Gaza Is a Problem for Biden, but Not Necessarily for the Reason Pro-Palestinian Activists Think

A lot of people, almost invariably pro-Palestinian activists or at least people with very strong sympathies for the Palestinian side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are convinced that Biden’s unwillingness to challenge Israel on Gaza will cost him the election in November. However, I think that not only do they vastly overestimate how much impact Gaza will likely have on the election, but I also think that, to the extent that it will matter, they misunderstand the reasons why. Nate Silver just wrote a good post on that issue, which covers much of the relevant facts, but I’d like to make a few additional observations because if anything I think Nate is actually not critical enough of the argument pro-Palestinian people make. The problem in my opinion is that people tend to be very sloppy on that question, because they don’t think carefully enough about what inferences one can make from survey data and they want to believe that adopting the policy they prefer would necessarily be electorally good for Biden.

A lot has been made of the fact that, in the latest NYT/Siena College battleground states poll, 13% of the respondents who say they voted for Biden in 2020 but won’t vote for him in November cite the war in Gaza as the most important issue to their vote. But as Nate points out, as a share of the electorate, this doesn’t translate into a lot of people:

Let’s do some math here. About 51 percent of the country voted for Biden in 2020. Of that 51 percent, 14 percent say they don’t plan to vote for Biden this time in the head-to-head matchup against Trump. Of those, 13 percent list Gaza or something related as their top issue. And of that 13 percent, 49 percent are more sympathetic to Palestine than to Israel (and only 17 percent are more sympathetic to Israel; the rest are in the both/neither camp). So we get:

.51 * .14 * .13 * .49 = .005

That is, 0.5 percent of the American electorate are 2020 Biden voters who say they’ll withdraw their vote from Biden because he’s too far to their right on Israel. (Or alternatively, 0.8 percent if you instead use the version of the poll that asks about third parties, which increases the number of Biden defectors.)

As he says, this could still make the difference in some swing states if, as seems likely, the election is close in some of those states, but that’s not the devastating blow many pro-Palestinian activists seem to imagine.

Moreover, as Nate points out immediately after this passage, there are also between 0.2 to 0.3 percent of the electorate who say they voted for Biden in 2020 but won’t vote him in November because they think he’s not supportive enough of Israel. But if you want to know how much, if at all, Biden is going to get harmed because he doesn’t restrain Israel enough, what matters is not just how many people who voted for him in 2020 won’t vote for him in November for that reason, but also how many people who voted for him in 2020 wouldn’t vote for him if started to restrain Israel more. As Nate says, if 0.2 to 0.3 percent of the electorate already say that, although they voted for Biden in 2020, they won’t vote for him in November because he’s not supportive enough of Israel, then it’s likely that if he started to restrain Israel more he would lose even more people who are pro-Israel. Of course, he would also get back some of the voters who say that, although they voted for him in 2020, they won’t vote for him in November but it’s impossible to say based on those data what the net effect would be. It could very well be that, depending on exactly what he did to restrain Israel more and what effect it had on the war, doing so would actually make him lose more voters than he’d win.

In fact, it’s even more complicated than that, a lot more complicated actually. First, the NYT/Siena College poll just shows that 13% of respondents who say they voted for Biden in 2020 also say they won’t vote for him in November and cite Gaza or foreign policy as the most important issue to their vote and say they’re more sympathetic to Palestine, but that’s not the same as showing that 13% of respondents who actually voted for Biden in 2020 won’t vote for him in November because he’s not doing enough to restrain Israel. Starting with the first point, it’s a well-known fact that respondents in polls tend to say they voted for the winner of the last election even if they didn’t, so it’s likely that some of the people in question didn’t actually vote for Biden in 2020.¹ Since they didn’t vote for him in 2020, there is no reason to assume they would have voted for him if his policy toward Israel had been different, although given the way in which views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increasingly align with partisan affiliation in the US this is probably more relevant for pro-Israel respondents who say they voted for Biden in 2020 but won’t in November and claim that Gaza is the most important issue to their vote.

Even putting aside such recall bias, it’s hardly obvious that, from the fact that someone voted for Biden in 2020 and that he says that he won’t vote for him in November and that Gaza or foreign policy is the most important issue to his vote, you can infer that he won’t vote for Biden in November because he’s not doing enough to restrain Israel. In order to make that inference, you have to make strong assumptions about the connection between what people say is the most important issue for them and the actual determinants of their vote, which in my opinion are highly dubious. For instance, a large share of French voters say the protection of the environment is the issue they care the most about if you poll them, but I can guarantee you that you wouldn’t know that from the way in which they vote. Moreover, even if you could make the assumptions in question safely, you could only infer that respondents in that group say they won’t vote for Biden in November because they think he’s not doing enough to restrain Israel, but it doesn’t mean they won’t actually vote for Biden anyway. Indeed, while at the moment the war is a highly salient issue, it’s likely that as the election draws closer other issues will become more salient and that as a result many of those people will still vote for Biden in the end.

But it’s even more complicated than that if you really think carefully about it. For instance, it’s likely that even if Biden started to restrain Israel more from now on some of the people who have already decided they won’t vote for him because he hasn’t done enough to restrain Israel so far wouldn’t change their mind, so to some extent they’re basically a sunk cost for him.² You also have to consider, not just how a change of policy toward Israel would affect the people who voted for Biden in 2020, but also those who voted for Trump, didn’t vote at all or voted for a third-party candidate. In addition, you have to take into account whether the people who plan to withdraw their vote from Biden because they think he’s not doing enough to restrain Israel are going to vote for Trump or a third-party candidate and the same thing for the people who would withdraw their vote from him if he started to restrain Israel more, because the effect on Biden’s share of the two-party vote and therefore his chances also depend on that.

