Young Voters Are Furious at Biden. That’s Nice.

Critics argue that Biden's support for Israel is driving young voters away and dooming his re-election chances, but that's not what the data says.

There’s a new narrative permeating through the news media and left-wing activist class: Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel is losing him the support of young progressives, and if he doesn’t course correct, the Democratic Party is doomed. The president has condemned Hamas as “pure, unadulterated evil” and pledged solidarity with Israel, stating “I am a Zionist” during his wartime visit. He has also called for humanitarian aid for Gaza, warned Israel not to repeat the same mistakes the US made in the wake of 9/11, and stressed that we “can’t ignore the humanity of the Palestinian people.” Young progressives stopped listening at “Zionist.” Now the press are dislocating their wrists from the intensity of their handwringing in op-ed after op-ed about how Biden is facing a “youth revolt” that could cost him the 2024 election. The data, however, tells a different story. Politicians don’t care what young progressives say or think, and for good reason.

It’s certainly true that young people are, by far, the most anti-Israel age demographic. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that 52 percent of registered US voters aged 18 to 34 disapprove of Israel’s response to the October 7th pogrom. That same survey showed that young respondents also consider anti-Muslim bigotry to be a more concerning problem than anti-Jewish bigotry by a margin of 15 points. (According to FBI statistics, Jews have consistently suffered more hate crimes than any other religious group in America. There has been a 37 percent increase in October, reaching a nearly three-decade high.) Likewise, young DC staffers, Gen-Z pressure groups, and social media activists have howled their fury — to say nothing of the unhinged depravity unfolding on the streets.

But the data doesn’t bear this rage out. A CBS poll from mid-September found that 65 percent of voters under 30 said they would vote for Biden. A later CBS poll from early November found a decline of… three points. Other recent polls of key states show slightly more movement. Even if there were a massive sea change in youth support, however, it’s not the 10-alarm fire that lefty writers would have us believe. There’s a reason why Biden isn’t scrambling to appease the college protesters caterwauling “Biden, Biden you can’t hide, you signed off on genocide!”, and it’s not just because he can’t hear them. Young progressives don’t vote.

Broken down by age, young people are the least reliable voting bloc going back at least 60 years. Even in 2020, an election cycle in which overall turnout hit a nearly 30-year high, only about half of 18 to 24-year-olds voted, compared to three-quarters of people aged 65 to 74, and two-thirds of the electorate as a whole. That’s for presidential elections. For midterms, this dynamic intensifies. In 2018 and 2022, people aged 18 to 29 accounted for a paltry 10 percent of all voters.

“Voter turnout rates among selected age groups in U.S. presidential elections from 1964 to 2020.” Source: Statista

By political ideology, the leftmost cohort, described by Pew Research as the “progressive left”, makes up just six percent of the public. To make matters worse, they are disproportionately concentrated in the urban areas of safely blue states in the Northeast and West Coast, where Joseph Stalin could run with a D next to his name and win by eight points. This means that the lion’s share of hard left voters could sit any given presidential election out without affecting much of anything.

Progressives are an insignificant voting bloc that do not sway elections. At the national scale, they are hardly a blip on the radar. Even at the local level, in deeply Democratic strongholds such as New York City, the progressive vote is often not powerful enough to elect their own preferred candidates. Instead, they tend to create a fractured field from which moderates emerge victorious, as I covered during the 2021 mayoral race. Bernie Sanders experienced firsthand in 2016 and again in 2020 that a path to victory which depends upon young progressive turnout is no path at all. Young voters are the deadbeat pothead roommates of politics.¹ Relying on them as your lifeline or calling on them as your cavalry is a recipe for crushing defeat and disappointment.

Source: Pew Research

The progressive youth vote is taken for granted not only because it is small, unreliable, non-decisive, and out of step with public opinion, but also because Democrats know that the US is a political duopoly and that leftists have no other viable option. Not even the most histrionic “youth revolt” prognosticators are seriously suggesting that these voters will cast their ballots for Donald Trump, or any other Republican. Much was made in 2016 of the 12 percent of Bernie Sanders primary voters who voted for Trump later that year, but they were not progressives voting for Trump out of foolish spite — they were disaffected populists voting for populists.

The worst case scenario for Biden is not that self-identified progressives vote for Trump, but that they cast their ballot into the garbage with a protest vote for Jill Stein, or Cornel West, or some other third party candidate, or that they simply stay home. As to concerns about the so-called “spoiler effect”, studies show that third party voters are not, for the most part, siphoned from the Republicans or Democrats, but rather disillusioned voters who would, if deprived the option of third parties, simply stay home.

All of this is to illustrate how little Biden has to gain by changing his decades-long position on Israel/Palestine, but he also has much to lose by doing so. Polls before and after October show a 12-point increase in the number of US adults who consider Israel an ally that shares American values and interests. 55 percent believe the US should continue to send weapons and military aid to Israel, and more Americans sympathize with Israel than Palestine by a 19-point margin. When adjusted by age, middle-aged and senior voters, the two most reliable cohorts, support military aid by 57 and 73 percent, respectively, and sympathize with Israelis more than Palestinians by a 24-point and 35-point margin, respectively.

Left-leaning commentators have raised similar concerns about Biden jeopardizing Muslim voters, however the same calculus applies. There are just shy of 1.1 Million Muslim voters in the US. This is not a heavily polled portion of the electorate, but some recent surveys suggest that a large majority, ranging from 84 percent in Michigan, to 83 percent of Arab voters nationally, do not plan on voting for Biden. In 2020, Biden won the Arab-American vote with 59 percent. There are, by contrast, over six million Jews registered to vote in the US. Crunching that figure with average voting rates from 2020 equals over four million voters, quadruple the size of the Muslim vote — and 87 percent of American Jews support US military aid to Israel.

Polls currently show a neck-and-neck race between Biden and Trump. Biden could well lose for a number of reasons, including age, optics, the economy, social or cultural issues, gaffes, and so forth. But even if he does lose, it will most assuredly not be because he failed to secure enough of the progressive youth vote. Last year, many of the most vocal anti-Zionists couldn’t locate Gaza on a map. A year from now, many will have moved on to the new Current Thing. And as we have seen, both in the 2022 midterms and in the 2023 state and local races, news of the Democrats’ demise is often greatly exaggerated.

For Biden to do a 180 on Israel/Palestine wouldn’t just be a betrayal of the views he has espoused for generations, it would also be a colossal political blunder. Alienating a large number of reliable voters to curry favor with a much smaller number of less reliable voters, as a strategy for winning, is just about the most insane thing a politician could ever do. The chatter online makes it seem as though Biden must lurch to the hard left on Israel in order to shore up support (Just look at the TikTok hashtag trends!). The progressive left and Palestine activists would love nothing more than for us to believe this myth, but according to the data, it’s not just bad policy — it’s bad politics.

See also: “Cancel Culture Comes for Anti-Semites”

“Hamas’s Useful Idiots”

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1. Temperamentally, perhaps more like angry drunks.