The Illinois primary Biden protest vote.
The "Uncommitted" movement rolls into the Land of Lincoln.
The turnout last Tuesday in the Illinois primary was a historic low.
It hovered around 20% of the one and a half million registered Dem voters in the state. Democrats are the overwhelming majority of voters.
Democrats hold the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the general assembly. It is one of only seventeen states where Democrats have that trifecta and have veto-proof majorities in the legislature.
So, the voters that did go to the polls on Tuesday can certainly be described as intentional voters.
As I have pointed out in the wake of primaries already held in other states, Illinois does not permit an “uncommitted” vote in the presidential primary as Michigan and Minnesota does.
My guess has been that this is a legacy of the old Democratic Machine which frowned on independence in the voting booth.
Even to run as a write-in requires official permission and a bunch of paperwork intended to discourage it.
Yesterday I was able to see how my precinct and ward voted.
On the ballot was a binding referendum that would have created a “mansion tax” in the city. The reform would have increased the property tax on home sales over a million bucks and reduced the property tax on houses sold for under a million.
Mayor Johnson, who backed the referendum, and his people ran a nearly invisible campaign - very disappointing - and it appears as I write this on Thursday that the measure will go down to defeat by a narrow margin.
A more aggressive campaign might have carried the day for the reform.
My precinct on the other hand in Chicago’s progressive Logan Square voted in favor of the referendum by a huge majority. It got 450 votes in favor and over 70% of those voting.
I compared the number of votes Joe Biden received in my precinct to those who voted for property tax reform. Biden got 331 votes. Either my neighbors left the presidential line blank. A few voted for the other candidates.
Over 26% of the Democrats in my precinct refused to vote for the presumptive nominee and the incumbent president.
I wrote in ceasefire. Others I know wrote in Gaza. Some just left it blank.
My precinct was not alone.
State-wide over 14% of Democratic voters left the line blank or voted for someone else other than Joe Biden.
That’s close to the uncommitted votes in Michigan and Minnesota even without the organized campaign that took place in those states.
By contrast, in the hotly contested 2016 primary, only 12,687 voters (1.8%) declined to select a presidential option, and in 2012, when President Barack Obama ran uncontested, 24,285 (9%) declined.
President Joe Biden received 227,756 votes and another 11.5% opted for less-popular candidates Dean Phillips (4%), Marianne Williamson (4%) or Frank “Frankie” Lozada (2.5%). Including votes for other candidates, at least a quarter of Chicago’s Democratic voters declined to vote for Biden on Tuesday.
The low turnout again suggests that this was an intentional vote and a continuation of the electoral protest of Biden and his support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.