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      How Much Is Biden’s Support of Israel Hurting Him With Young Voters?

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      Donald Trump leads him among those 18 to 29, a new poll shows.Palestine supporters in Washington on Sunday.Tasos Katopodis/Getty ImagesAs recently as this summer, a poll with Donald J. Trump leading among young voters would have been eye-popping.Now, it’s increasingly familiar — and our new New York Times/Siena College national survey released Tuesday morning is no exception.For the first time, Mr. Trump leads President Biden among young voters in a Times/Siena national survey, 49 percent to 43 percent. It’s enough to give him a narrow 46-44 lead among registered voters overall.Usually, it’s not worth dwelling too much on a subsample from a single poll, but this basic story about young voters is present in nearly every major survey at this point. Our own battleground state surveys in the fall showed something similar, with Mr. Biden ahead by a single point among those 18 to 29. Either figure is a big shift from Mr. Biden’s 21-point lead in our final poll before the midterms or his 10-point lead in our last national poll in July.And there’s a plausible explanation for the shift in recent months: Israel.As my colleagues Jonathan Weisman, Ruth Igielnik and Alyce McFadden report, young voters in the survey took an extraordinarily negative view of Israel’s recent conduct: They overwhelming say Israel isn’t doing enough to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza, believe Israel isn’t interested in peace, and think Israel should stop its military campaign, even if it means Hamas isn’t eliminated.You might think that the young voters with these progressive or even left-wing views would be among the most likely to stick with Mr. Biden. At least for now, that’s not the case. The young Biden ’20 voters with anti-Israel views are the likeliest to report switching to Mr. Trump.Overall, Mr. Trump is winning 21 percent of young Biden ’20 voters who sympathize more with Palestinians than Israel, while winning 12 percent of other young Biden ’20 voters. In an even more striking sign of defections among his own supporters, Mr. Biden holds just a 64-24 lead among the young Biden ’20 voters who say Israel is intentionally killing civilians, compared with an 84-8 lead among the Biden ’20 voters who don’t think Israel is intentionally killing civilians.It’s possible that the kinds of young voters opposed to Israel already opposed Mr. Biden back before the war. That can’t be ruled out. But it’s still evidence that opposition to the war itself is probably contributing to Mr. Biden’s unusual weakness among young voters.Here are a few other findings from the poll:Biden ahead among likely voters?Even though he trails among registered voters, Mr. Biden actually leads Mr. Trump in our first measure of the 2024 likely electorate, 47 percent to 45 percent.If you’re a close reader of this newsletter, this might not come completely out of nowhere. Our polls have consistently shown Mr. Biden doing better among highly regular and engaged voters — especially those who voted in the last midterm election. In those polls, the most heavily Republican voters have been those who voted in 2020, but not 2022. It helps explain why Democrats keep doing so well in low-turnout special elections even though they struggle in polls of registered voters or adults.But in this particular poll, the split isn’t just between midterm and non-midterm voters. It’s between people who voted in the 2020 general election and those who didn’t. Mr. Biden leads by six points among voters who participated in the 2020 election, while Mr. Trump holds an overwhelming 22-point lead among those who did not vote in 2020. In our estimation, needless to say, 2020 nonvoters are less likely to vote in 2024, and that’s why we show Mr. Biden ahead among likely voters.It’s an intriguing pattern, but there’s good reason for caution here.For one: Our previous polling hasn’t shown anything this extreme, including our battleground polling conducted eight weeks ago. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but our sample of 2020 nonvoters includes only 296 respondents — a sample that’s too small for any serious conclusions.For another: The people who voted in 2020 reported backing Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by 10 points in the 2020 election, 51 percent to 41 percent. In reality, Mr. Biden won by 4.5 points.Now, there’s a good reason respondents might have been less likely to report backing Mr. Trump in our poll: We concluded the substantive portion of the survey with a series of questions about Mr. Trump’s coming legal battles, including whether he committed crimes, whether he’ll be convicted, whether he should go to jail and so on. Then, at the very end of the survey, we asked them how they voted in 2020.It’s possible these questions about Mr. Trump’s legal problems made his supporters less likely to admit supporting him in the 2020 election. Indeed, registered Republicans with a record of voting in 2020 were three times as likely as Democrats to refuse to tell us whom they supported in the last presidential election. But it’s also possible that our sample really does just contain too many Biden ’20 voters with respect to nonvoters, yielding a lopsided shift in his direction among likely voters.The underlying data still looks mostly normal.Every time I see what looks like a crazy result — such as Mr. Trump leading among young voters or a nearly 30-point gap between 2020 voters and nonvoters — I think that I’m going to peer deeper into the data and see the signs that something is off.I haven’t seen it yet.In fact, this survey has a more Democratic sample of young people by party registration than in the past, but a much more Trump-friendly result.A similar story holds for the 2020 nonvoters. They may back Mr. Trump by a wide margin, but 27 percent are registered as Democrats compared with 17 percent as Republicans. Mr. Trump nonetheless leads among them because Mr. Biden has only a 49-34 lead among registered Democrats who didn’t turn out in the 2020 election. He has an 83-8 lead among registered Democrats who did vote.A mere 49-34 lead for Mr. Biden among Democratic nonvoters sounds pretty far-fetched, but it’s at least easy to imagine why these kinds of Democrats might be less likely to support Mr. Biden. If you’re a Democrat who didn’t vote in 2020, you probably aren’t as vigorously and passionately opposed to Mr. Trump as those who did show up. Nonvoters also tend to be young, nonwhite, less educated and have low incomes — all groups Mr. Biden has struggled with. They also tend to be less partisan and less ideological, and therefore may be less loyal to the party.But for now, it’s just one relatively small data point. And curiously, it’s a data point we might never get a chance to validate. Nonvoters don’t vote, after all. In all likelihood, people with a robust track record of voting will play an outsize role in the election, and at least in this poll, that’s good news for Mr. Biden. More

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      Political Debate Is Rife on TikTok. Politicians? Not So Much.

