Gaza Is A Political Disaster For Biden
Some observers say the war isn’t that big a deal in the 2024 campaign. Here’s why they’re wrong.
Editor’s note: This piece is an extended version of my article that appeared in The Nation this morning, with additional polling analysis and historical comparisons. You can read The Nation’s shorter version of the piece at the link here.
The 2024 election continues to contradict itself as the primaries come to a close. On the one hand, there is the presidential race between former president Donald Trump and current president Joe Biden. Here, the polls seem to point towards nothing less than a Republican revolution. For the past eight months, Trump has led continuously in national polling and in the decisive swing states—something that, if it holds, will give him an easy victory of more than 300 electoral votes and make him the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.
But at the same time, Democratic candidates for Senate have been holding solid leads in the exact same states, putting them on a path for a historic repudiation of the Republican Party in what was supposed to be an abysmal year.
So, with less than six months before election day, the predominant question of the campaign has become this: why is Biden so uniquely unpopular compared to his party?
For many on the left, the answer is simple: Gaza. Among all of the members of his party, the president stands alone in the degree of his complicity in Israel’s morally indefensible and increasingly unpopular campaign. He has refused to meaningfully distance himself from the conflict as the death toll has mounted to unimaginable highs and horrific accounts of Israeli abuse lead daily headlines. As the story goes, this has caused his support among the core Democratic constituencies of youth and nonwhite voters to plummet far below both historic norms and the numbers managed by 2024’s downballot Democrats, allowing Trump to come to a lead.
It all adds yet another degree of urgency to something people already wanted: an end to the war. Stop Netanyahu, it is said, and you will save not only countless lives, but also a presidency—and, by extension, American democracy itself.
Some, however, have pushed back against this interpretation of the election. Pointing at issue polling showing that young voters and nonwhites place higher priority on domestic issues than Israel, they argue that the idea that the Democratic base is abandoning Biden over his Gaza policies is more conjecture than proven fact. To them, the focus on the issue as the source of the president’s woes is yet another example of an insular, over-educated leftist media clique mistaking the opinions of their friends for that of the country at large. To the extent that they acknowledge the war impacting the election at all, they say that Biden’s chosen course was the best one, politically speaking.
Which of these views is the most correct? It depends on the question you’re asking. If you’re trying to determine how much the broad American public cares about the specifics of Biden’s Israel policy, you’ll probably side with the second camp. It’s undeniable that Israel policy doesn’t carry the same electoral weight as, say, immigration or the economy. That’s not too surprising. Americans only rarely place any foreign policy issues at the top of their agendas, and when they do, they almost always directly involve US troops.
Yet the larger claim from the “leftists are out of touch” camp—that Gaza has had a minimal effect on the election—could not be more wrong. This may seem counterintuitive—how can an issue be a relatively minor concern for most people but still matter so much for November? To understand why, you need to relearn everything this set has told you about Biden’s unpopularity.
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