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Voters in the midwestern U.S. state of Michigan are casting their ballots Tuesday in Democratic and Republican presidential primaries, with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump widely expected to win.
The margins of those victories will be closely watched as signs of support for the two candidates in the key state, ahead of their likely rematch of the 2020 presidential election won by Biden.
Trump won the political battleground state in the 2016 national election in his successful run for the presidency, but Biden defeated him there in 2020, helping him turn back Trump's reelection effort.
Michigan is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, and opposition to Biden's support for Israel's war in Gaza against Hamas militants has led some Democrats to call for voters to choose "uncommitted" on Tuesday instead of casting a vote for Biden.
Supporters of the effort for "uncommitted" ballots say they are hoping for 10,000 such votes. Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Biden supporter, told NBC News she thinks it is possible the uncommitted vote total will reach that figure.
"I think there will be a sizable number of votes for uncommitted," she said. "I think that it is every person's right to make their statement about what's important to them."
"And we know that the Arab community, the Palestinian community, the Muslim community, those are not all one and the same," Whitmer said. "There's a lot of pain. There's a lot of pain in our Jewish community, too. So, people have the right to make their voices heard."
"At the end of the day, I am advocating that people cast an affirmative vote for Joe Biden, because anything other than that makes it more likely we see a second Trump term and that's bad for all the communities," she said.
Trump has won all four contested states so far in the battle for the Republican nomination, and polls in Michigan show him with a commanding lead there as well.
But his lone remaining major challenger, Nikki Haley, Trump's one-time United Nations ambassador and a former South Carolina governor, has remained in the race. She has argued that American voters do not want a Biden-Trump rematch in the November election and that if it occurs, Trump would lose a second time to Biden.
Haley has said she will fight on until at least the Super Tuesday contests on March 5 that involve 15 states, two territories and one-third of the overall delegates at stake in the Republican race.
Republicans will formally name their presidential candidate during a national convention in July. Democrats will follow with their convention in August.
Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
The Voice of America provides news and information in more than 40 languages to an estimated weekly audience of over 326 million people. Stories with the VOA News byline are the work of multiple VOA journalists and may contain information from wire service reports.