Uncommitment

Today is the 13th of March, and that makes it, among other things, the day after the Washington State Presidential primary election. Not that it matters; both the Democratic and Republican primaries, to the degree that they were actually contested, were already over on the national level.

But there's always something interesting going on, and yesterday, I came across this sign, stuck in the parkway near a local grocery store:

I don't know when the idea that a vote for an "Uncommitted Delegate" became a sort of vote against continuing Israeli military action in Gaza. And I suspect that if I'm not clear on this, the campaign to re-elect President Biden to another four-year term isn't either.

It's a strange way to conduct politics: the Biden campaign is meant to take away from this that there are voters who are unhappy with the relationship between the United States and Israel, but then what? In the event that the conflict between Israel and Hamas simply drags on, an incoming Trump 2.0 administration is unlikely to request that Israel, dial things back... the Evangelical portion of the Republican/Trumpist base tends to be fairly Zionist and unconcerned with the plight of the Palestinians. So is the threat here that people will withhold their votes in November?

Given the nature of the Electoral College and Washington State politics, one may as well put Washington's 12 Electoral College votes in the "Joe Biden" column right now. This place hasn't been competitive for decades, and isn't likely to become so anytime soon. So there's no real leverage for a small number of ceasefire supporters. (If there were more of them, and they had more resources, their message would be more widespread.

That makes this a signal that has a difficult time carrying any information. Politics tends not to work in the way that many people want it to; policymakers tend to have a level of insulation from all but the most intense levels of direct public opinion. Given this, signals have to be clear and unambiguous in a way that common public channels rarely are.