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      President Biden and the White House regularly post to millions of followers on social media, talking about the economy on Facebook, sharing Christmas decorations on YouTube, showcasing pardoned turkeys on Instagram, posting about infrastructure on the X platform. They’re even on Threads.But they aren’t speaking directly to 150 million Americans on TikTok. There’s no official @POTUS, White House or Biden-Harris 2024 account. You’ll find only one of the Republican presidential candidates there — and just 37 sitting Congress members, according to a New York Times review of accounts.Some pundits call next year the “TikTok election” because of the ballooning power and influence of the video app. TikTok may have been known for viral dances in 2020, but it has increasingly become a news source for millennials and Gen Z-ers, who will be a powerful part of the electorate. But less than a year from the election, most politicians are keeping their distance from the app, as efforts grow in Washington and elsewhere to restrict or ban it because of its ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance. Many lawmakers and regulators have expressed concern that TikTok could put users’ information into the hands of Beijing officials — an argument that the company disputes.By passing up a huge microphone because of those concerns, however, politicians are running the risk that they and their campaigns will not directly reach young people on the app. They might also be upstaged by savvy challengers who may not feel so conflicted and who can figure out how to use TikTok to their advantage.Many campaigns are trying to hedge their bets by turning to a growing network of TikTok political influencers to share their messages or by making short videos on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels in hopes that they’ll end up trending on TikTok. They have to give up some control to do that, and they need to persuade creators to work with them, often for little to no pay.To many political consultants, the politicians’ absence on TikTok is perhaps untenable.“The discourse is being shaped by this thing even if you yourself don’t use it,” said Teddy Goff, a top digital strategist for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, said that he was telling candidates “if you didn’t get it banned in 2023, you need to get on in 2024.”Several Republican presidential candidates have slammed TikTok at their recent debates and criticized Vivek Ramaswamy, the one candidate who has joined the app despite previously referring to it as “digital fentanyl.” He has defended joining TikTok, saying he did it to reach young voters.Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign team said that it did not need its own TikTok accounts to reach voters.“The reality is us having an account would not make a substantial difference in what we need to do on TikTok,” said Rob Flaherty, Mr. Biden’s deputy campaign manager and the former White House director of digital strategy. “The most important thing you can do is work through influencers.”TikTok arrived as a political force during the 2022 midterm campaign, when Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, successfully roasted his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, in a flurry of cutting videos, and Representative Jeff Jackson, Democrat of North Carolina, used a video filter to make his head look like a piece of broccoli while talking about reaching younger audiences.Annie Wu Henry, a 27-year-old digital strategist who helped run Mr. Fetterman’s TikTok account in 2022, said his use showcased TikTok’s potential reach and influence. She said she was amazed as she watched clips and memes that Mr. Fetterman’s campaign posted on the app take off “and become actual parts of conversation or picked up by traditional media sources.”Annie Wu Henry helped run social media for John Fetterman’s Senate campaign last year.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesWeeks after the elections, though, Washington’s sentiment toward the company turned sour. The Biden administration, as well as most states, some cities and some college campuses, has barred the app from being used on official devices. Some lawmakers have called for a national ban.Today, just 7 percent of the 533 Senators and Representatives have verified accounts on TikTok, and some have never posted, according to the analysis by The Times. None are Republican. The few who have joined often post to the app from separate “TikTok phones” because of security concerns, said Mike Nellis, a Democratic digital strategist.Mr. Jackson is the most popular, with 2.5 million followers, and Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, comes in second, with 1.4 million. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota each have over 200,000 followers.Ms. Wu said campaigns, including Mr. Biden’s, were potentially leaving major audiences on the table.“It needs to be figured out, and there’s almost this rush right now of who’s going to do it,” she said.The White House has tapped into TikTok in the past few years by working with social media stars to promote access to Covid-19 vaccines and to brief viewers on the Russia-Ukraine war and the Inflation Reduction Act. Several stars told The Times they weren’t paid but were eager to participate.That sort of workaround is expected to be even more popular next year. “There’s this booming industry under the surface of both agencies and platforms that are helping political organizations, social impact groups and politicians themselves sponsor content on TikTok and partner with creators and influencers to put out messaging,” said Brian Derrick, a political strategist and co-founder of Oath, a platform for guiding donations to Democratic campaigns.TikTok prohibits paid political ads, including paying creators for endorsements. It doesn’t encourage politicians to join the platform, though it does verify official accounts.A White House spokesperson, when asked about the use of TikTok, pointed to a rule barring the app from being used on federal devices as of March and declined to comment further.Harry Sisson, a 21-year-old junior at New York University and a political commentator on TikTok, is a rising creator, sharing news and opinions against backdrops of social media posts and articles.Yuvraj Khanna for The New York TimesHarry Sisson, a 21-year-old junior at New York University and a political commentator on TikTok, started posting in 2020, when he was a high school senior, to help Mr. Biden’s campaign for president. He has amassed 700,000 followers.Mr. Sisson said that in the past year and a half, Democratic groups had offered him more opportunities, including filming voting videos with Mr. Obama and watching the State of the Union at the White House. He wasn’t paid but was thrilled to be involved.With the White House in particular, he said, “They’ve always stressed, we’re not here to tell you guys what to say, if you disagree with us, we’re not going to be upset.”Mr. Sisson said he earned money through views on his TikTok videos and accepted some paid collaborations with advocacy groups that he believed in like Planned Parenthood, but his goal was to help elect Democrats. A.B. Burns-Tucker, a political TikTok creator, believes that her content has influenced voters, pointing to the approval of a recent Ohio ballot measure that enshrined a right to abortion in the State Constitution.