On Tuesday in the Michigan primary we had a protest vote that was nominally about forcing President Biden either to demand or actually force a permanent ceasefire in the ongoing fighting in the Gaza Strip. I’ve written a lot about the pros and cons of this both on the ground in Israel-Palestine and within U.S. domestic politics. That dynamic however shouldn’t obscure a greater and more immediate reality, which is that even on its own terms, the current Israeli operation in Gaza has largely reached a point of diminishing returns. It is Israel which desperately needs the U.S. to put an end to it.

This isn’t to say that there are not still legitimate military goals Israel has. The Hamas leadership is still holed up in Rafah. The hostages, imprisoned for four months, are still held captive there. Hamas as a military force is clobbered but not yet broken. But as is always the case, military action is a tool to accomplish political ends. Military action which makes sense on its own terms can be revealed as folly when viewed through a broader and more consequential political prism. Tom Friedman covered a lot of this in his most recent column from a couple days ago.

Here’s a good HuffPost piece from TPM alum Igor Bobic. They went to what we might call “IVF Sad” Republicans and asked them about passing a federal law to protect IVF from extremists like those on the Alabama Supreme Court. “IVF Sad” Republicans are Republicans who are discomfited by having to ban IVF or at least don’t want to get caught supporting banning IVF but also have to admit that they agree with the judge who banned it.

Marco Rubio, a senator who is an emerging leader in the movement says: “Unfortunately, you have to create multiple embryos [with IVF], and some of those are not used, then you’re now in a quandary.”

This doesn’t significantly change the picture from what I noted before. But something I at least hadn’t figured on is showing up in the numbers. There’s a significant difference between the breakdown of the primary day and the early/mail vote. The gist is that the primary day vote is significantly better for “uncommitted” and the early/mail vote better for Biden. The net effect of this is that Biden seems to be adding to his margins now since the primary day vote was in most cases getting counted first. So for instance, Dearborn (which is the heart of the state’s Arab-American community) had been like 75% for uncommitted. But now it’s at roughly 55% to 41% as the early votes get counted.

The actual vote totals and percentages are coming into focus. So there’s a lot of pivoting to what they mean. As of this moment President Biden has about 80% of the vote and uncommitted has 14%. That’s been pretty consistent for a while. But there are major differences by county and towns and cities here. So the results might be bouncier than normal as more votes come in. I noted one numbers guy I follow closely who pointed to 17% as a threshold based on historical comparisons for “uncommitted.” As the results have come in there’s been a lot of shifting among “uncommitted” supporters from percentages to raw vote totals. The raw numbers are high. But overall turnout is really high too. So you can kind of play this either way you want. Raw votes go up with turnout. That’s elementary. Percentages are the key metric. Or you can say that raw votes matter since raw votes will be the margin in the general. The truth is that you simply can’t make linear comparisons like that.

8:37 p.m.: We’re still seeing just the first results out of Michigan. Too early to draw any real conclusions. But some benchmarks are helpful. In 2012, 2016 and 2020, “uncommitted” got around 20,000 votes. In 2012 that was 11% of the votes. That’s a helpful benchmark since that was the last time an incumbent Democratic President was on the ballot.

One of the numbers crunchers I follow points to 17% for uncommitted as a threshold below which you could say the Gaza/uncommitted push has failed vs over that and it has some success. The best hints I’m seeing have it right about there and maybe a point or two higher. So modest success but some success. But again, that’s tentative so far. It’s difficult to model this since there aren’t obvious baselines from earlier elections.

We’ll know more soon.

One TPM Reader sent me this new article on Rep. Ro Khanna jumping into the complex and perilous situation for Democrats in Michigan. The primary there is this week. But this is really about the general election. The article is fuzzy on a number of points but the gist is that Khanna seems to have taken on the role of mediator between disaffected groups in Michigan and the Biden White House. And after a series of meetings in the state Khanna says that absent a dramatic change of policy — by which he means a permanent ceasefire — Biden cannot win Michigan. That’s the gist of the article.

A few things come to mind to me about this article and this message.