Having seen a lot of material of questionable utility on a key 2024 issue, I decided to explore it at New York:
The Israel-Hamas war has become an abiding presence in U.S. political discourse in the past six months. President Joe Biden has been lambasted by both a small but visible minority of Democrats who oppose his support for Israel as it wages war in Gaza, and Republicans who say he hasn’t done enough to back Israel and curb pro-Palestinian campus protests. But for all the noise and heat in the air on this subject, it’s still unclear whether the conflict in the Middle East will be a significant factor in the November presidential election.
Polling on Americans’ attitudes toward the conflict and its domestic fallout has been erratic and difficult to compare, as various pollsters have taken very different angles on the subject. But the “salience” of the issue as something that might push a significant number of voters this way or that is dubious at best.
There’s no question that U.S. public opinion has slowly evolved from strongly pro-Israel immediately after the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas to a mixed assessment leaning toward hostility to Israel’s conduct of the war ever since. Already by November, Gallup found significant deterioration in Americans’ support for Israel’s war in Gaza, with 50 percent approving and 45 percent disapproving of Israeli military operations. By March of this year, the approval-disapproval ratio had dropped to 36 percent approval to 55 percent disapproval. Meanwhile, the reflexive sympathy Americans have traditionally felt for Israel when it’s embattled has eroded as well; as of February, Pew had found that a solid 57 percent of Americans sympathize “at least somewhat with both the Israeli people and the Palestinian people or equally with both of them.”
Nearly every survey on the subject has identified a significant generational divide on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, with those under the age of 30 sympathizing more with Palestinians and less with Israelis; opposing Israel’s military operations in Gaza by strong margins; and also opposing unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel. A Pew survey earlier this month showed that “six-in-ten adults under age 30 have a positive view of the Palestinian people, compared with 46% who see the Israeli people positively.” Meanwhile, “only 16% of adults under 30 favor the U.S. providing military aid to Israel to help in its war against Hamas, compared with 56% of those 65 and older.”
Young voters’ unhappiness with Israel and Biden’s policies on the Gaza conflict, compounded by less-well-documented but apparent pro-Palestinian tendencies among nonwhite voters, have created more and more of a partisan gap on Middle Eastern policy. The aforementioned March Gallup survey found that 64 percent of Republicans still approved of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, while 75 percent of Democrats disapproved. So long as Biden was identified as America’s most prominent supporter of Israel in the conflict, this disconnect with his own party’s base was potentially a source of intra-Democratic friction and a negative influence on Democratic enthusiasm for Biden’s reelection. The problem looked likely to go well beyond the relatively small number of “uncommitted” voters in Democratic presidential primaries this year who were explicitly seeking to condemn or reverse the president’s position on what was happening in Gaza.
Most recently, however, Republican politicians may have given Biden a hand — or at least reduced the possibility that pro-Palestinian voters would give them a second look out of anger at the president — with increasingly more vocal support for Israel, particularly after recent exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran. Republicans have been even more vocal about adopting what might be called an “anti-anti-Israel” stance: calling for repressive and punitive actions toward pro-Palestinian protesters. It’s also relevant that the most visible “third option” for voters unhappy with the two major parties, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been staunchly pro-Israel throughout the course of the Gaza war.
But is the Israel-Hamas war a voting issue — or a reason not to vote at all — for enough people to greatly affect the outcome of the November election? The available data on issue saliency doesn’t provide much evidence that it’s top of mind for that many voters.
A March 29 Gallup survey asked respondents to identify “the most important issue facing the country today.” “War in the Middle East” tied for 13th with just 2 percent. More often, pollsters don’t bother to break out the Israel-Palestine conflict as a singular concern, instead lumping it together with other foreign-policy concerns or national-security threats. But foreign policy in general isn’t looking terribly salient. A mid-April Economist-YouGov poll showed just one percent of Americans considered any or all foreign-policy issues as “the most important for you.” A late April University of North Florida national survey that added all of foreign policy to national-security challenges as an issue cluster found 6 percent of voters willing to identify it as most important in determining presidential preferences. But with Republicans fanning all sorts of national-security fears, who knows what that means?
Perhaps the most startling data comes from the very credible large-sample Harvard Youth Poll released on April 19:
“Poll results showed that two issues closely associated with under-30 voters — the Israel-Hamas war and student debt relief — may not be especially consequential ones when it comes to casting votes.
“Biden gets good marks (39 percent) for his efforts to reduce student debt, and poor marks for his handling of the war in Gaza (18 percent). But young people ranked these as least important among the issues facing the country. The majority said inflation, healthcare, and housing were the top three matters, followed by gun violence, according to the poll.”
To be more specific, under-30 voters listed “Israel/Palestine” 15th among the 16 “major issues” they were asked to rank in importance. Pew’s March survey on the subject noted low interest and information levels on the Middle East in the same age cohort:
“Just 14% of those under 50 say they are following the war extremely or very closely, roughly half the share among those over 50 (30%). Consistent with their lower levels of attention, younger Americans are also less likely to know key facts about the ongoing war, based on their responses to three knowledge questions included on the survey.”
Without question, perceptions of the presidential candidates and their political parties may be influenced on the margins by their positions and conduct on this and related issues. Biden’s efforts to broker a broader regional peace agreement could reinforce his reputation as an internationalist and a competent diplomat. Republican demagoguing about campus protesters could strengthen their issue advantage on crime. But even if news coverage continues to draw attention to the carnage in Gaza and its underlying causes, it may not be an election game-changer, unless the election is extremely close. If that’s the case, of course, almost anything could be decisive.
I’d tend to agree with shai but would also caution about more worrisome, though perhaps counter-intuitive implications of this population shift. I’ve heard reports, although I can’t remember where (perhaps NPR?) in which politicians and demographers have noted that the country is actually becoming more, not less politically homogeneous. Conservatives and liberals are tending more and more to live in neighborhoods (and perhaps states) with residents that are more like them. Therefore I’d throw out the possibility that many of the snowbirds moving south are Republican/conservative leaning, hence the willingness to move to the south in the first place. They might prefer the family values and nascar culture that already exist there or maybe they’re moving for lower taxes and thus they are moving there to be amongst their own kind.
I remember reading predictions in the 80s and 90s that Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina would be defeated because of all the population growth from the north to the state. It turned out at that many of the people moving into the state were conservative white northerners, not representative cross-sections of the states from which they came (based on exit polls).
This is not to deny that there are many other groups such as Hispanics moving into fast growing red states too, in fact, doubtlessly at faster rates than northerners. But the trends I described above might play out here too. For example, if you look at exit polls it’s easy to see that Hispanics vote much more Republican in states like Georgia and Utah than states like New York and New Jersey. They may also be attracted to those who are politically and culturally like them.
This may also be why Florida, despite so much heavy population growth from northern White baby boomers and non-Cuban Hispanics between 2000 and 2004, actually became more Republican on a state and national level.
I don’t have a solution to this and do believe long-term trends favor Democrats in the country overall, but since our electoral college system is based on geography rathe,r than the popular vote for electing presidents I consider the trends very worrisome.
I personally don’t care about the south; let them have it. We won’t see a blue south in a presidential election for a long time. However, the growth in population in other red states (such as the mountain west) will favor the Dems. As a former New Yorker/Washingtonian who relocated to Denver in ’03, I see the shift happening and am very pleased to be a part of recent Dem success in CO. And, if the Dems play their cards right in ’08, CO’s 9 votes will go blue. Then all we need is 9 more . . . .
With the demographic character of Sun Belt populaltion increases already sited, another factor in the mix is the fact that evangelicals seem to be slowing peeling off the GOP elephants hide, kind of like dandruff on a black shirt.
While it may be true that population shifts might just make red states more purple, the political implications may still be important for a while to come.
In presidential elections, it’s hard to see Texas going for a Democrat for a long time, even if the state is slowly becoming more Democratic. This could be because even a massive influx of new Democrats is not enough to outweigh the already considerable advantage Republicans hold in the state. It could also be because new (potential) Democrats count in the census but do not vote, in some cases because they’re not citizens.
Moreover, an effective gerrymander regime could easily mute the effects of a massive influx of Democrats, by sifting them into already heavily Democratic districts. Thus, Democrats could lose a House seat in the north but not gain it in the south.
Finally, the effects filter all the way down to the low-level races. My wager is that all the new Democrats in the south and west will be less likely to run for and win dog catcher races, for a variety of reasons: for example, they may not be qualified (too young or not citizens), or they may not have the community ties to understand how politics works in their area or to garner a base of support. Transient Democrats are at a relative disadvantage compared to stable Republicans.
I could easily be proven wrong about any of these scenarios, and I certainly hope to be wrong. But I think that we should not rest on our laurels just because population gains in red states are due to Democrats moving in.