Slouching Towards the 2024 Election

While Biden has (finally) started to hammer Trump's fascist aims, the Gordian knot of the Israel-Gaza War is costing him vital support. But there are signs a change could be underway.

Jan 09, 2024

Happy New Year! And what a year it’s going to be. Are you ready? Because the Phoney War is over.

Getting back to basics

Just before the December holiday break, Billy Wimsatt, founder of the Movement Voter Project, posted “Bat Signal 2: The Biggest Investment Ever,” a follow-up to his original Bat Signal memo warning about the big funding gap facing grassroots community organizing as we head into the 2024 presidential election. His new memo offers some good news (serious money is starting to flow) and makes an eloquent plea to the millions of liberal and progressive Americans who, thanks to their own good fortune or inherited privilege, are in a position to dig deep now to tip the election in a better direction. Do make the time to read the whole thing.

Two things, though, jumped out at me from Wimsatt’s essay. First, this graphic, which is self-explanatory. If you’re going to donate money to change the course of history, give it to groups doing year-round organizing, not to candidates or party committees who will spend it on paid media (that consultants love because of the juicy commissions they earn from placing those ads).

The second thing shocked me. As Wimsatt writes, in the fall of 2011, the last time a Democrat in the White House was running for re-election, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign already had 300 paid staff getting ready for 2012. Guess how many the Biden re-election campaign had on staff as of October?

Just 38!

As Wimsatt writes, “It looks like ads and public appearances are their primary strategy, with a side order of digital micro-influencers. These are all necessary strategies but far from sufficient.” This isn’t arm-chair speculation, either. As Axios reported in November, by that point, the Biden campaign had spent more than $50 million on TV and digital ads in swing states in 2023 “and next to nothing on local organizers to begin reaching voters in person.” It’s as if top Democrats aren’t even trying to disguise any more the fact that they don’t believe in grassroots organizing (a theme I’ve written a series of posts about, all under the loose heading of “the poverty of Democratic organizing).

Wimsatt doesn’t dodge the obvious conclusion, writing, “The idea that they will even attempt to run a robust ground game is seeming more and more remote. Essentially, by default, they are depending on the kinds of local grassroots organizations that MVP and our allies support, to run most of the ground game for them. But they’re not saying that explicitly. They’re not saying: ‘Hey donors! We’re not running a major ground game this time. Please make sure you fund the outside groups to do it for us.’” So, whatever money you are thinking of giving to Biden, give it to MVP instead.

There’s also method to this approach. As Wimsatt writes, “it’s especially helpful to have on-the-ground organizers who aren’t just serving digital ads to voters using out-of-date, incomplete voter file data. Local organizers are trusted messengers who can have real in-depth conversations in a human-to-human way, which research has shown to be highly effective in shifting views on divisive topics. In terms of micro-targeting within racial or geographic communities, local organizers tend to be more rooted in the more progressive parts of youth communities and communities of color – so there is some helpful self-selection in who they target within their communities. Local organizers have a deeply intimate and nuanced knowledge of which segments of youth and BIPOC populations to prioritize or deprioritize for persuasion vs. turnout that national campaigns and algorithms can simply never match.”

But can Biden win?

With the third anniversary of the January 6^th insurrection just behind us, it is, what--sobering, astonishing, terrifying?--that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican party and that he could very well be re-elected. Can Biden, whose approval rating is at a dismal 38%, stop him? Well, count me alongside people like Brian Beutler, who is arguing that Biden’s recent speech at Valley Forge calling out Trump by name as a mortal threat to American democracy is the right message and the right way to deliver it.

And don’t be fooled by the polling about next November. Right now voters are not focusing on their November election decision when they talk to pollsters; instead they’re venting all kinds of frustrations at the man in the Oval Office. Hopefully, as the November choice comes into focus, this kind of overarching message about the Trump threat will lead them to choose differently.

That said, one huge reason Biden is bleeding support is because younger voters, especially those of color, are highly critical of how he’s handled the Israel-Gaza crisis since October 7. While polls show that most Americans remain far more supportive of Israel than Palestine, that tilt is reversed among 18-29 year-olds. According to a December New York Times poll, 46% of young registered voters say they sympathize more with the Palestinians while 27% sympathize more with Israel. Slightly more than half of this group (55%) oppose providing more economic and military aid to Israel, which Biden is committed to doing. A plurality of Black voters is more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel (34%- 28%), and Black voters are the one group that thinks Palestinians are more serious about a peaceful solution to the conflict than Israel.

Asked whether Israel should “stop its military campaign in order to protect against civilian casualties, even if not all Israeli hostages have been released” or it “should continue its military campaign until all hostages are released, even if it means civilian casualties in Gaza might continue,” a narrow plurality of registered voters favored a stop, according to the Times poll. There was a big gender gap (men being far more supportive of the military campaign than women) alongside a similar split between young voters/voters of color and others. Far more voters said they didn’t think Israel was taking enough precautions to avoid civilian casualties (48-30%), another sign of public uneasiness with the war.

Will all of this be salient in November?

When asked about the most important problem facing the country today, just one percent of likely voters in the Times poll said the Middle East/Israel/Palestinians. That included four percent of voters under the age of 30. The top issues garnering attention were the economy, inflation, immigration, the state of democracy, and polarization. So it’s possible the Gaza war will not matter much to voters—though in a close election, if just thousands of Arab and Muslim voters stay home in states like Michigan, that shift alone could tip some swing states to Trump.

