Democrats should be very worried about November because the White House’s pro-Israel policy may well cost them dearly in an election that could be decided by under 100,000 total votes in a few key states. It is not too late for President Biden to switch gears on Israeli policy, but every day that passes without a shift brings us closer to a 2016-like outcome. This time, however, the consequence may not just be a Trump presidency but, as Democrats have warned, the potential end of the American democratic experiment.
Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza over the last several months in a horrific war that has had full American backing. Countless more are buried under the rubble. Unprecedented protests have broken out across this nation’s campuses but also across the world. Even American allies stopped voting the same way as the United States on Security Council resolutions calling to end the war. Still, President Biden has failed to demonstrably break from Benjamin Netanyahu and use American leverage to bring an end to the war.
Doing so would not only be both the morally right thing to do and the path that best serves American interests. It may be one of the absolutely necessary shifts needed to hold together a coalition of voters that would reelect Joseph R. Biden to the presidency.
No one who has stayed up into the late hours of election nights, watching returns and biting their fingernails, needs to be told how close a presidential election can be. Whatever the popular vote counts, it will likely come down to a few hundred thousand or perhaps even tens of thousands of votes across five or six states that will decide the presidency. Truly reassuring polls for Biden are hard to come by. For every poll that shows him ahead, another shows him behind. Most concerning for Biden world are polls that show him losing to Trump in swing states where Democratic Senate candidates are winning among the same respondents.
The biggest peril for the Biden campaign, however, is with the youth vote, and particularly with youth voter turnout. In 2020, youth voter turnout powered Biden to an election victory. In fact, youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than in any presidential election since 1972, the first after the voting age was lowered to........