Biden's Israel election blunder
Biden's efforts to be all things to all people in his handling of Israel-Hamas politics has been a disaster. He has alienated Jewish-American voters for no gain.
US President Joe Biden’s attempts to be all things to all people when it comes to the Israel-Hamas War is a political mistake that is going to blow up in his face like he is Wile E. Coyote with a TNT detonator. The election is the Roadrunner, zipping away from him.
Biden has made the mistake of thinking that because the mainstream news media and louse-ridden university students are angry about the Israel-Hamas War, that it is a key election issue. It is a for some voters, but not for many.
His efforts to woo both Jewish and Arab-American voters by supporting Israel with one hand, threatening it with the other, and trying to please everyone, are failing. He is pleasing no one. He is alienating both constituencies, and paying no attention to those who support Israel but for whom it is not a voting issue. That is most Americans.
Let us begin with Jewish voters. American Jews are an important constituency that the Democratic Party has been steadily losing for decades. In the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton won 80 percent of the Jewish vote, with Republicans pulling in only 11 percent (independent Ross Perot won 9 percent). By the last election, Biden won only 68 percent of the Jewish vote, with Donald Trump winning 30 percent.
Given Biden’s duplicitous treatment of Israel, specifically holding up a batch of munitions for Israel’s Rafah operation and his craven appeasement of Iran’s theocratic regime, Jewish support for Biden could drop as low as 60 percent this year. That would mark an enormous shift. Given how many younger Democratic voters are Far Left, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic, this Jewish shift away from the Democrats looks like a secular trend.
So, why is Biden willing to risk the support of this demographic? Partly, it is arrogance. He is mistakenly taking the Jewish vote for granted. Mainly, however, Biden is trying to win the Arab-American vote, especially in the key swing states of Michigan and Minnesota, what the Wall Street Journal cleverly called Biden’s two-state solution.
It is true that Arab-Americans, and Muslim Americans more broadly, are angry at Israel’s prosecution of its war against Hamas in Gaza and even more furious at the US government - and Biden specifically - for supporting Israel.
Yet, Biden has miscalculated. No matter how much he criticizes Israel, or betrays it, it will never be enough to appease Arab-American voters on this issue. There is also more than a hint of patronization in Biden’s assumption that Arab-Americans will vote on US Middle East policy, as opposed to more mundane concerns such as the economy, inflation, and immigration.
Younger voters, too, may not have Gaza top of mind when they enter the polling booths in November. Anti-Israel protests across US campuses, often supported by morally retarded faculty members, have revealed the Far Left’s takeover of academia and how acceptable anti-Semitism has become. It also created the illusion that Israel is a major issue for young voters. Polling, however, suggests otherwise. There is no one to virtue signal to in a polling booth.
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