In the days leading up to yesterday’s Democratic primary in Michigan, President Joe Biden’s White House and reelection campaign were reportedly “freaking out” about the grassroots push to protest his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict by getting voters to check “uncommitted” on the ballot. With the votes now cast and tallied up, it’s easy to see why.

“Uncommitted” came second in the Michigan primary with 13 percent of the vote, making up just shy of 101,000 individual votes, in a stunning rebuke of an incumbent president by the voters meant to be his most committed supporters. The three-week-old campaign cleared its own self-set benchmark of ten thousand votes in a matter of hours.

Critics, not unfairly, charged the target had been set artificially low to exceed expectations. Yet by the end of the night, the final total was not just ten times this number. It was both a higher percentage and roughly five times the raw total that “uncommitted” drew against Barack Obama in the state’s 2012 primary. That was a year in which Obama’s reelection chances were considered perilous, owing to the then president’s sagging approval rating — one that was nonetheless still seven points higher than Biden’s current, historically low approval.