Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for Joe Biden, the Israel-Hamas war poses serious problems for a president already struggling with upside-down approval ratings heading into a re-election year.
Domestic politics should not drive foreign policy decisions, and I have given Biden credit for demonstrating moral clarity thus far with his steadfast support of Israel. But Biden is being squeezed politically on multiple fronts (left, right, and center). Should this war linger, the collateral damage could also include Biden’s second term.
Let’s start on the left, where the war has emerged as a wedge issue dividing Democrats along the lines of ideology, identity, and age.
Democrats are already voicing concern that Biden’s support of Israel could cost him the state of Michigan. “Joe Biden has single-handedly alienated almost every Arab American and Muslim American voter in Michigan,” Democratic state Rep. Alabas Farhat told NBC News recently.
Due to the peculiarities of the electoral college, Michigan is almost a must-win state for Biden. As NBC News noted, “There are an estimated 240,000 Muslims in Michigan, a state Biden won in 2020 by 150,000 votes. Trump won Michigan in 2016 by a little more than 10,700 votes.”
But it’s not just Michigan. Outside the Wolverine state, Biden’s national approval ratings have dropped since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. What is more, Gen Z and millennials—a key component of the Democratic base—are dramatically less pro-Israel than their older counterparts.
This difference was on display by virtue of protests, many of them antisemetic, taking place on college campuses and in major cities across America.
George Washington University students, for example, recently projected the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Glory to the Martyrs” during a demonstration. You don’t have to be hip to the latest art terms to know that this is a thinly disguised way of saying “Kill the Jews” and “Viva Hamas.”
And these are just the calls coming from inside the Democratic house.
So where does left-wing student activism fit in with Biden’s mounting troubles outside his party? Simply put, it’s hard to cast Republicans as the extremist party when your side is flaunting its own extremism.
To understand how leftwing extremists could cost Biden among centrist voters in 2024, it is important to revisit the 2022 midterms.
As you might recall, Republicans were expected to swamp Democrats, based on polls consistently saying that the economy was the biggest voter concern.
To combat this, Biden shrewdly chose to focus on warning the nation about “MAGA Republicans” who “pose a clear and present danger” to democracy. Amazingly, Biden’s bet paid off.
But can he effectively run that same play in 2024?
The contrast only works if Biden and his party can retain the image of being the normal, reasonable, mainstream party. But anti-Israel left-wing protests by progressives muddy the waters.
To be sure, tying Biden to radical protests would require a bit of prestidigitation and a lot of guilt by association—such as conflating comments made by Rep. Rashida Tlaib for Biden’s. This is assuming that Biden doesn’t flip-flop or go wobbly on Israel (which would paint him as weak and untrustworthy).
“The simplest and most obvious reason a lingering Israel-Hamas war is bad news for Biden is that it feeds the perception that Biden’s tenure has resulted in chaos, rather than a return to normalcy.”
It might not be fair, but that tenuous link could be enough to spook some normie suburban voters and swing a close election in a key state or two—especially if it is effectively weaponized by Donald Trump.
Speaking of normie voters, perhaps the simplest and most obvious reason a lingering Israel-Hamas war is bad news for Biden is that it feeds the perception that Biden’s tenure has resulted in chaos, rather than a return to normalcy.
A sophist can argue that the Trump era represented a golden age when bad guys were too afraid to launch attacks on our allies, inflation and interest rates were low, and the economy was humming (never mind that last year of Trump’s presidency when COVID-19 hit).
This argument would require creative historical revisionism to prop it up. Besides, many great leaders have found themselves presiding over times of war; in many cases, that experience made them great leaders.
But this nostalgia play might be effective. It might not be Biden’s fault that the world is falling apart. But if you are looking for a “steady hand” to calm things down, are you better off now than you were four years ago?
Again, I don’t want to give the impression that domestic political concerns are more important than the atrocities committed against Israel last month or the return of the hostages held in Gaza. But I’m a political columnist, and enough time has passed to see that if this war drags on, it will have serious political ramifications for Biden.
No doubt about it, Joe Biden is feeling the squeeze.
