Most voters don’t care about Gaza, and - despite all the alarmist predictions - the Gaza conflict had no impact on the presidential election.
The release of the Democratic Party’s internal autopsy of the 2024 presidential campaign is causing controversy in the political world. But the most significant aspect of the report is what the authors left out: Gaza.
You know why? Because most voters don’t care about Gaza, and - despite all the alarmist predictions - the Gaza conflict had no impact on the presidential election.
The disputed report, which the Democratic National Committee released last week after months of stalling, analyzes the reasons that Kamala Harris was defeated in 2024.
It cited a number of factors:
• The Harris campaign “wrote off rural America," instead of actively competing for votes there.
• Harris was damaged by her appointment as “border czar," at a time when the Biden administration’s immigration policy was deeply unpopular.
• The Harris campaign “relied on Trump being unacceptable rather than building an affirmative case for Harris."
• Harris put too much emphasis on issues that were not priorities for most Americans, such as transgender concerns.
The New York Times expressed surprise that the report “makes no mention of Israel or Gaza, an issue that has fractured the party."
But that’s just it - while Gaza has fractured the party’s elite and the small core of its most passionate activists, most Americans don’t count it among their priorities.
Alarmist polls in recent months have asserted that significant numbers of Americans, especially younger Democrats, are turning against Israel. If you ask people in a poll for their opinion on almost any issue, they will have one. But that doesn’t mean it has any real impact on their voting.
This month’s Pew Research Center survey of the issues that Americans care about most named 13. Gaza was not one of them.
In March, a Gallup Poll ranked the 16 issues Americans are most concerned about. Once again, Gaza did not even make the list.
Even the Harvard Youth poll of 18-to-29-year-olds, taken in 2024 at the height of the campus protests over Gaza, found that “the conflict in the Middle East" ranked 15th of the 16 issues that young voters care about most.
The anti-Israel protests that rocked America’s campuses in early 2024 were noisy and colorful. About 3,000 students were arrested. That sounds like a lot - until you remember that there are 19.5 million college students in the United States. The number arrested amounted to three-tenths of 1% of the total.
The protest tents that attracted so much attention have long since disappeared. So have the marches, the takeovers of campus buildings and the invasions of classrooms. Some attempts to reignite it were seen at a few commencement exercises.
The anti-Israel movement on America’s college campuses was a flash in the pan. A core of extremists were briefly joined by students who wanted to mimic “what the cool kids are doing." Together they manufactured a tumult that sympathetic news media outlets amplified. But their impact beyond those brief headlines was minimal.
Israel-haters try to use those headlines and scary-sounding poll results to intimidate the American Jewish community and stampede politicians into criticizing the Jewish state.
But candidates for office and their campaign strategists would be wise not to pay too much attention to polls showing that many Americans dislike some Israeli policy or leader. And friends of Israel would be wise not to panic over those poll results.
Because at the end of the day - as Pew, Gallup and Harvard have discovered - most American voters just don’t care that much about Gaza. They didn’t care about it during the 19 years when Egypt occupied it, they didn’t care about it during the 12 years of totalitarian rule by the Palestinian Authority or the 17 years of Hamas rule and they don’t really care about it today.
Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and theHolocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.
Reposted from the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles