A Lookback:
US elections: Gaza War is for Biden what Covid-19 was for Trump
If Trump lost the 2020 elections because of Covid-19, Biden may lose it because of his support for actions that are producing a genocide in Gaza.
In late May 2020, Trump was sliding down in the polls. His advisors told him it was covid-19 and his handling of it. Reportedly, Trump reacted with anger, how could something that he had nothing to do with, derail his chances of winning a second term.
Biden is in a similar situation, he is behind in key states, and he is behind because he is losing young American voters who are protesting what they see as a genocidal war in Gaza. Unlike the pandemic, which Trump claimed he had nothing to do with it, Biden chose to deal with the war they way he did, and he will face the consequences of that choice this November. Biden's handlers seem to recognize the need for him to change direction, however, Biden is personally unmoved by the plight of Gazan civilians being exterminated by bombs and famine, and soon as the weather heats up, disease.
Here is now wha the New York Times Thinks:
New York Times: Biden and the Democratic Party lost in the election because of their politics in Gaza
The New York Times now reports that the war on Gaza contributed to the failure of the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, because she supported "Israel" and did her best to make voters who care about Palestinian rights feel unwelcome.
The newspaper pointed out that the Biden administration continued to send weapons to "Israel", despite overwhelming evidence that the most devoted voters in the Democratic Party wanted to end arms sales to it, even after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expanded the war to Lebanon.
The newspaper mentioned that Harris said sharply in August, when anti-war activists interrupted her speech: "If you want Donald Trump to win, you have to say so." At the Democratic National Convention, her campaign rejected an appeal from activists to allow an American of Palestinian origin to speak on the main stage.
A few days before the elections, Harris's sponsor Bill Clinton justified to a crowd in Michigan what Israel was committing in Gaza.
The newspaper believed that all of this provided an opportunity for Trump to win the US presidential elections. According to the newspaper, his campaign found that undecided voters in swing states were about six times more likely than other swing state voters to be motivated by the war in Gaza. Trump has courted these voters, vowing to help “the Middle East return to real peace,” and has attacked former Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican Harris chose to campaign with, as an “extreme war hawk.” Like Richard Nixon, who appealed to anti-war voters in 1968 with a promise of “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” Trump has portrayed himself as the “peace candidate,” according to the newspaper. During the presidential campaign, journalists trying to assess the electoral impact of Israel’s war in Gaza have often focused on Arab and Muslim voters, especially in Michigan. This is understandable, but in the Arab-American-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan, which supported Joe Biden in 2020, the results showed that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by about six percentage points.
The newspaper considered that viewing the political ramifications of Gaza solely through the lens of identity misses something fundamental: Over the past year, Israel’s massacre and starvation of Palestinians—funded by American taxpayers and broadcast live on social media—has sparked one of the greatest waves of progressive activism in a generation.
It stressed that many Americans who were motivated to act by their government’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza have no personal connection to Palestine or Israel, and like many Americans who protested apartheid in South Africa or the Vietnam War, their motivations are not racial or religious. They are moral.
It noted that “anger has been particularly intense among black Americans and young people,” and recalled previous events related to this issue; last spring, solidarity camps with the Palestinian people were set up on more than 100 college campuses. In February, the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s bishops, one of the country’s “most prominent black groups,” called the war in Gaza “genocide” and called on the Biden-Harris administration to stop funding it. In June, the NAACP urged a halt to arms shipments as well.
A CBS News poll in June found that while most voters over 65 supported arms sales to Israel, voters under 30 opposed them by a margin of more than three to one. While only 56 percent of white voters favored cutting off arms, the figure among black voters was 75 percent.
She suggested that pre-election poll numbers explain some of what we saw Tuesday night: Harris is much younger than Joe Biden. However, early polls — from CNN, The Washington Post, Fox News and the Associated Press — suggest she has suffered a sharp decline among voters under 29 compared to Biden’s 2020 showing.
On race, the paper said Harris is African-American, but according to CNN and The Washington Post, she did slightly worse than Biden among African-American voters, and fared much worse.
On the economic front, it said, many young and African-American voters were dissatisfied with the economy. Some may have been drawn to Trump’s immigration message. Others may have been hesitant to vote for a woman.
But these broader dynamics, according to the paper, do not fully explain Harris’s poor showing, because she appears to have lost much less ground among older and white voters. Her share of white voters was about the same as Biden’s. And among voters over 65, she actually gained ground.
More media reporting on the elections' results:
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