How Much Will Gaza Affect Joe Biden’s Re-election Chances?
Dire warnings as the Democrats divide—but the polls tell a different story.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN FACES two major problems: the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and his consistently weak poll numbers against Donald Trump. Critics of Biden’s approach to the Gaza war not only denounce his words and policies, but also claim it will cost him re-election. Biden is “risking re-election for Bibi,” warned liberal journalist Mehdi Hasan, arguing that Biden has a “strong domestic record” but is “throwing it all away” by supporting Israel.
Biden’s political problem is not in the center, it’s on the left because of Gaza, reports Jonathan Martin in Politico.
“Unless there is a pretty dramatic course correction at home and abroad soon,” David Austin Walsh, a progressive academic, wrote on May 3, “Joe Biden will lose the election.” Change tack in Gaza, goes the logic, and re-election may be within reach.
These arguments all assume that Biden’s electoral weakness is related to his Middle East policy. But that doesn’t fit the evidence. The Israel-Hamas war doesn’t appear to be driving voters away from Biden in significant numbers, and most of the people criticizing Biden from the left for his support of Israel don’t appear to be his voters anyway.
There are two questions mixed up in here. First: What is the right thing to do? Second: What impact will Gaza have on Biden’s chances of winning in November?
The first question is the most important, but also the most complicated. Plenty of informed, well-meaning, reasonable people disagree about the answer. The second question attracts much less rigorous discussion, and informs answers to the first—so let’s dig into it, looking at the polling data.
IN A SIMPLE BINARY—is Gaza a political problem for Biden?—the answer is yes. About 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the conflict. Issues that unite a party make for good campaign themes, issues that divide the party do not—and Gaza divides Democrats.
Persistent news coverage of mass death and suffering, along with scenes of protesters clashing with each other and police, create a sense that things are spinning out of control, which typically hurts the incumbent. That may be more of a factor in 2024 than usual, since a central part of Republicans’ campaign strategy is trying to paint Trump’s authoritarian plans as necessary to tame “Biden’s” chaos (chaos at the borders, chaos in American cities, chaos lurking behind every corner, and yes, chaos in the Middle East).
However, while Gaza is a negative issue for Biden, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an electoral liability.
A May 5 poll from ABC/Ipsos found voters ranked “the Israel-Hamas war” last in importance out of ten issues, well behind the economy, crime, protecting democracy, immigration, abortion, and more.
The president’s approval rating tells a similar story. According to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregation, Biden’s approval on October 6, 2023 was 39.1 percent. On October 14, a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel but before Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Biden’s approval rating was 39.4 percent. On May 3 this year, after more than six months of war, Biden’s approval rating was 39.1 percent.
Since the November 2022 midterm elections, Biden’s approval rating has stayed within a narrow band of about four points, with no apparent change in response to the Gaza war.
But approval rating is a broad measure, and smooths over subgroup differences. Americans’ support for Israel correlates with age, so it’s frequently assumed that Biden’s Israel policy is hurting him with young voters. After all, the anti-Israel protests that grabbed national attention are on college campuses.
The claim that Biden’s Gaza policy caused young Americans to turn on him doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. For example, the July 2022 New York Times/Siena poll found that, among 18–29-year-olds, 19 percent approved of Biden, while 69 percent disapproved; 32 percent strongly disapproved while only 1 percent strongly approved. The latest Times/Siena poll, from April 2024, found that 28 percent of 18–29-year-olds approve of Biden and 67 percent disapprove; strong disapproval had climbed to 40 percent, but strong approval had climbed to 5 percent.
Modestly higher approval and slightly lower disapproval is probably not because of Biden’s Gaza policy, but it shows that Gaza isn’t cratering Biden’s approval among young Americans. They’ve never been into him, in part because of his age.
According to a Pew analysis, Biden beat Trump 59–36 among 18–29-year-olds in 2020. With 2024 expected to be close, he needs them again. The Biden campaign’s challenge isn’t primarily losing them to Trump (who is also old). It’s young Americans who lean Democratic not bothering to turn out for Biden.
