Washington Post: The Gaza war and youth voting for Biden in the 2024 elections
The Washington Post reported that some young American voters who are dissatisfied with President Joe Biden’s position on Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip are considering voting for a third candidate other than the current president and his predecessor, Donald Trump, or abstaining from casting their votes in the upcoming presidential elections in 2024.
The Washington Post conducted interviews with university students who revealed that Biden’s handling of the Gaza war threatens to weaken their enthusiasm for him and divide many students and other young people over how to use their voices and organizational power.
Against the backdrop of their concern about President Biden’s advanced age, a number of liberal students expressed their openness to candidates from other parties, and perhaps their frustration with the return of competition between Biden and Trump, which indicates that they will change their focus on voting in the elections for Senate and Congress members, and state governors.
Some students mentioned that they face an ethical dilemma about how to vote, and whether to vote at all in the upcoming presidential elections.
The Washington Post indicates that the younger generation and millennial voters continued to support the Democratic Party candidates, and are credited with overturning the voting results in swing states such as Michigan in favor of the Democratic candidate, which ensured that Biden won the 2020 presidential elections.
Although Americans youth generally stand with Israel, opinion polls show that their positions are witnessing increasing polarization among parties and across generations.
These polls showed that 48% of the younger generation believe that the Israeli military response to the Hamas attack on October 7 is exaggerated, compared to the opinion of the general public, which reached 38%.
The Washington Post indicates that most young people don’t agree with Biden’s handling of the current situation.
A recent poll conducted by NBC News showed that 70% of voters between the ages of 18 and 34 disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war.
Many experts and activists have long attributed this division to the younger generations’ rejection of the right-wing policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s siege of Gaza and its occupation of the West Bank, and to comparisons between the United States’ treatment of minorities and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as the Washington Post states in its report.
Young voters are expected to make up nearly 40% of the electorate in the 2024 elections, and their influence has already been demonstrated by their success in making the majority of Wisconsin Supreme Court justices liberal, and they also increased turnout in the elections that took place this month in the universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia.
But the Washington Post adds that the decline in participation among young voters may complicate Biden’s re-election attempt, especially in key battleground states such as Michigan.
The Washington Post quoted one of the students as saying that she was previously excited to vote for president for the first time in 2024, but now she isn’t sure who she will vote for, adding that Biden’s opinion of the ceasefire in Gaza caused a major rift, so much so that her friends began calling him genocidal atmosphere.
