🚨Yes, Biden needs to worry about Michigan🚨

Republicans smell blood. Why? A new poll looks bad and polls here have typically *understated* Trump's support.

The removal of MAGA clown Kristina Karamo as Michigan Republican Party Chair could be seen as another example of the GOP reaping the consequences of elevating the depraved souls inspired by Donald Trump. It seems like a humorous example of Republicans in disarray — especially compared to the removal of the GOP’s Florida chair, which involves serious rape allegations, as stories involving Florida Republicans now often do.

Karamo’s only qualification for the job was her contempt for democracy. She demonstrated this with her willingness to use her position as a poll watcher in Detroit during the last presidential election to spread Trump’s Big Lie. She assumed the position of chair after she lost her bid to become Secretary of State by 14% — a margin so ridiculously large that almost no one noticed when she refused to concede, much as she as refused to concede the loss of her gig as state chair.

Calling her leadership as chair floundering would be insult to the word “floundering.” The party is “on the brink of bankruptcy” and teetering into the bumbling illegality you’d expect from someone who wanted to throw out the votes of 2.5 million of her neighbors.

But I’d like to suggest something else is going on.

The business Republicans of Michigan — typified by the man who poisoned Flint himself, Rick Snyder — smell blood. They didn’t just recognize that removing a Black woman from power would upset few in a party that exists to perpetuate white male power. They also see a chance to reverse the losses that cost the party control of Michigan’s House, Senate and governorship for the first time since 1984.

A new poll from the Detroit News finds Joe Biden trailing Trump by 8% in a head-to-head matchup.

There are reasons to question this poll beyond the lack of crosstabs. You could just take it as a hint that voters in general just don’t want a Trump/Biden matchup in 2024 and expect Biden to somehow cleanly cede the nomination to a magical someone who wouldn’t divide the party, a person who simply does not exist.

Evidence for that case includes the same poll showing Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer leading Trump. You could argue, “When reality sinks in voters won’t pick the traitor who brought us to the brink of murdering our neighbors for a few squares of toilet paper?” There’s no doubt most voters don’t really tune into presidential elections, even if said election will decide the fate of the Republic, until Labor Day.

But Trump’s lead is beyond the margin of error and even bigger when third-party candidates are thrown in. And I’d also remind you that polls in general have greatly underestimated Trump’s support here. Biden was leading by nearly 8% in the polls before the 2020 election. He won by less than 3%.

Why is Biden struggling here?

Some of it is the same as everywhere. We may have the best job market in modern history. Inflation is clearly receding. Yet people don’t like rising prices, even if wages are rising faster. Compound that with the right-wing media borg that has effectively withered the popularity of any new Democratic president since LBJ (though Biden led the party through the least bad midterm of any first termer in generations).

But there could be something unique going on in my state, where Trump became the first Republican to win Michigan in a generation when he carried the state by just over 10,000 votes in 2016.

A new Quinnipiac poll of Pennsylvania shows the president up by 3%, similar to his margin of victory in Keystone state in 2020.

So why is he running almost 11% behind that in a state known for Hailing the Victors, not losers like Donald Trump?

There’s an argument, which I mostly buy, that Joe Biden is the best president Michigan could ever hope for. He became the first Commander-in-Chief to walk a picket line in the runup to the United Auto Workers scoring a historic contract. His NRLB has helped bring workers rights back from the dead. The Inflation Reduction Act has brought billions to the state to finance clean energy and good union jobs. And he has done more to fix the damn roads here than any recent president, possibly since Eisenhower.

But there’s the unique problem to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in response the atrocities of October 7th.

From The Conversation:

In the 2020 presidential election, for instance, Biden won the state of Michigan by a total of 154,000 votes. The state is home to overlapping groups of more than 200,000 registered voters who are Muslim and 300,000 who claim ancestry from the Middle East and North Africa.

Biden’s margin of victory here in 2020 was just over 150,000 votes.

Caution: You’re about to experience some Olympic-qualifying hemming and hawing that will likely satisfy no one.

As an American Jew who despises the Netanyahu coalition and the war crimes that I believe have been committed in Gaza, I understand and respect any effort to try to get the United States to stop the carnage we’re enabling. I still reject any willingness to throw the election Trump — who will unleash Netanyahu even more (if possible), who will immediately reinstate his Muslim ban, and who will use arcane immigration laws to escalate the persecution of anyone with brown skin. But I get why those who are watching their civilian family and friends be slaughtered would consider any measure to reject a government that has supported what Netanyahu’s coalition has done (without coming close in any way to their stated objective of destroying Hamas).

I also get how powerful the unqualified support of Israel is among America’s hegemony, from the far evangelical right (who see the Jewish state as the path to heaven at the expense of nearly all non-Christian souls) to liberal American Jews, who were raised to sanctify the state as the one good thing to come out of the Holocaust.

This may simply be a Gordian Knot that makes this state unwinnable. I hope not.

I hope the Biden comes up with a policy that breaks the DC consensus, prevents a larger war, and ends the bloodshed in favor of some actual peace process of sort that Netanyahu has spent his life destroying. Given that this is unlikely, I hope Biden supporters get that telling people they aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on in the Middle East isn’t a strategy at all. You may think it’s “complicated.” But let me assure you that to those with loved ones in Gaza, it’s really isn’t. Telling people they deserve to end up in camps because they’re making the sort of unwavering stand you might also make if you were in a similar situation is just shitty. Don’t do that.

I think we have to be resigned that this going to be a persistent challenge for Biden into November. And there will likely be no hedge that won’t just irritate the wound.

Instead, the president and Democrats need to focus on the wide majority of Michiganders who support democracy and abortion rights. Proposal 2, which ended partisan gerrymandering, won by a staggering 32% in 2018. Proposal 3, which enshrined Roe v. Wade in our state constitution, won by 13% in 2022.

If Trump gets elected, he’ll be able to replace both Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito with younger MAGA justices that will entomb Dobbs or worse into our reality, ensuring Roe v. Wade will never be restored in our lifetime. That would also likely free up the MAGA majority to end independent redistricting commissions like the one established by Proposal 2 to bring the worst kind of gerrymandering back. And if Trump got the chance to replace any of the liberal Justices or John Roberts, we’d certainly have a national abortion ban for the rest of our lives.

Ideally, the wide chasm between Biden and Trump on these issues would be enough to win the state. But I think a clearer agenda that sets the stakes of the agenda is needed.

Given the popularity of abortion rights — which is yet to lose on a ballot — even in the reddest of states, including Ohio, Kentucky and Kansas, Biden needs to make this election not just about preserving democracy but restoring freedoms.

Backing the expansion of the Supreme Court now when there’s some hope of a Senate majority that could make it happen is the clearest way to put the stakes of the election front in center for voters in Michigan and the nation. If this election is going to be decided by single issue voters, let that issue be freedom itself.