The good news for Democrats is that President Joe Biden managed to get through Super Tuesday without a loss to “uncommitted” or to so-called “spiritual guru” Marianne Williamson. The bad news is that his one loss in the campaign primary season was even more embarrassing by comparison.
In American Samoa, Biden managed to get beaten by entrepreneur and really, really, really long-shot contender Jason Palmer by 11 votes.
According to the U.K. Daily Mail, Palmer — whose candidacy makes Williamson look like a Eugene McCarthy-esque giant-killer — managed to win four Democratic delegates from the Pacific island territory after he took the caucuses there. His website crashed shortly afterward, probably from Americans asking themselves (as you doubtlessly are), “Wait, who?”
According to a news release Friday from his campaign bearing the dateline of Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, Palmer has only qualified for the ballot in 16 states and territories. American Samoa isn’t a state, which means it doesn’t have Electoral College votes — but it does send delegates to the Democratic convention.
Biden will still win at least two — and possibly three — of the territory’s six delegates, according to reports from the Daily Mail and The Hill.
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So, what got Palmer attention at the caucuses? Well, consider the fact that he did “multiple virtual town halls” with American Samoa voters.
Washington D.C. is long overdue for a president who will be an advocate for American Samoa. The Meet & Greet in Malaeimi was a perfect way to learn more about what locals need the most. As a Democratic Candidate on the ballot, I’m here for the fight #AmericanSamoa #JasonPalmer pic.twitter.com/uDcZBTXG2r
— Jason Palmer (@educationpalmer) March 4, 2024
Consider, too, that American Samoa has never been a particularly strong territory for Biden, with just single-digit support on the island in 2020. (Billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg won the territory back then.)
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Of course, Biden has little to worry about from Palmer, a candidate who included this line in his March 1 media release: “In groundbreaking news this week, Palmer became the first candidate to release a talking AI-powered version of himself.”
Perhaps this is a strategy Biden can copy. Even Google Gemini, the AI bot that’s busy churning out accidental pictures of black female Founding Fathers, couldn’t do much worse than the president has been doing.
The worst Super Tuesday news for Democrats, though, were the “uncommitted” votes that shadowed Biden’s results. After a whopping six-digit number of ballots were cast for “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Feb. 27 primary, several states that allowed some form of uncommitted vote on Tuesday saw huge swaths of voters show how shaky Biden’s support is in his own party.
Minnesota, for instance, has a large Muslim and progressive population centered around the Minneapolis-St. Paul area that’s ready, more than willing and able to use their votes to send Biden a message about supporting Israel in its war against the terrorist killers of Hamas. Almost 19 percent voted “uncommitted,” according to Axios.
North Carolina was also a surprising double-digit uncommitted result, with 12.7 percent of Democrats voting “no preference.”
Five other states allowed some form of uncommitted on Super Tuesday. Besides Minnesota’s high and a low in Iowa, which recorded only 3.9 percent uncommitted Democrats, it was the choice of anywhere between 6.0 percent of Democratic voters in Alabama to 9.4 percent in Massachusetts, according to Axios.
While dropping such a huge percentage of the uncommitted vote isn’t as embarrassing as losing to AI chatbot dude, it’s more problematic.
You see, Palmer is going to go into some random Wikipedia entry and be bar trivia one day, but he’s basically the proud beneficiary of political arcana and generalized apathy toward a flailing incumbent. Maybe he can produce an AI-powered version of the Democratic National Convention where his bid for the nomination matters, but other than that, this is his shining moment.
The huge number of “uncommitted” Democrats, however, underscores Biden’s vulnerability. Only four of the states that allow an “uncommitted” vote (or the equivalent) have the slightest chance of swinging either way, and for the most part they’re considered pretty safe — Iowa and North Carolina in the Republican column, Colorado and Minnesota in the Democratic.
However, according to Axios, Colorado and Minnesota saw 8.1 and 18.9 percent of Democrats, respectively, telling Joe Biden to go to the fringe and support a murderous terrorist group against a key U.S. ally or he doesn’t get their vote. In a general election, those kinds of numbers can turn a state that leans Democratic into a potential toss-up, and toss-ups like Michigan (where “uncommitted” drew 13 percent of Democratic votes) into Republican victories.
Long after Jason Palmer is a distant memory to anyone not in the Palmer family, that’s going to be a persistent worry for team Biden. The president is already down against former President Donald Trump in the polls. The last thing his campaign needs is for the party’s most reliable progressive voters to stay home or vote third party. If American Samoa wasn’t the canary in the coal mine, then the “uncommitted” support should be.
Considering the fact that both Biden and Trump became near-certain locks for their parties’ nominations with Super Tuesday, the attacks from Trump are only going to get more brutal from here. Without his own party being willing to turn out for him, this could get very ugly for the incumbent very quickly.
