Even in Michigan, 53 percent of voters favored continuing aid to Israel during the war against Hamas and Hezbollah.

After every election, there’s always a genre of articles that can be summarized as, “The party would have done better if it were more like me.” The worst ones are written by authors who would have drawn the same conclusions regardless of the outcome. I could have predicted a year ago that Peter Beinart’s postelection column would use whatever the results were to argue that U.S. foreign policy needs to be more anti-Israel, so it’s of course no surprise that he wrote, “Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party” in the New York Times.

There is no reasonable way to draw that conclusion from the results.

According to CNN exit polls, 61 percent of the electorate said U.S. support for Israel was “not strong enough” or “about right” compared with 31 percent who said it was “too strong.” In other words, by a two-to-one margin, voters opposed making U.S. support for Israel weaker. Fox asked a different question and found that, 54 percent to 45 percent, voters favored “continuing aid to Israel in the war against Hamas and Hezbollah.” Even in Michigan, 53 percent of voters favored continuing aid. 

Beinart ignores those findings, and then cherry-picks a bunch of data about Harris’s underperformance and, without evidence, attributes that underperformance to her refusing to cut off weapons sales to Israel or make other concessions to the anti-Israel crowd.

He observes that Harris “is far more youthful than Joe Biden” and yet “she suffered a sharp decline among voters under the age of 29 compared with Mr. Biden’s result in 2020.” While it’s true that Harris did six points worse than Biden among those under 29, that does not necessarily mean that the drop was due to Gaza. Harris did, similarly, five points worse than Biden among the 45–64 cohort, a group that polls show are much more supportive of Israel. So, clearly, there was more going here.

Beinart similarly attempts to attribute Harris’s drop off in support among black voters to her being insufficiently hostile toward Israel. But in an AP/NORC–University of Chicago survey released last month, black voters ranked the Israel–Hamas war well below other issues such as the economy, health care, and crime. Just 27 percent of black registered voters said the war was one of the most important issues, which is nearly identical to the 26 percent of all voters who said the same. 

If Harris was damaged by outrage over the war in Gaza, the most obvious place you’d expect to see it would be in noticeably higher support for Jill Stein — who ran on being a staunch critic of Israel. That’s what happened in Dearborn, where Stein won 18.4 percent of the vote. Yet, nationally, Stein is carrying 0.45 percent of the vote. Add in votes for another anti-Israel candidate, Cornel West, and it still only came to 0.5 percent combined. Stein herself doubled that when she eclipsed 1 percent of the vote in 2016, when Donald Trump won his first race, against Hillary Clinton.

While I have no doubt that there were some voters who Harris could have won over by taking a harsher stand against Israel, it is irresponsible to view it in a vacuum, without considering how many more votes she would have put at risk by breaking with a clear majority of the electorate by calling for an end to wartime support for our ally.