Unfortunately, the complex, interwoven relationship between Israeli politics and American politics is a huge problem for Democrats. Biden’s instinctive response to October 7, to embrace not just Israel but also Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longstanding and now hugely unpopular leader, has backfired on him. If Biden’s “bear hug” was supposed to somehow restrain Bibi’s worst impulses (and perhaps it has staved off a regional wider war, something Biden gets no credit for), what it has still allowed is an unacceptable level of Israeli violence against Gazan civilians. Hence those critical poll numbers.

Worse yet, Biden’s stated commitment to give Israel’s army all that it needs to fight Bibi’s war has allowed Netanyahu to work the bear hug in reverse. He’s operated with a green light from America—most visible in how Biden has wielded the US veto in the UN security council to stave off calls for a cease-fire. And unlike Biden, who stands to lose if the war drags on or expands, Bibi stands to gain. Indeed, his only hope of remaining in power (and avoiding the corruption trials that have been circling him for years) is to keep the current crisis at a boiling point until next fall, when the US election could very well put Trump back in the White House. It’s as if Israel is, as many have said, America’s 51st State and its governor, Netanyahu, is already pledging its electoral votes to Trump.

There is a way to break this Gordian knot, but so far the politics of Israel-Gaza here in the US have not been helping. Much of the American left, which rushed reflexively to accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing and “settler-colonialism” just days after October 7, demanding a cease-fire that imposed no conditions on Hamas (the instigator of the latest round of war), has played right into the hands of AIPAC and the other staunchly pro-Israel allies of Netanyahu in Congress. There’s been no middle ground for Biden to move toward: either he is pro-Israel or pro-Hamas.

Progressives in America could have moved differently in the days after October 7. They could have aligned themselves with the Israelis who have been trying to overthrow the Netanyahu government since last year, who now had the upper hand since the whole country blamed Bibi for the security lapse that allowed October 7 to happen. We could have been demanding Bibi’s resignation as a condition for US support for Israel’s effort to destroy Hamas, effectively driving a much more useful wedge in the Israeli political system. But that would have required a different American left in the first place, one capable of making mature distinctions about the internal divisions in Israel rather than painting the entire country with one hyper-ideological brush.

Still, I see some signs of hope. Activists in Israel, led by Jewish-Arab solidarity groups like Standing Together and Women Wage Peace, have begun holding public demonstrations demanding an end to the war and new elections. This Thursday, they’ll be rallying again. Here’s how they’re framing their call to action (translation from the Hebrew):

"We are all in pain over the harsh reality we are living. The pain of the bereaved families, of those kidnapped, of the people we were uprooted and forced to leave their homes. We are all horrified when we hear about civilian casualties, including children, in the Gaza Strip and in the Gaza Envelope.

For many it is now clear: only a cease-fire agreement can return the hostages alive to their families and stop the killing of innocent people. But in the extremist government of Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, they are pushing towards the other direction: they talk about population transfer and "voluntary migration", they reject the possibility of diplomatic negotiations with the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, and they promise us nothing - except many more years of war and suffering.

For us, the people who live in Israel, there are two options: either Israeli-Palestinian peace or an eternal war. On Thursday, January 11th, the peace and equality movements will march through the streets of Tel-Aviv to say in a loud voice: Only peace will bring security!"

(I can’t help but point out how different the tone of this statement is from the “Free Palestine” “From the river to the sea” demonstrations that have become so fashionable on the American left.)

Also, in the last two days, both J Street and American Friends of Peace Now (APN), the leading “pro-Israel” pro-peace organizations inside the Democratic political ecosystem, have issued critical statements demanding the Biden administration shift course. APN’s is titled “Biden: It’s Time to End the War.” It reads, in part:

“At this point, the continuation of the war endangers Israel’s national security interests, threatens to lead to a wider regional war, and has made Gaza utterly uninhabitable, plagued by death, hunger, and disease. The scope and duration of Israel’s response, and its lack of a “day after” strategy that would harness its military response to a clear political objective, has cost Israel dearly and caused shocking carnage and immeasurable suffering for Gazan civilians, most of whom have been displaced from communities now reduced to rubble. The United Nations has said that hunger is widespread and the threat of starvation is imminent in Gaza. The healthcare system has collapsed, and disease is spreading.
As such, Americans for Peace Now (APN) strongly urges the Biden administration to push Israel to adopt and implement an immediate exit strategy from the war in the Gaza Strip. The strategy must provide for Israel’s security and lead to the return of all hostages. It must also address the dire humanitarian crisis that Gazans are facing and set out a vision for a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike. ‘Continuing this devastating war poses unacceptable risks for Israel, Gazan civilians and the entire region. For the sake of the security and wellbeing of civilians in Israel and in Gaza, the Biden administration must push Israel to bring about an immediate cessation of hostilities and pivot from war to peacemaking,’ said James Klutznick, APN’s Chair of the Board. [emphasis in the original.]”

(This statement too, like that of Standing Together and Women Wage Peace, frames the need to end the war in terms of Israel’s material and moral self-interest, and not only as something needed to perform our solidarity with Palestinians.)

J Street’s statement was more narrowly focused on ensuring that Israel be blocked from any mass resettlement of civilians from Gaza, a goal mentioned by several top ministers in Netanyahu’s government in recent days. But it too insisted that Biden pressure Netanyahu to unequivocally shift course and repudiate any such plans. Last year, Biden was able to put a lot of pressure on Netanyahu over Israel’s democracy crisis because a critical mass of Israelis and American Jews were already speaking out. The same kind of political alignment needs to form before he can put real pressure on Netanyahu to end the war. Maybe, just maybe, we’re seeing that take shape now, as the Israel-Gaza war approaches its 100th day.

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