How Much Will Israel or Convictions Matter In November?

I'll start out with the month's big headlines....the criminal convictions of both former President Trump and current President Biden's son.  In ordinary times, it would be an astonishing development that the son of the current President was just convicted of felonies and an even more astonishing development that the former President and current opposition party nominee was also convicted of felonies only months before the election, but for nearly a decade now we haven't lived in ordinary times and we probably won't live in ordinary times again anytime soon.  As proof that times are far from normal, the Presidential polling hasn't moved an inch since Trump's felony conviction...and very few expected that it would.  A potential future President who cannot visit dozens of countries because he's a convicted felon is no longer a dealbreaker for a majority of American voters, or at least a near-majority.

To clarify, polling data since Trump's conviction has indicated that 50% of American voters consider the felony conviction "disqualifying" to run for President, and 56% of voters say Trump should be replaced as the Republican nominee as a result of his conviction.  Insofar as any polling is trustworthy in 2024, that seems damaging, but the head to head numbers with Biden haven't changed.  How is this possible?  Because a significant faction of the poll respondents who agree that Trump's conviction is disqualifying and believe that he should be replaced as the nominee still plan to vote for him.  By arnd large, they are the Nikki Haley primary voters....who still find a vote for Biden to be a more unthinkable proposition than voting for a convicted felon who they deem disqualified to run for President.  This is where we are in America in 2024.

This is the sort of thing that will have to be shaken out by the electorate, either shaving or not shaving a few thousand votes away at the margins in a handful of battleground states.  After a fully litigated general election campaign where all of the implications of Trump's felony conviction are broken down, it's possible that enough voters in these key states will decide they have enough of a problem with his rap sheet to cost him the election.  Particularly with as bad as the polls have been in recent cycles, I'm not discounting the possibility that there could be a larger electoral impact from Trump's ever-escalating character issues than is currently apparent.  On the other hand, I also won't be surprised to see that the electoral impact is nonexistent or even beneficial to Trump by initiating his MAGA army even more aggressively and goosing the base vote.

On the other hand, a potentially more salient wild card is the situation in the Middle East.  Polls indicate it rates low on the list of issues that motivate voters, but all one has to do is look at the headlines and see the protests all over the country to confirm that those who are motivated on the issue are extremely motivated.  And while it's likely that the impact will be concentrated at Ivy League campuses and a few communities in suburban Detroit, I'm struck by how many poll respondents with Anglo surnames are speaking up to pollsters to announce that the Israeli/Gaza situation is the most important issue for them.

 

Most problematic for Biden about this development, however widespread it is, is that almost every "Gaza voter" is someone he can expect to be subtracted from his vote column with almost zero upside potential.   Even if most of those Gaza voters don't end up going from Trump (and I suspect a non-zero number will in fact go Trump just out of petulance), Biden needs all of these Muslim Americans and woke college students if he's gonna get to 270 electoral votes.  Considering the 2020 election came down to fewer than 44,000 voters in three combined states, it's not at all difficult to imagine a scenario where the Gaza voters are the difference between victory and defeat.

The November 2024 election will not only give us a snapshot of how many people actually care about the situation in the Middle East enough to base their vote on it, it will also give us a snapshot of how disconnected the general "youth vote" is from the Ivy League college campus "youth vote".  I've been questioning the diminishing utility of polls for the last few cycles, but my radar still went up when recent polls have indicated that young voters side with the Palestinians over the Israelis by a 2-1 margin.  If correct, those numbers point to a seismic generational transformation in American public opinion on this issue in the last 20 years or so.  

 

But given that these same polling samples are showing a double-digit shift toward Trump since 2020 among young voters, it's hard to reconcile.  Sure, Trump is the challenger against an incumbent President whose current alliance with Israel is under scrutiny, but Trump is also vastly more bullish in his support for Israel than Biden, which would be obvious to those with the most basic knowledge of the situation, let alone the young people on the streets protesting and telling pollsters it's the issue that's most important to them.  So either polling is hopelessly broken or young voters are hopelessly broken with an incurable cognitive dissonance.....planning to avenge Biden's coziness with Israel by voting for a challenger promising to be much more cozy yet with Israel.

Ultimately though, I suspect what election night will make most clear is the continuing epic divide between those with college degrees and those without, young and old alike.  This will manifest itself in a multitude of ways, but probably none more than the situation in the Middle East.  A small and shrinking cohort of young people catapulted into foreign policy activism by the college campus culture are allegedly representative of the youth vote, but may in fact represent a microscopic faction of the actual youth vote.  And if this is the case, it could represent a significant demographic flashpoint directly adjacent to collapsing college enrollment numbers nationally, possibly even to the point of becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.  If increasing numbers of young people see their college-age contemporaries decrying the niche crusade for Palestinian liberation as the cause of their lives, it could help persuade even larger numbers of them to forgo higher education as neither the crushing expense nor the activist political culture seems consistent with their values.  Much as the Democrats fancied themselves having a "coalition of the ascendant" during the Obama years, these developments present a very significant problem for them moving forward because voters only seem to become Democrats in the modern era if they go to college.