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesA.B. Burns-Tucker, 34, is another political content creator who has joined White House briefings. She posts on TikTok as @iamlegallyhype, and has over 700,000 followers. She said her account took off after she made a popular explainer video about the Russia-Ukraine war, which colloquially referred to world leaders as “Big Daddy Biden” and “Big Bad P.” She says she’s now a news source for people who don’t tune in elsewhere.“I talk about current events with my friends all the time, but most of them are like, ‘Girl, I don’t watch the news, if you don’t tell me I don’t know,’” she said. “I took that and ran with it.”Ms. Burns-Tucker believes that she has influenced voters, pointing to the approval of a recent Ohio ballot measure that enshrined a right to abortion in the State Constitution. She was paid by Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights to make a TikTok video that urged people to vote for the ballot measure, which aligned with her personal beliefs, she said. “A lot of people in the comment section were like, I didn’t even know, I’ll be in line first thing tomorrow,” she added. The video passed 45,000 views.People like Mr. Sisson and Ms. Burns-Tucker don’t have a parallel among conservatives, said Amanda Carey Elliott, a digital consultant for Republicans.Ms. Elliott said that she was firmly against using TikTok based on the party’s stance on China — but that there was also less incentive for Republicans to use it.“There’s not a huge culture of TikTok influencers on the right — it’s just not the same for us,” she said.Still, some Republican consultants say the opportunity is too big to pass up. Mr. Wilson, the Republican strategist, has been trying to guide candidates on how to sign up for the app after criticizing it.“Candidates drive in cars all the time — that doesn’t mean they want cars to be unregulated,” he said. “There’s not necessarily a hypocrisy there if you’re clear about what your position is and how you’re using it.” More

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      Why Our “Great” Economy Is Making Young Americans Grumpy

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      As a part-time commentator on things economic, I’m often asked a seemingly straightforward question: If the economy is so good, why are Americans so grumpy?By many measures — unemployment, inflation, the stock market — the economy is strong. Yet only 23 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction, a strong headwind for President Biden’s approval ratings. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s formidable base of disgruntled voters endures.As I’ve engaged with my many interlocutors, I’ve concluded that voters have valid reasons for their negativity. In my view, blame two culprits: one immediate and impacting everybody, and another that particularly affects young people and is coming into view like a giant iceberg. Both sit atop the leaderboard of reasons for the sour national mood.While inflation has provided the proximate trigger for unhappy feelings, an understandable grimness about our broader economic prospects, particularly for younger Americans, is playing a major part. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The Wild Card in Taiwan’s Election: Frustrated Young Voters

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      An important bloc for the governing party, the island’s youth are focusing on bread-and-butter issues and have helped propel the rise of an insurgent party.In the months leading up to a pivotal presidential election for Taiwan, candidates have focused on who can best handle the island democracy’s volatile relationship with China, with its worries about the risks of war. But at a recent forum in Taipei, younger voters instead peppered two of the candidates with questions about everyday issues like rent, telecom scams and the voting age.It was a telling distillation of the race, the outcome of which will have far-reaching implications for Taiwan. The island is a potential flashpoint between the United States and China, which claims Taiwan as its territory and has signaled that it could escalate military threats if the Democratic Progressive Party wins.But many Taiwanese voters, especially those in their 20s and 30s, say they are weary of geopolitics and yearn for a campaign more focused on their needs at home. In interviews, they spoke of rising housing costs, slow income growth and narrowing career prospects. A considerable number expressed disillusionment with Taiwan’s two dominant parties, the governing Democratic Progressive Party and the opposition Nationalist Party.That sentiment has helped propel the rise of a third: the Taiwan People’s Party, an upstart that has gained traction in the polls partly by tapping into frustration over bread-and-butter issues, especially among younger people. The two main parties have also issued policy packages promising to address these anxieties.In interviews, younger voters voiced concerns about rising housing costs, slow income growth and narrowing career prospects. An Rong Xu for The New York TimesWhom young people ultimately vote for — and how many vote at all — could be a crucial factor in deciding the presidential election on Jan. 13. About 70 percent of Taiwanese in their 20s and 30s voted in the 2020 presidential election, a lower share than among middle-aged and older voters, according to official data. People ages 20 to 34 count for a fifth of Taiwan’s population, government estimates show.“We’re tired of the divisions and wars of words between political parties,” said Shen Chih-hsiang, a biotechnology student from Kaohsiung, a city in the south that is traditionally a stronghold of the Democratic Progressive Party. He remained undecided on whom to support.“Instead of worrying about the politics of major powers that are hard to change,” said Mr. Shen, 25, “I am more concerned about whether I can get a job and afford a house after graduation.”The frustrations voiced by Taiwan’s voters have highlighted some of the issues that the next administration will be under pressure to address. Taiwan is renowned for its cutting-edge semiconductor industry. But many younger workers at smaller companies earn relatively low incomes, and inflation can eat into any small pay increases. Housing prices have risen in many cities.Vice President Lai Ching-te, the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate, has led in the polls for months. But his lead has narrowed over Hou Yu-ih, the candidate for the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. Ko Wen-je, the candidate for the Taiwan People’s Party, has slipped in recent polls but could still play a decisive role by drawing youth votes that might have once gone to Mr. Lai’s party.Ko Wen-je, the candidate for the Taiwan People’s Party, at a news conference in Taipei last month. He has slipped in recent polls but could still play a decisive role by drawing youth votes.