The news of a permanent ceasefire agreement being struck between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday resulted in a collective sigh of relief across the U.S. political spectrum.
Even many ardent supporters of Israel’s siege of Gaza had publicly fretted over the past year over what effects the conflict was having on the broader American public’s view of the Israeli state. Now, a new poll confirms that those fears were warranted — and validates warnings from the progressive left over the past year.
A poll released Tuesday by the Institute for Middle East Understanding conducted by YouGov ranked the war in Gaza as a top issue for Democratic-leaning voters who stayed home in 2024 rather than voting in some of the key swing states that were won back by Donald Trump after he lost them four years prior.
In those states — Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Harris, much like her opponent, underperformed the ticket she’d been on in the 2020 cycle. While Trump was (and still is) weighed down politically by the aftermath of the assault on the Capitol, it was persistently high consumer prices and the shockingly bloody Israeli assault on Gaza that drove the largest numbers of potential Harris voters away from the Democratic ticket. IMEU’s poll indicated that the pair of sore spots on Harris’s record were the driving issues in both battleground states and “safe” states — where the vice president underperformed previous Democratic performances as well.
Economic issues won out over concerns about the U.S.’s role in the war in a collection of battleground states, though the president’s unwillingness to exert political pressure on the Israeli government to accept a ceasefire deal still beat other top issues including border security among voters who previously supported Biden in those swing states. In three states — Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan — one in three Democratic-leaning voters who stayed home cited the war as their top reason for not backing Biden at the polls.
The latter pair of states are part of the “Blue Wall” — a bulwark of states typically won by Democrats which Trump cracked in 2016 and again in 2024, to greater effect.
“Democrats cannot hope to win future elections by running candidates whose words and deeds do not line up with the values of Democratic voters who support freedom and equality for all,” said Margaret DeReus, executive director of the IMEU’s policy project. “Supporting Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is a losing electoral strategy for Democrats.”
The data seemingly supports two arguments that have been used to explain Harris’s defeat in November.
Many Democrats and analysts argued that voters did not agree with the Biden-Harris’s depiction of the economy as being in a healthy and positive place. Progressives in particular argued that high home prices and costs of food and fuel were hurting vastly many more families than were seeing the benefits of a booming stock market and low unemployment rate. And they’ve excoriated the Harris campaign in particular for its embrace of Liz Cheney, a Republican, while the Democratic Party’s base grew more and more disillusioned with the president and later vice president at the top of the ticket.
The survey also contacted Democratic voters who supported the party in swing states both this cycle and in 2020. Among those voters, a vastly larger share said they’d have had an easier time supporting Harris had she broken with the president and vowed to halt arms shipments to Israel under laws restricting US weapons when they may be used in human rights abuses.
One notable issue not surveyed by the poll: Biden’s age, and the lingering concerns that Americans had with a campaign and White House which seemingly hid the extent of the president’s decline from the public. Harris’s replacement of the commander-in-chief on the presidential ticket in July, according to some pollsters and Democratic insiders, never made up the gap between her ticket and Donald Trump’s campaign which had existed before she took the reins.
Biden, flanked by Harris and his secretary of State Antony Blinken, gave an address from the White House on the ceasefire agreement Tuesday afternoon following the announcement. Trump, and his associated GOP cronies, were simultaneously claiming credit on social media; Trump’s envoy to the region visited Israel for a meeting with the prime minister described in Israeli media as terse over the weekend.
“Today, after many months of intensive diplomacy by the United States, along with Egypt and Qatar, Israel and Hamas have reached a ceasefire and hostage deal. This deal will halt the fighting in Gaza, surge much needed-humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians, and reunite the hostages with their families after more than 15 months in captivity,” said the outgoing U.S. president.
His remarks came days after giving an interview to USA Today, in which Biden claimed that he could have beaten Trump. He faced no questions about the war in Gaza at all during that conversation, part of the White House’s efforts to define his legacy in his final weeks.
“Even as we welcome this news, we remember all the families whose loved ones were killed in Hamas’s October 7th attack, and the many innocent people killed in the war that followed,” Biden continued in his address Tuesday. “It is long past time for the fighting to end and the work of building peace and security to begin. I am also if thinking of the American families, three of whom have living hostages in Gaza and four awaiting return of remains after what has been the most horrible ordeal imaginable. Under this deal, we are determined to bring all of them home.”
