practice of the faith, similar to Malcolm X’s racial and spiritual awakening during the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964.
Ali voted for Biden in 2020, but he and other Black folks don’t support using tax dollars to finance what many have called a “genocide” in Gaza. Ali said he particularly objects to Biden sending millions in military aid to Israel while Black Georgians who voted for him are struggling to pay for groceries and housing.
“That money could be used over here,” he said.
He’s one of the estimated 1,000 Black clergy members who signed a letter to Biden in November calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, a move that created a divide between some of the most prominent local Black and Jewish faith leaders.
He acknowledged that Blacks, Jews and Muslims have worked together to advance civil rights for everyone, but said many Black Americans also find common cause with the plight of Palestinians in Gaza due to their shared histories of endured oppression and white supremacy.
“African Americans should support the effort putting pressure on this government to put pressure on the Israeli government to act within the norms of human rights and international law,” Ali told Capital B Atlanta on Tuesday.
What About Trump?
Ali and others aren’t persuaded by arguments that Trump will be worse for the Palestinian cause if he’s reelected in November.
The former president told Fox News on Tuesday that Israel needed to “finish the problem” in Gaza, suggesting he’d be even more hard line on the issue than Biden has been.
Mitchell recalled speaking out against Trump’s Muslim ban during the last president’s time in office.
Ali said Democrats who warn of Trump becoming a dictator if he’s reelected should stop using Trump as “the boogeyman.”
“Leaving it blank is sending a message that we don’t have to settle for the lesser of two evils,” Ali said.