But Biden’s weakness with young voters isn’t due to Gaza. The spring 2024 Harvard Youth Poll, conducted in March, found that Biden had a much lower approval rating among 18–29-year-olds on his handling of Gaza, 18 percent, than on his overall job performance, 31 percent. However, like the general population, most young Americans consider other issues more important. Asked for their top two of sixteen topics, 18–29-year-olds ranked Israel-Palestine second-to-last. For young Democrats specifically, it’s tied with immigration for twelfth place, well below women’s reproductive freedom, gun violence, housing, and more.
Most of the public opinion polling on the Israel-Gaza war was conducted before the wave of campus protests. It’s possible that coverage of the protesters, the heavy police response, and Biden’s reactions have changed opinions of him.
On May 2, two days after police forcibly removed protesters at Columbia University, Biden made a statement on the campus protests. Echoing his stance during the 2020 campaign on Black Lives Matter demonstrations and civil unrest, Biden defended peaceful protests and denounced violence. “Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations—none of this is a peaceful protest.” He did not comment on the protesters’ goals, and he did not mention the police.
In response, University of Utah economics professor Marshall Steinbaum declared, “Joe Biden just decided that suppressing anti-Zionist student protest was more important than winning the 2024 election. So when he loses, he has no one to blame but himself.” Yale history professor Samuel Moyn reacted to the president’s statement with: “I hope Joe Biden didn’t just lose the election.”
He probably didn’t.
Biden’s stance on protest and violence lines up with the public’s. For example, a 2023 YouGov survey found that majorities think it’s always or usually acceptable to hand out flyers, march, boycott, and picket, even for causes they oppose, while a quarter or less think it’s acceptable to disrupt public events, deface property, or block traffic, even for causes they support.
In May, YouGov found 28 percent of Americans support pro-Palestinian campus protests, while 47 percent oppose—but among 18–29-year-olds, 40 percent support the protests while 37 percent oppose them. Among Democrats the margin is 46–31. However, a plurality of respondents deemed colleges’ reactions to the protests “not harsh enough” (30 percent); “too harsh” was the least popular option with 16 percent. Among Democrats, the most common answer is “about right” (30 percent), followed by “too harsh” (24 percent) and “not harsh enough” (17 percent). Among young voters, 29 percent said “about right,” with 24 percent choosing “too harsh” and 11 percent choosing “not harsh enough” (36 percent said “not sure”).
Similarly, a poll of college students by Generation Lab conducted May 3–6 found a plurality of 45 percent supporting pro-Palestinian protests at least “a little,” but also 81 percent in favor of universities holding students accountable for vandalism, destruction of property, or occupying campus buildings. Fifty-eight percent said it’s “unacceptable” for students to refuse a university order to disperse.
If Biden were to come out in favor of protesters disrupting graduation ceremonies and taking over buildings and against police forcibly clearing protest encampments, he would likely alienate more voters than he’d win over.
PROTESTERS AREN’T POLICYMAKERS. They don’t need to know all the nuances of a situation to conclude that it’s bad, and don’t need a well-articulated plan for fixing it before they demand improvement. But framing Biden’s Middle East policy in electoral terms raises the question: Is it possible for Biden to win back the voters he’s lost with a change in policy?
For a contingent on the left, one that’s especially vocal online, the answer is probably No. If someone currently believes it would be immoral to vote for the politician they’ve been calling “Genocide Joe,” they will likely think so later this year, too. The war might be over by the fall, but even in the best-case scenario, Gaza will likely be in crisis, with food and medicine shortages, and problems of governance.
If the Americans accusing Biden of genocide by proxy already largely disapproved of him before the Israel-Hamas war—because he’s too old or too moderate or for any other reason—then no plausible adjustment in his stance on Israel-Palestine is likely to satisfy them.
Biden may have created a real-world experiment to test this hypothesis. On Wednesday, he announced the suspension of American deliveries of bombs and artillery ammunition to Israel, apparently so that American munitions would not be used in civilian-packed Rafah in an operation to which Biden objects. When the next round of opinion polls come out, we’ll see if this decision wins him back some support from his left-wing critics. I wouldn’t bet on it, though.
There may be voters who believe that Biden’s approach to Gaza has been so horrific, so immoral, that they must oppose him—even though Trump is more supportive of Netanyahu’s policy, much harsher against domestic protest, and enacted a Muslim ban, not to mention everything else—but there aren’t many such voters, and the electoral impact they’ll have is mostly, perhaps entirely, locked in.
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