I could go on for a while like that, but you probably get the point. It’s very complicated to infer from the kind of polling data Nate discusses how a change of policy toward Israel would directly affect Biden’s chances in November. People who care a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tend to overestimate how much everyone else does. That’s a pretty natural bias, but it’s still a bias. In reality, most people don’t really care much about the conflict and, to the extent they have views about it, they tend to be pro-Israel much more often than pro-Palestinian advocates imagine. I personally find that regrettable, because I’m leaning toward the Palestinian side of the dispute, but that’s not a reason to be in denial about that. In fact, as Nate correctly points out, not having unrealistic views about the state of public opinion is likely to harm the Palestinian cause, because it will make you adopt tactics that won’t go well with most people. For instance, as much as I agree that pro-Palestinian protests on campuses have been wildly misrepresented, I also think Norman Finkelstein is right that protesters have made that easier by using unnecessarily provocative and ambiguous slogans.

Based on polling data about how much people care about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the consistent finding in political science research that in general foreign policy doesn’t affect people’s voting behavior much and the distribution of Jewish and Muslim voters across states in the US (who probably don’t vote as activists assume they do anyway³), I think it’s very unlikely that the direct effect of Biden’s policy toward Israel on his chances of winning in November will be large. If the race is close enough, which it probably will be, it may still be enough to make the difference in Michigan and maybe one or two other swing states, but even that is hardly obvious. But does that mean that Biden’s policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza can’t have a significant effect on his chances of reelection? No, it does not. Indeed, so far I have just been talking about the direct effect of Biden’s policy toward Israel on his chances in November, that is to say how many voters who would have voted for him if he had a different policy but won’t because they don’t like his actual policy and care enough about the war for that fact to decisively affect their vote. This is what everyone is focusing on, but that doesn’t exhaust the effect of Biden’s policy on his chances in November, since there are also indirect effects to consider.

While the vast majority of voters don’t care much about the war, the same can’t be said about Democratic political elites and left-wing political activists, but those are the people who are going to run Biden’s campaign or could seriously disrupt it. If those people are squabbling with each other about Biden’s policy toward Israel, it will get in the way of effective campaigning. If Democratic operatives are divided over Gaza, it will impede cooperation between them, making it harder to run a smooth campaign. This will be reflected in the media, giving the impression of a campaign in disarray, which in turn will negatively affect perceptions about Biden’s campaign among voters. Similarly, if left-wing activists keep showing up at campaign events to call Biden a genocide enabler or whatnot, it will be a problem for him. Even if most voters don’t care about that, because they see those activists as radicals, it will make people in Biden’s campaign nervous and they’ll probably schedule less events for Biden and his surrogates out of fear that pro-Palestinian activists will make a scene that will make the headlines.

It’s hard to campaign and get your message across when everyone is constantly talking about you’re getting attacked by people in your own camp. Thus, while the number of people who won’t vote for Biden because they don’t like his actual policy and care enough about the war for that fact to decisively affect their vote is probably not very high, if you add the voters he’ll lose because his campaign is a mess due to squabbling over his policy toward Israel among Democratic political elites and left-wing political activists, I think there is a much higher chance that it will be a serious problem for him in November if the issue hasn’t been resolved by then. I don’t want to exaggerate how big of a factor it will be, I think it’s impossible to quantify precisely what effect this will have and the claim that it effectively kills any chance of reelection for Biden is way too strong, but nevertheless I think that once you put together the direct and indirect effects it will have it’s likely to be a serious problem for him. This is particularly true given that, in the era of polarization, any presidential election is bound to be close.

That is why, as I argued before, I think he’d better start pressuring Israel a lot harder to end the war sooner rather than later. It’s not obvious that it would work, but I think it would if he used his leverage intelligently, to make the people in Israel’s national security establishment, many of whom seem to have serious reservations about the war by now and see the preservation of good relations with the US as a priority, increase the pressure on Netanyahu to wrap things up and present a “day-after strategy”. If this worked and the war ended, either because Netanyahu responded to internal and external pressure or because there was a US-backed “soft coup” against him, people would move on and he could turn the election into a referendum about Trump, but the more he waits and the less this will work because the closer to the election the war ends and the more it will remain a salient issue by the time people vote. If he waits too much, at some point, it will become more costly for him to pressure Israel to end the war than to do nothing.

1. Of course, there are also people who say they voted for Trump in 2020 even though they didn’t, but that’s just random measurement error. The effect I’m talking about here is systematic bias in favor of the winner of the last election.

2. Of course, the same thing is true for the people who have already decided they won’t vote for him because he hasn’t been supportive enough of Israel, should he start to support Israel more and not less. But that is less relevant because this isn’t a realistic possibility.

3. For instance, I think a lot of conservative pro-Israel activists are completely delusional about how many Jews are going to switch party in November because of Biden’s policy toward Israel, because although Jews are more likely to be pro-Israel and care more about that issue than average, they still tend to be liberal and many of them are not crazy about Netanyahu. Thus, although they would probably be pissed if Biden started to promote a one-state solution or adopted harsh sanctions against Israel, they don’t react to the constraints Biden has placed on Israel’s conduct of the war in the way conservative pro-Israel activists do.