With the presidential election in sight, pundits are breathlessly assessing just how damaged President Joe Biden supposedly is by dissatisfaction from his party’s hard left over his disinclination to drink their brand of Kool Aid on the Mideast conflict. College students overdosed on TikTok and faculty whose yearning to ingratiate themselves with campus fashion has outstripped their intellectual rigor have certainly made a lot of noise. Their protests have run the gamut from laughable to cringeworthy, but they have succeeded in generating media attention. What is less clear is their impact on actual people in an actual election.
Columbia University has been a scene of considerable mirth, as self-professed progressives scream support for crazed Yemeni jihadists — funded by an Iranian regime that executes dissenters and LGBTQ community members — who are trying to blow up ships in the Red Sea to mark their hatred of infidels. “Hands off the Houthis!” and “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around!” shout the children of the rich and privileged in Morningside Heights, most of whom don’t know a Houthi from a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise.
At Rutgers University, the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, on probation after having been suspended for repeatedly disrupting campus activities, held a press conference dressed like ISIS machete-wielders, their faces masked to hide their identities, issuing a set of “demands” of the university. Over at the White House, a mob of pro-Hamas demonstrators furious at the president for his “support for genocide” tried to breach the security perimeter, shrieking “F— Biden!” at Secret Service who stood calmly behind the gates.
Last week, anti-Israel protesters demonstrated outside Manhattan’s Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, hurling accusations of “genocide” against a world-renowned hospital that has helped hundreds of thousands of cancer patients and their families. Protest leader Nerdeen Kiswani exhorted the crowd to direct their shouting at pediatric patients watching from within the hospital. “Make sure they hear you, they’re in the windows!” Kiswani thundered.
“Shame on you, you support genocide, too!”
Though the prevailing storyline has been that disaffection among the left will hurt Biden in November, data that has flown underneath the radar indicates that were he to bend to the far left on Israel, Biden would be damaged badly, even fatally, in his race against Donald Trump. A Gallup poll released earlier this month found that 38% of Americans said Israel is getting “the right amount” of U.S. support — but 24% said it wasn’t getting enough. That’s the highest percentage of Americans who have told pollsters Israel wasn’t receiving enough U.S. support since Gallup began asking the question in 2001.
A New York Times/Siena College poll taken in six battleground states in November found that voters believed that Trump, generally regarded as more hawkish in his support for Israel than Biden, would “do a better job” on the Israel-Hamas conflict than Biden. Of all six states, the gap was widest in Pennsylvania, a state that Biden cannot lose if he hopes to win reelection; 53% of Pennsylvanians said that Trump would do a better job on the conflict, while 37% said Biden.
White House operatives are doubtless paying attention to the reversal of political fortunes of Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who has been an extremely vocal supporter of Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, and whose favorable net ratings are 23% higher than Biden’s in the president’s home state.
A recent Suffolk University poll in New Hampshire found that 49% of voters sympathized more with Israel than with Palestinians, compared with 16% the other way around. Forty-five percent of Granite State voters told pollsters that Biden’s support for Israel was “about right,” while 12% indicated he wasn’t supportive enough. In a Biden-Trump match-up, those surveyed supported Biden over the former president by over seven percentage points.
The takeaway appears to be this: Noise-making is different from vote-winning. Indeed, it may well be that the claims made by the Hamas lobby are so repugnant to Americans’ common sense that embracing those claims may burn Democrats, not help them.
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