Strangers in Strange Lands are an Electoral Conundrum

Earlier this month, the Biden campaign began a desperate effort to regain the trust of disillusioned Arab-American voters in Michigan. Having thus far failed to straddle an acceptable middle ground and appease both pro-Israel, establishment liberals and pro-Palestine progressives, Biden has isolated the pro-Palestine flank of the party. The intraparty conflict in Michigan is casting a long shadow over Biden's campaign. Without Michigan in his electoral college coalition, Biden's road toward re-election will be markedly steeper.

Biden speaks to UAW workers in Michigan (Credit: AP)

Regardless of what one thinks about the ongoing conflict in Gaza, one must acknowledge that the grand implications of this local squabble over the affairs of a distant nation are somewhat absurd. There is no reason why the fringe opinions of a few thousand Arab-Americans in Dearborn should have such a disproportionate sway over the next President of the United States or the foreign policy of the United States. But they do: due to the strange and outdated electoral college and the way it prioritizes the opinions of certain voters in certain politically divided states, this microscopic population has garnered national and international media attention from the NYT, BBC, and AJ. Michigan is a swing state where its weird, marginal interest groups actually matter. In a vast majority of states, they do not.

This isn't the first time in American history that this has happened. The foreign policy preferences of small groups of voters in swing states have played an exaggerated role in American foreign policy for decades. In the year 2000, Elián González, a Cuban child who was found in a buoy off the coast of Florida, was deported and reunited with his father after a legal battle. However, unfortunately for everyone involved, Elián's case had become a messy, dramatic media circus, involving family drama, international strife, the American Dream, and Fidel Castro. By the time Elián was deported, he had become a household name, especially among Cuban-Americans who were outraged at the federal government's decision to return one of their own back to the Communist island from whence they had come.

An INS agent takes Elián from a relative to deport him to Cuba (Credit: AP)

In the heated environment of the Presidential election, George W. Bush went to bat for Cuban Americans against the decision of the Clinton-Gore administration. In one interview with Wolf Blitzer in early 2000, Bush declared that Elián's father should be required to come to the United States and enjoy its freedoms first before forcing his son to return with him to Cuba. Gore, meanwhile, took the side of public opinion, and he favored the legal process of the administration of which he was a part. Gore lost Florida by just over 300 votes. Gore lost the election by 5 electoral votes. His failure to take the unpopular position is sometimes credited with losing him the election. As President, Bush pursued a harsh, anti-Cuba agenda, vetoing popular, bipartisan attempts to reconcile Cuban-American relations.

Joe Biden, today, finds himself in a remarkably similar situation to that of Al Gore in 2000. Like Gore, Biden is in the mainstream on a geopolitical issue around which there is something close to a bipartisan consensus, but he is being confronted with an outspoken minority in a swing state for whom that international issue is personal. The circumstances may be different, but the systems are the same. Gore took the popular position on a child, and he sabotaged his campaign. If Biden loses the pro-Palestine, Muslim vote in Michigan, he just might lose the nation. Biden may well be on the road to repeating Gore.

I do not believe that American foreign policy should be done at the mercy of unpopular minority groups in swing states. America is the global hegemon, and our foreign policy decisions reverberate across the globe. We are the elephant that every nation is forced to sleep beside. Whether or not we roll over should not be dictated by noisy mice in a few lucky states, yet these mice and their strength are an inevitable consequence of incentive structures built into the electoral college. The fates of Israel, Cuba, Mexico, or Palestine should not be decided by a few voters in a few states. The electoral college favors candidates who appeal not to the general public and popular causes, but to niche policies and interest groups in specific, random states. It favors pork barrel candidates who can deliver on incoherent foreign policy goals despite of broader interests. The world deserves better than a superpower that elects its leaders by such a system, and, as leaders of the free world, we should strive to set a better example.