On January 8, President Joe Biden traveled to South Carolina to deliver one of his first political speeches of the year. Minutes into his remarks, pro-Palestinian hecklers began chanting “Cease-fire now!” — forcing the 81-year-old incumbent to reluctantly acknowledge that his administration’s approach to the war in Gaza is slowly fracturing his own coalition.
“I understand their passion,” Biden said from a podium inside Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. “I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza, using all that I can to do.”
That early-January interruption ended up serving as a relatively tame precursor to the wave of college-campus protests that have swept the nation in recent weeks. These actions have set the stage for a protest-filled summer that could culminate at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August and undermine the “return-to-normal” pitch Biden led with in 2020.
The election is still a long way away, and it’s impossible to predict how long the protests will continue, let alone how developments in the war in Gaza might affect Biden’s reelection chances. Still, high-profile Democrats in the president’s corner are clearly bracing for more political fallout from the war that may prompt some of their own voters to stay home or consider third-party options in November.
Representative Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.), a staunch defender of Israel, acknowledged in a brief interview with National Review on Tuesday that Biden is “managing a delicate balancing act” that risks losing key battleground-state voters on both sides of the conflict.
“The president is treading a tightrope, because if he treads too far in one direction, he can alienate an important constituency, because there is a substantial Jewish vote in Pennsylvania and Michigan,” he said. “At the same time, there’s a substantial Arab and Muslim and Palestinian vote.”
In short? “It’s a lose-lose,” Torres said, though he remains skeptical that the issue will ultimately prove electorally decisive in November.
The pro-Palestinian campus protests exploded last week and have since resulted in the arrest of more than 1,000 protesters at universities across the country, according to the Associated Press, dominating news coverage and bolstering Republicans’ narrative that, on Biden’s watch, the country is awash in chaos.
Just last night, NYPD officers descended on Columbia’s Hamilton Hall to force out protesters who had seized the building, prompting outrage from progressive Representatives Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). New York City mayor Eric Adams has said the protesters’ takeover of the building was spearheaded by individuals who were not affiliated with the university.
Rampant antisemitism at the pro-Palestinian encampments have created a difficult political environment for Biden, whom some left-wing campus protesters have nicknamed “Genocide Joe.”
Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to Columbia University to call for President Minouche Shafik’s resignation while he and other members of Congress stood on her own turf. The Senate Republicans’ campaign arm is already running ads tying Biden and vulnerable in-cycle Democrats to the chaos on campus.
“Death to America, threatening Jews, attacking police. Antisemitic mobs are taking over our universities, students radicalized by the far left acting like terrorists,” says a narrator in one of the new ads targeting Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. “Now, Joe Biden and Tammy Baldwin want you to pay off their student loans? Using your tax dollars to fund this mayhem? Tell Tammy Baldwin, stop caving to the woke mobs and put America first.”
Campus protesters — vocal and elite — are of course a minority of the roughly 17.3 million college students in the U.S., and an even smaller fraction of young people generally, most of whom do not attend college and are already low-propensity voters. In a March survey of 18- to 29-year-olds by the Harvard Institute of Politics, 60 percent of respondents said they were not enrolled in school of any kind. And only 2 percent of respondents said the “Israel-Palestine” conflict is their top concern.
Yet many Gen Z left-leaning groups are starting to signal that this public pressure campaign will continue into the summer, laying the groundwork for protest-focused news coverage in the months leading up to Election Day. College Democrats of America, the official student arm of the Democratic National Committee, released a statement Tuesday afternoon reaffirming their support for Biden while also maintaining that they “reserve the right to criticize our own party when it fails to represent youth voices.”
“Each day that Democrats fail to stand united for a permanent ceasefire, two-state solution, and recognition of a Palestinian state, more and more youth find themselves disillusioned with the party,” reads the statement, which demanded the release of the hostages while also calling the war in Gaza “genocidal” and “unjust.”
Biden has struggled to walk this tightrope in recent days, telling reporters last week that he condemns “the antisemitic protests” as well as “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
These political calculations have led Biden to water down his support for Israel, which he claimed was “rock solid and unwavering” in the days after the October 7 terrorist attacks.
In February, a senior foreign-policy aide in the administration met with Arab-American officials in Dearborn, Mich., and reportedly acknowledged that the administration had made “missteps” in foreign policy and public messaging about the Israel–Hamas war. The move seemed to show the president’s concern about potentially alienating a large voter base in the key swing state that he won in 2020. Dearborn could emerge as a critical marker of Biden’s support in the state, as the city has the highest per capita Muslim population in the U.S.