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesTo increase the chances of an opposition victory, Mr. Hou and Mr. Ko had briefly discussed forming an alliance. But the talks fell apart in a spectacular fashion late last month.“So much of this youth support for Ko Wen-je is really driven not by actual admiration for the man and his policies, but by frustration,” said Lev Nachman, a political science professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. He cited focus group discussions he had with Taiwanese students.“This idea that the D.P.P. and K.M.T. are both equally bad seems to have taken hold among a lot of younger voters,” Professor Nachman said, referring to the two main parties.In a recent poll by My Formosa, an online magazine, 29 percent of respondents ages 20 to 29 said they supported Mr. Ko and his running mate, a fall from the previous survey, while 36 percent backed Mr. Lai. Other polls suggested a similar pattern, thought experts stressed those results could change in the final weeks of the race.The rumble of discontent did not mean that Taiwanese were dismissive about the risks of conflict with China, said Chang Yu-meng, the president of the Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy. The group had organized the presidential forum last month, where Mr. Lai and Mr. Ko answered questions from young voters.“I think young people are still highly concerned about international topics,” Mr. Chang said in an interview after the forum, citing relations with China as an example. “But apart from that, they are really concerned about a diversity of issues.”Chang Yu-meng, the president of the Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy, said young voters were concerned about a broad range of issues in addition to relations with China.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesWinning the election would be a watershed for the Democratic Progressive Party. Once a scrappy outsider, it was founded in 1986 as a wave of mass protests and democratic activism pushed the Nationalist Party to abandon authoritarian rule. Since Taiwan began direct presidential elections in 1996, no party has won more than two successive terms.The Democratic Progressive Party has tended to win most of the youth vote, but after two terms in power under President Tsai Ing-wen, it is no longer a fresh face. And many younger Taiwanese tend to see the opposition Nationalists as a party too caught in the past and too attached to China.“To young people in Taiwan now, the D.P.P. is the establishment,” said Shelley Rigger, a professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, who has long studied Taiwanese politics and conducted interviews with younger voters. “Whatever the D.P.P. was going to do for young people, they should have done by now. There’s a lot of youth dissatisfaction with the economy.”Mr. Ko, a surgeon and a former mayor of Taipei, has leaped into the space created by this discontent. He supported the Democratic Progressive Party earlier in his political ascent but formed the Taiwan People’s Party in 2019 as an alternative to the establishment. At rallies across the island, he has promised to solve housing and economic problems with a no-nonsense approach that he says he honed in hospital emergency wards. Mr. Ko and his supporters argue that he can also thaw relations with China.Jennifer Yo-yi Lee is one of the legislative candidates for the Taiwan People’s Party who is hoping to tap into voter frustration. “Young people are tired of the vicious battle between parties,” Ms. Lee said.Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times“Taiwan has been stagnant for too long, and it needs some changes,” said Hsieh Yu-ching, 20, who recently attended a youth rally held by Mr. Ko.Mr. Lai recently announced a series of youth policies, promising to improve the job opportunities and mitigate high housing costs. He also announced as his running mate Bi-khim Hsiao, who has been Taiwan’s representative in Washington for more than three years. Ms. Hsiao could lift enthusiasm for the Democratic Progressives, several experts said.“I also want to acknowledge the many domestic and social challenges that our young people are facing,” Ms. Hsiao said at a news conference last month. She promised to do more to address anxiety over jobs, housing and the environment.Vice President Lai Ching-te, the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate, center left, announced as his running mate Bi-khim Hsiao, who has been Taiwan’s representative in Washington.Carlos Garcia Rawlins/ReutersThe parties all face the hurdle of coaxing voters to turn up at the ballot box. Taiwan’s minimum voting age, 20, is higher than in many other democracies, and people must vote where they are officially registered as residents. For some voters, especially younger ones, that means a long trip back to their hometowns.Millie Lin, who works at a technology company in Taipei and hails from Tainan, at the other end of the island, said she had not decided whether to go home to vote on Jan. 13.“When I see the struggles between political parties,” she said, “I sometimes feel that my vote can’t change anything.” More

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      Why Biden’s Weakness Among Young Voters Should Be Taken Seriously

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      Almost all the polling shows the same pattern. Could the coming campaign restore Democrats’ usual advantage?A solid youth vote edge could be in doubt for Democrats in 2024. Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesCould President Biden and Donald J. Trump really be locked in a close race among young voters — a group Democrats typically carry by double digits — as the recent Times/Siena polls suggest?To many of our readers and others, it’s a little hard to believe — so hard to believe that it seems to them the polls are flat-out wrong.Of course, it’s always possible that the polls are wrong. I’ve thought our own polling might be wrong before, and I would be very apprehensive if it were just our poll out on a limb. But this isn’t about one Times/Siena poll: Virtually every poll shows a close race between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump among young voters.When dozens of polls all say the same thing, it’s worth taking the polling seriously. It’s easy to remember that the polling can be wrong, but it can be easy to forget that the polling is usually in the ballpark. It’s a losing game to dismiss all polling simply because it doesn’t comport with expectations.Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with those who question whether the final election results will look like recent polls. Personally, I’m skeptical the final results will look quite like these polls. But even if you think the final results will be very different, it does not mean that the polls are “wrong” today.In fact, the belief that Mr. Biden will ultimately win young voters handily next year does nothing to distinguish two very different explanations for what we see in the polling:The polls are mostly wrong. They’re biased. For whatever reason, they fail to reach the Democratic-leaning young voters who propelled Mr. Biden to victory in 2020.The polls are mostly right. They’re reaching the young voters who backed Mr. Biden. But for now, these voters don’t support him. Over the next year, things could change.When it comes to the Times/Siena poll, we’ve put forward a lot of evidence consistent with the theory that the polling is mostly right, but that things might change.By the measures at our disposal, the voters 18 to 29 in our survey “look” right. They say they backed Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump in the last presidential election by a wide margin, 57-35, right in line with our expectations. They “look” right by other measures of partisanship as well. In the states with party registration, for instance, the Times/Siena young voters were registered Democrats by a 13-point margin, 35 percent to 22 percent. That’s almost exactly in line with their actual 13-point registration advantage, 36 percent to 23 percent.It’s important to emphasize that just because the polls “look” right doesn’t mean they are right. Our polls looked “right” by these kind of indicators in 2020. They were still wrong in important ways (though they were right about plenty as well, including racial and generational depolarization). But these data points nonetheless raise the burden on those who assert that the issue is partisan nonresponse bias, in which young Democrats simply aren’t answering their cellphones (99.8 percent of our young respondents were reached by cellphone).We see no evidence of that. In our polling, the problem for Mr. Biden isn’t too few young Democrats. It’s that many young Democrats don’t like him. Mr. Biden has just a 76-20 lead among young voters either registered as Democrats or who have previously voted in a Democratic primary. It’s just a 69-24 lead among young nonwhite Democrats. The dissent exists among self-identified Democrats, Democratic-leaners, Biden ’20 voters, and so on.This kind of intraparty dissent is rare but not without precedent in our polling. I’ve seen it in our congressional polls of highly educated suburbs full of Romney-Clinton voters. And I’ve seen it once before in a statewide presidential race: our final polls in 2016, when Mr. Trump suddenly surged to obtain 30 percent of white working-class registered Democrats. It was hard to believe, but it was fairly easy to explain and it raised the serious possibility of a Trump win.Similarly, I think it’s fairly straightforward to explain Mr. Biden’s weakness among young voters today, much as it was easy to explain Mrs. Clinton’s among white working-class voters in 2016. Young voters are by far the likeliest to say he’s just too old to be an effective president. Many are upset about his handling of the Israel-Hamas war. And all of this is against the backdrop of Mr. Biden’s longstanding weakness among young voters, who weren’t enthusiastic about him in 2020, and Mr. Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters, who are disproportionately young.But even if you don’t buy these explanations, that’s mostly just a reason to believe the numbers will shift over the next year, not a reason to dismiss the polling.After all, these polls do not depict the usual, stable basis for vote choice that we’ve become accustomed to in our polarized country. This is not an election where almost all voters like their own party’s candidate while disliking the opposing party’s candidate and disagreeing with them on the issues. Instead, we have an unstable arrangement: Millions of voters dislike both candidates, entertain minor-party candidates and when pressed often say they would vote for someone from the other major political party whom they disagree with on many important issues. These are the textbook conditions for volatility, and it’s entirely reasonable to doubt whether the arrangement will last once the campaign gets underway.We tried to illustrate the abstract possibility that “things can change” more concretely through an article in which we called back the Kamala-not-Joe voters — the young voters who back Vice President Kamala Harris over Mr. Trump but not Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump. It’s worth noting that these are the kinds of voters we would expect to find in the data if Mr. Biden really were performing this badly among an otherwise typical sample of young voters — much as the 2016 polling featured plenty of white working-class Trump voters who approved of Barack Obama and who said they voted for him in 2012.There’s one other way the results might end up “normal,” even with today’s polling: a low youth turnout. Almost all of the polls nowadays are among registered voters, not likely voters, and most of Mr. Biden’s weakness is among disengaged voters on the periphery of the electorate. In the latest Times/Siena polling, Mr. Biden leads by 15 points among young voters who turned out in the midterms, while he trails by three points among young voters who didn’t turn out. If these irregular, disaffected voters simply choose not to vote, Mr. Biden will most likely have a healthy lead with young voters.There are countless other reasons the polls today may not ultimately align with the final result. For one, Mr. Trump could be convicted of federal crimes in six months. But just because the polls aren’t necessarily “predictive” of the final outcome does not mean they’re wrong. It doesn’t mean they’re not worth taking seriously, either. For the campaigns, taking the numbers seriously today may wind up being exactly what changes the numbers tomorrow. More

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      The Joe Biden Re-election Dilemma

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      Joe Biden should be far and away the favorite to win re-election in 2024.The American economy continues to gather strength. He has a solid string of policy victories. And his main Republican opponent, Donald Trump, is lost in a jungle of legal troubles.The Democratic Party continues to score electoral victories as voters coalesce on the issue of abortion rights, as we saw in Ohio, Virginia and Kentucky on Tuesday night. But it is not clear at this point whether Biden’s fate is linked to down-ballot candidates or issues.In Ohio, where abortion access and marijuana legalization won, and in Pennsylvania, where a Democratic State Supreme Court justice won, Trump appears to hold an edge in several polls. Biden is polling ahead in Virginia, where Democrats flipped control of the House of Delegates and maintained control of the Senate, but it’s also a state where Democrats have won the last several presidential elections.And while abortion has been a winning issue for Democrats, it’s not clear yet if it will be on the ballot next November in any swing states — Arizona is one where it might be — or if Biden will effectively capitalize on the issue.Taken together, this is why Biden’s continued struggles in the polls are so worrisome. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Sunday found Biden trailing Trump in five of six swing states. We’re a year out from Election Day, but Biden’s relative weakness compared to Trump’s position is still shocking.The poll would be easier to dismiss if it were the only one showing Biden’s weakness against Trump, but it’s not. Recent polls from CBS News and ABC News/Ipsos also reveal troubling signs for Biden.David Axelrod, who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, posted on social media on Sunday that if Biden continues to run, he will surely be the Democratic nominee in 2024. But, Axelrod said: “What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?” because “the stakes of miscalculation here are too dramatic to ignore.”Some understandably thought that Axelrod was suggesting that Biden drop out of the race, but Axelrod himself insisted that was not what he was saying.I don’t view Axelrod’s comments as controversial. They’re not a dig at Biden for his performance. It is ridiculous to ask people to ignore the erosion of Biden’s support among demographic groups that he must secure to win re-election.The risk of a Biden loss is real, and no amount of political ego or posturing can disguise that.According to the Times/Siena poll, Biden is losing ground among younger, nonwhite and less engaged voters.At The Times’s Nate Cohn put it, “Long-festering vulnerabilities on his age, economic stewardship, and appeal to young, Black and Hispanic voters have grown severe enough to imperil his re-election chances.”The economic piece is a conundrum. The economy is improving, but many people don’t see it or feel it, and they blame Biden. There is a clear disconnect in the data. And it is possible that people are also injecting a more general dissatisfaction with the direction of the country into their feelings about the economy. Either way, this may be fixable.The age issue, which I view as largely a manufactured one, is one that has calcified. Unlike feelings about the economy, which change as conditions shift, Biden is only getting older.What is his campaign going to do? Put him in more jeans and rolled-up dress shirts? Have him jog up to the mic at rallies? Make sure that he appears tanned and rested? Every scenario designed to signal youth and virility has the downside potential of looking ridiculous.I still remember the cringe-worthy moment in 2019 when an Iowa voter raised questions about Biden’s age, and Biden responded by challenging the man to a push-up contest. No more of that, I beg you.Biden is an elderly man, yes. And he will look and behave in ways that demonstrate that. But he seems to me to be handling his job well now and capable of continuing. The irony is that Trump is also elderly, but the immaturity in his defiance, anger and petulance can read as young.Lastly, the minority outreach question is also more complicated than it might appear. I sense a growing dissatisfaction with Biden, particularly among young minorities, and the war in Gaza is only making it worse. The passions are so high now that I think this tension will remain even after the war ends.Also, both parties and all demographics have segments that are less engaged and informed, but those groups are also open to drift, even if in the end they would be voting against their own interests.Recently, the rising rapper Sexyy Red said in an interview that “the hood” started to love Trump once he started “getting Black people out of jail and giving people that free money” in the form of stimulus checks.Never mind that Trump and Republicans opposed those stimulus checks and Democrats pushed them — that “free money” is still associated in the minds of many with Trump.This just underscores how Biden has trouble on both ends of the engagement spectrum among some young voters: Some of the highly engaged ones criticize him for the U.S.’s actions in the war in Gaza, and some of those less engaged mythologize his predecessor.It is possible that more and better outreach and engagement could change some of these realities, but make no mistake: We are in a very risky situation where the one person likely standing between Trump — and Trump’s destructive impulses — and the White House is a president who is limping into a re-election bid.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      The War Between Israel and Hamas Is Splintering the Democratic Coalition

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      The Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel and Israel’s retaliatory strikes on Gaza are creating a fissure between Democratic constituencies crucial to President Biden’s campaign for a second term in the White House.The Nov. 2 Quinnipiac University Poll found that half of all voters approved of the way Israel is responding to the Oct. 7 attacks, while 35 percent disapproved. Among all voters, however, one key subgroup dissented — 18-to-34-years-olds — a constituency that provided Biden with enough votes in 2020 to put him over the top. These young voters faulted Israel’s response to the attacks, 52-32 percent.Exit poll data from 2020 shows that Donald Trump beat Biden by small margins among the 60 percent of the electorate that was 45 or older, that Biden won 52-46 among the 23 percent of voters aged 30 to 44 and that the one bloc decisively in favor of Biden was voters aged 18 to 29, who made up 17 percent of the electorate and backed the Democratic nominee 60-36.Perhaps equally significant, in March 2023, more than six months before Hamas’s attack on Israel, Gallup found that “sympathy toward the Palestinians among U.S. adults is at a new high of 31 percent, while the proportion not favoring either side is at a new low of 15 percent. The 54 percent of Americans sympathizing more with the Israelis is similar to last year’s 55 percent, but it is the lowest since 2005.”This shift in American public opinion toward Palestinians provides crucial insight into what my Times colleagues Jennifer Medina and Lisa Lerer wrote on Oct. 20:Progressive Jews who have spent years supporting racial equity, gay and transgender rights, abortion rights and other causes on the American left — including opposing Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank — are suddenly feeling abandoned by those who they long thought of as allies. This wartime shift represents a fundamental break within a liberal coalition that has long powered the Democratic Party.There is, Medina and Lerer add:a politically engaged swath of American Jewry who are reaching a breaking point. They have long sought an end to the Israeli government’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza, supported a two-state solution and protested the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu.But in the Hamas attacks, many saw an existential threat, evoking memories of the Holocaust and generations of antisemitism, and provoking anxiety about whether they could face attacks in the United States. And they were taken aback to discover that many of their ideological allies not only failed to perceive the same threats but also saw them as oppressors deserving of blame.Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my question on the domestic political consequences of the violence in the Middle East:For Democrats, the Gaza war exacerbates pre-existing coalitional tensions along age, racial, religious, and ideological lines. The pro-Hamas faction is younger, nonwhite, Muslim and secular, and more progressive. The pro-Israel faction is older, whiter, Jewish and Christian, and more centrist.Biden cannot afford to lose even thin slices of the Democratic electorate, Cain argued: “As the Siena/NYT poll indicates, small swings in turnout of the Democratic base can doom Biden. This is what happened to Hillary behind the blue curtain in 2016.”“The longer and bloodier the war,” Cain added, “the harder it will be for the Democratic coalition.”I asked Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “Do you see the conflict hurting Biden’s prospects or helping them?” He replied by email: “Right now, there is no question it is dividing the Democratic base and hurting Biden’s approval.” But, Ornstein quickly added, “the election is a year away, and, more important, all will be shaped by the outcome of the conflict.”Biden’s support of Israel has produced exceptional, if not unprecedented, dissent among party loyalists and government employees.On Nov. 3, Liz Skalka, Daniel Marans and Akbar Shahid Ahmed reported on the HuffPost website that more than 50 staff members of the Democratic National Committee had signed a letter calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.“As strategic partners to the administration … we feel it is the D.N.C.’s moral obligation to urge President Biden to publicly call for a cease-fire,” they wrote. “With the number of civilian deaths growing rapidly each day, we must be clear: the Israeli government’s unrelenting military bombardment and blockading of vital supplies entering Gaza must end.”Along similar lines, a Nov. 1 Foreign Policy article by Robbie Gramer disclosed that there was a “storm of dissent brewing in the State Department.”A group of State Department employees opposed to administration policies is gathering signatures for a “dissent cable,” Gramer wrote, a formal procedure created by the State Department “to allow its users the opportunity to bring dissenting or alternative views on substantive foreign policy issues.”Gramer reported that “many U.S. diplomats were privately angered, shocked and despondent by what they perceived as a de facto blank check from Washington for Israel to launch a massive military operation in Gaza at an immense humanitarian cost for the besieged Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”In a separate Nov. 3 Foreign Policy article, “More U.S. Officials Are Anonymously Calling for a Gaza Cease-Fire,” Amy Mackinnon and Gramer wrote:Hundreds of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) officials have reportedly signed a letter calling on the Biden administration to push for “an immediate cease-fire and cessation of hostilities” in the Israel-Hamas war, according to a copy of the petition obtained by Foreign Policy.On Nov. 3, 56 Democratic members of the House and two senators wrote to Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, demanding that the administration “make clear that Israel must conduct military operations within the scope of international law and minimize civilian harm.”“We must continue to hold ourselves and our closest allies to the highest standards of conduct,” the authors of the letter went on to say,even at times of great tragedy and violence. While we firmly believe in Israel’s right to defend itself, we are gravely concerned by Israel’s military operation and conduct that fails to limit harm to noncombatants and vulnerable populations. Nearly 9,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 3,600 children. Abiding by international law is not only morally imperative, but also legally required per international humanitarian law, and strategically important to prevent regional escalation and to preserve global support for Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack.One underlying reason the Israel versus Hamas conflict — including both the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel and the subsequent Israeli counterattack on Gaza — is particularly problematic for Democrats is that psychological research shows that liberals are more inclined to feel empathy than conservatives.In a May 2018 paper, “Are Liberals and Conservatives Equally Motivated to Feel Empathy Toward Others?” Yossi Hasson, Maya Tamir, Kea S. Brahms, J. Christopher Cohrs and Eran Halperin reported that “on average and across samples, liberals wanted to feel more empathy and experienced more empathy than conservatives did.”Their conclusion found support in a paper that was published in May, “Ideological Values Are Parametrically Associated With Empathy Neural Response to Vicarious Suffering,” by Niloufar Zebarjadi, Eliyahu Adler, Annika Kluge, Mikko Sams and Jonathan Levy of Aalto University in Finland. The five authors used neuroimaging “to reveal an asymmetry in the neural empathy response as a function of political ideology.”The research by Zebarjadi and her four colleagues “revealed a typical rhythmic alpha-band ‘empathy response’ in the temporal-parietal junction. This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group” of those studied.Jeremy Konyndyk, who served as the director of USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance from 2013-17, gave voice to this empathy in an interview with Politico about the Israel/Hamas conflict:What the rest of the world sees is that when civilian apartment buildings are bombed by Russia in Ukraine, the U.S. government forcefully condemns this as illegitimate. And when they see similar tactics being used by the I.D.F. in Gaza, they see lock-step support from the U.S. government. This dramatically undermines the credibility of international humanitarian law.The fundamental foundation of international law is that certain things are wrong full stop because it happens to humans. That’s why it makes the attacks by Hamas wrong — deeply horrific and a grave violation of international humanitarian law. And that’s why it makes war crimes in response wrong.One of the striking findings in polling conducted in the aftermath of Oct. 7 is how much more supportive young voters are of Hamas and how much less supportive they are of Israel.The Oct. 19 Harvard-Harris poll asked 2,116 registered voters: “In general in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?”By 84 to 16 percent, voters chose Israel, with everyone 25 or older backing the Jewish state by three to one or better. The one exception was voters 18 to 25, with 52 percent saying they sided with Israel and 48 percent with Hamas.Asked “Do you think the Hamas killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians in Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?” an overwhelming majority of registered voters surveyed, 76 percent, said it could not be justified; 24 percent said it could be.Among the youngest voters, however, 51 percent of those 18 to 24 said the killing “can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians” and 49 percent said it cannot be. Voters 25 to 34 were split, 48 percent saying the killing of Israelis can be justified, 52 saying it cannot.In researching their March 2022 article, “The Young American Left and Attitudes About Israel,” Laura Royden and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Harvard and Tufts, “surveyed 3,500 U.S. adults, including oversampling of 2,500 adults aged 18-30” to explore why “young people and the ideological far left have developed distinctly negative views toward Israel.”