Biden Is Losing the Election in the Center, Not the Left

Earlier this year, national pundits began connecting President Joe Biden’s poor standing in the presidential election with the revolt on the left over his policy on Gaza. Michigan was the epicenter of the crisis, and polls seemed to indicate Biden’s unpopularity was especially acute there. With its large Arab American population and vocal protests in Ann Arbor, Michigan supplied evidence that left-wing alienation had spilled over beyond the progressive niche into the realm of concrete national political stakes.

There’s no longer any evidence this is true. The polling average shows that, far from having a Michigan problem, Michigan is Biden’s best swing state, or his least-bad one, anyway. At the moment, he’s trailing by 0.3 points in Michigan, a smaller deficit than Wisconsin (-1.2), Pennsylvania (-2.7), or the Sunbelt states (where he’s trailing by around five points or more).

Yet, even though Biden turns out not to have a specific “Michigan problem,” the broader narrative — that Biden’s election depends on winning back young left-wing voters alienated by his centrism in general and support for Israel in particular — has calcified.

The causes of Biden’s lagging campaign are banal. The inflation run-up of 2021–22 tanked his approval ratings, and his aged demeanor makes it harder for people to believe he is fixing the problem. That run-up has simultaneously made Trump’s presidency appear retrospectively better — a CNN poll found 55 percent of respondents consider Trump’s term a success.

It is true that Biden is disproportionately shedding non-white Democrats to Trump. But that is totally consistent with the fact that Black and Latino Democrats are more moderate than white Democrats. When you lose votes in the center, the most moderate members of your coalition are the ones who defect.

That hypothesis is consistent with findings by Blueprint (a moderate but partisan Democratic Party outfit). Analyzing polls of voters who switched from Biden in 2020 to Trump now, it finds more than half identify as “moderate,” one-third as “conservative,” and only 14 percent as liberal. The phenomenon of far-left voters looking to punish Biden certainly exists, but its numerical scale is tiny.

What about the angry youth? The Harvard youth poll asked voters age 18–29 to rank 16 issues in importance. The Israel-Palestine conflict ranked 15th. The issues at the top of the list — inflation (which ranked first), health care, housing — are the same traditional meat-and-potatoes issues that concern other voting cohorts. Young people are angry with Biden for basically the same reason everybody else is.

So why has the narrative of disillusioned young progressives played such a dominant role in the media’s coverage? One reason is that the progressive movement has several groups whose entire mission is to push the Democratic Party leftward by threatening that “the base” won’t be “energized” unless various policy demands are met. These organizations have little to no grassroots support, so their entire job is to get the media to report on their claims. They are good at their job.

Media frequently treats these claims, which provide juicy intraparty drama, at face value. A recent Politico story is a fairly representative sample of how this form of lobbying gets covered. Headlined “Biden’s latest aggressive climate rule launched today. Will it satisfy unhappy green voters?,” the story quotes various progressive-group leaders warning that Biden must do more to turn out climate voters. “Biden can’t create green jobs on Monday, on Tuesday approve a big oil export project, and then expect young people to turn out in the numbers that he needs us to,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, spokesperson for the youth climate group Sunrise Movement. “As a climate-passionate young person, it’s my responsibility to stand for Palestinian liberation. If Biden cares about us showing up for him in November, he can’t give us a cookie regarding one issue and treat us with hostility on another,” wrote Elise Joshi, executive director of Gen-Z for Change.

Voters in general have extremely low tolerance for giving up anything to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Phasing out gasoline cars, even by as distant a date as 2035, is underwater by 20 points. Just one-quarter of Americans said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to help stop climate change.

Young voters might care more about this than other voters, but not much. Climate change ranked 12th out of the 16 issues surveyed by the Harvard youth poll.

The second reason is that the campus protests have captured enormous amounts of public attention. Anti-Israel activists have successfully found a leverage point to attract media coverage, and they’re taking full advantage. (Remember how progressives used to complain that we pay too much attention to the goings-on at elite universities? You don’t hear that much anymore.)

Since these campus stories are dominating news coverage, it’s natural to juxtapose them against the backdrop of the presidential election, which campaign reporters and pundits habitually assume is “about” whatever is dominating the news environment at the time.

And the protests are surely having an effect on the race. They are elevating the salience of the conflict between Gaza and Israel, which splits Biden’s base and unites Trump’s, at the expense of issues that unite Biden’s base and splits Trump’s. And they are contributing to a general image of crisis that Trump can exploit.

So I would never say the issue doesn’t matter to the presidential race. It matters quite a bit. But the way it matters is not quite what the media is making it out to be. The story is contributing to the sense of chaos and failure that is harming Biden and helping Trump.

Of course, every vote Biden loses matters, and even a tiny number of left-wing defections could prove decisive in a close race. But the reason the race is close, and Biden is losing, is moderate or cross-pressured voters. The people he needs to win back are not occupying college campuses.