In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won Wisconsin’s electoral votes by a margin barely visible to the naked eye. In the small but crucial swing state, Biden received 1,630,866 votes to the 1,610,184 cast for Donald Trump. Four years earlier, Trump won by a nearly identical margin — 1,405,284 votes to the 1,382,536 for Hillary Clinton.

So when the campaign started for voters in the Badger State to register their outrage at Biden’s role in the genocide in Gaza by casting their Democratic primary votes for “uninstructed” — Wisconsin’s equivalent of what other states are calling “uncommitted” — the organizers were hoping for 23,000 votes. That would have been a couple of thousand more than the 20,682 votes Biden won by in 2020 and a few hundred more than the 22,748 that Trump won by in 2016. They calculated that this would be enough to send a loud and clear message that Biden is playing with fire by continuing to support a deeply unpopular policy of providing money, weapons, and diplomatic cover for the Israeli military as the corpses of Palestinian civilians pile up in Gaza.

They didn’t get 23,000 votes. They got 48,162. Simultaneously, uncommitted got an even higher percentage of the vote in solid blue Rhode Island — remarkable since there was very little organized effort there to campaign for that outcome. And uncommitted and similar campaigns are currently underway in a number of other states.