And when progressives launched an effort to have voters select an “uncommitted” option in the Democratic primary in several states to send Biden a message over his support of Israel, the administration seemed to once again pivot its messaging, with Biden saying he was hoping to have a cease-fire in place shortly.
At least part of Biden’s shifting position may be attributed to the efforts of Vice President Kamala Harris, who has reportedly spent the months since Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack privately lobbying Biden administration officials to be tougher on the Israeli government’s war strategy and adopt a more sympathetic approach to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Seventeen members of Biden’s campaign staff also made their own anonymous appeal for a cease-fire in a January letter to the president.
Yet for Biden this approach runs the risk of angering Jewish voters, including 300,000 voting-age Jews who make up a key portion of the electorate in Pennsylvania, a swing-state Biden won by a whisker in 2020.
“We have to balance the considerations,” Representative Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) told reporters on Tuesday, when asked about the wave of campus protesters that have rocked the country in recent days. “We should applaud the peaceful protesters who are speaking out for an end to the war and for a Palestinian state. We also need to make it clear that there’s no place for antisemitism, Islamophobia, or threats or harassment against people because of their faith.”
Asked whether the Biden administration should be doing more to reach pro-Palestinian activists on campus, many House Democrats say that the responsibility to address university protests falls on school administrators.
“I defend the right of people to have a protest,” says Representative Brad Schneider (D., Ill.), who is Jewish. “But when you see people coming on campus not calling for the advancement of Palestinian rights or protection of Palestinians or a two-state solution and all that, but they’re calling for ‘intifada’ and revolution and destruction and, in many cases, the elimination of Israel and Jewish people — we need the administrations to step up.”
Around NR
• Former president Donald Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis seem to have buried the hatchet in recent days after having weathered a bruising primary. James Lynch has more:
“I am very happy to have the full and enthusiastic support of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. We had a great meeting yesterday,” Trump said Monday on Truth Social. “The conversation mostly concerned how we would work closely together to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Also discussed was the future of Florida, which is FANTASTIC!”
• Michael Brendan Dougherty looks at the recent “Burgum-mentum” following reporting that North Dakota governor Doug Burgum is on Trump’s shortlist for VP:
I don’t know all of Burgum’s views. But I thought he was the only candidate in 2024 to easily exceed expectations in the debates. He is a well-liked governor from a small state. He projects seriousness and sobriety, two qualities Pence also had that were important to balance the 2016 Republican ticket. . . . Burgum needs to survive the millions poured into opposition research, but, if he does, I think he would bring credit and balance to the Republican ticket.
• Americans are stuck sitting through a presidential general election that will be long and oddly disconnected from what Americans are actually worried about, writes Jim Geraghty:
When Americans are asked what their top priority is, the answer is clear and consistent — the economy and the high cost of living, with the border and illegal immigration climbing to be a close second. Unsurprisingly, President Biden wants to make this election about any issue except those two — student loans, abortion, climate change, gun control, union jobs, and tales of how he took down Corn Pop. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s favorite topic remains himself — how unfairly he’s always being treated, how everyone involved in his trials is so dishonest and biased against him, how he was the real winner in 2020 until the election was stolen from him, and how he’s the only one who’s strong enough to stand up against everyone who stole the last election from him.
• Joe Biden has become exactly what he claimed to denounce, writes Dan McLaughlin, noting that the president offered a both-sides answer when asked whether he condemns the antisemitic protests on college campuses. Biden said he condemned the antisemitism but also those “who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians”:
His instinct was clear: He must give cover to the people running around claiming “genocide” and telling Jews to go “back to Poland,” where the extermination camps were. As if some unspecified group “who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians” are currently engaging in anything even remotely comparable at this moment in this country. Sometimes, it’s the president’s job to meet the moment with clarity.
• Audrey Fahlberg has an inside look at Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake’s pitch to donors:
Lake is known to be a firecracker on the stump, where she often uses incendiary rhetoric to rile up Republican crowds and taunt her critics. But speaking with prospective GOP donors behind closed doors, the former Arizona newscaster turned grassroots MAGA celebrity unsurprisingly strikes a much softer tone in her bid to win over deep-pocketed donors, often talking at length about her personal faith and her humble upbringing as the youngest of nine children.
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