“In June 2021,” they write, “immediately following armed conflict in Israel and Palestine, liberal Democrats were three times more likely than conservative Republicans to say that the U.S.A. was too supportive of Israel. Three in five Republicans, but only one in five Democrats, agreed in May 2021 that it was very important for the U.S.A. to help protect Israel.”Among Democrats aged 18-35, however, they found that “respondents were three times more likely to say the U.S.A. should lean more toward Palestinians than Israel.”Digging deeper, Royden and Hersh found a clear ideological and age pattern:On both ideological extremes, more young adults than older adults hold an unfavorable view of Israel. Moderate young adult favorable attitudes toward Israel (58 percent) is indistinguishable from moderate older adults (at 62 percent). The difference is largest on the far left, where Israel favorability is 27 percentage points less among younger very liberal adults (at 33 percent) for young adults compared with older adults (at 60 percent). Young very conservative adults are supportive of Israel (66 percent), but substantially less so than older very conservative adults (82 percent). Clearly, the most left-leaning young adults have the lowest rating of Israel.If many young people are disaffected with the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict between Hamas and Israel, their discontent pales in comparison with that of Muslim and Arab Americans.The Arab American Institute commissioned John Zogby Strategies to conduct a survey of 500 Arab Americans between Oct. 23 and Oct. 27. For Biden, the results were striking: “Support for President Biden in the upcoming election has plummeted among Arab Americans voters, dropping from 59 percent in 2020 to 17 percent, a 42-point decrease.”Two-thirds of Arab Americans “have a negative view of President Biden’s response to the current violence in Palestine and Israel,” according to the poll. “A strong majority of Arab Americans believe the U.S. should call for a cease-fire on the current violence.”In terms of partisan identification, Zogby wrote in his summary, the surveymarks the first time in our 26 years of polling Arab American voters in which a majority did not claim to prefer the Democratic Party. In 2008 and 2016, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by two to one. In this poll, 32 percent of Arab Americans identified as Republican as opposed to just 23 percent who identified as Democrats.In 2020, Biden carried Michigan by 154,181 votes. Arab Americans played a significant role in his victory there.Farah Pandith, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out in an email that until recently, Muslim Americans had become a core Biden constituency:In 2020, American Muslims were involved in fund-raising and volunteering in the Biden campaign. They were mobilizing themselves to get Muslims out to vote, to educate and to — importantly — be publicly seen doing so. With so much hardship in the years post 9/11 and accusations that American Muslims could not be loyal Americans and practicing Muslims, this dedicated effort is compelling. These generations not only wanted to debunk that false narrative, but they wanted to see their candidate win — believing that Biden would understand their lived experience in America in a post 9/11 world and govern accordingly.Now, Pandith wrote, “it is clear that the hard-won trust and warm relationship Biden enjoyed with the vast number of American Muslims has been diminished. For many, their confidence in and loyalty to Biden has seemed to evaporate.”I asked a political operative closely tied to the Biden campaign — who insisted on anonymity in order to speak forthrightly — about the ramifications of the struggle between Israel and Hamas:There are open wounds and we are far from the war’s end. And there are hostages still out there. And Americans both tire and get bored with foreign conflicts after the messy part is done. But I do know one thing: Trump was the president of the Muslim ban and he called for a Muslim ban 2.0, so I don’t think a lot of Arab Americans are going his way. I think there is time for Biden to get them back. Not all of them.Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, argued by email that concern over Biden’s problems in dealing with the Mideast conflict may be overblown:Americans traditionally do not hold consistent or well-informed opinions on foreign policy. The further a foreign conflict or global issue is removed from people’s day to day lives, the less they are going to hold any meaningful opinion about it or use it to guide their political preferences.In addition, Wronski continued, “the role of negative partisanship may outweigh Muslim Americans’ criticisms of Biden’s foreign policy.” Some voters may defect to a third-party candidate or abstain from voting, but “a potential second Trump term can be more threatening to Muslim Americans domestically, given Trump’s record and rhetoric toward minority and marginalized groups, than Biden’s foreign policy agenda.”I asked Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard, for his perspective. He replied to my query by email:My sense right now from our data is that Biden is in a very complicated political situation. Jewish voters, while only 2 percent of the electorate, provided key support (and voted about 70 percent for Biden) in pivotal states, where every group counts. Biden did even better among Muslim voters, winning 90 percent of the vote. Muslims are only about one-half of one percent of the electorate. Both groups are small shares of the overall vote, but they both vote Democratic. Biden risks alienating one Democratic group or the other if this is not handled right.Above all though, the situation in the Middle East is terrible. It is a human tragedy. Every president in modern history has tried to find a resolution to the Israel-Palestine question. Biden now faces the task of containing this conflict so that it does not escalate into a broader Middle East war. There’s not much upside here, politically or morally, just avoiding potentially terrible outcomes.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Biden Is Behind, and How He Could Come Back

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      A polling deficit against Trump across six key states is mainly about younger, nonwhite and less engaged voters. Kamala Harris performs slightly better.Four years ago, Joe Biden was the electability candidate — the broadly appealing, moderate Democrat from Scranton who promised to win the white working-class voters who elected Donald J. Trump.There are few signs of that electoral strength today. More