Biden’s Fraught Candidacy Faces Twin Threats at Home and Abroad

President Biden’s fragile bid for a second term is under new threat from the powerful combination of two conflicts he has little direct control over: Israel’s war with Hamas and the deepening rift in the U.S. over America’s role in it.

The two crises, unfolding thousands of miles from each other, are merging to crystallize a wider set of divisions in U.S. society that are challenging Biden’s already shaky political standing. Americans had already been debating the limits of free speech on campus, the balance between protest and public order and the U.S. alliance with an obstinate Israeli government.

Now, the barricades, encampments and police in riot gear on campuses across the country have dramatically magnified those tensions, as well as competing grievances that spring in part from America’s growing diversity.

The situation holds many risks and few good options for Biden, who faces the prospect of continued protests this summer. Those could culminate in big demonstrations at the Democrats’ national nominating convention in Chicago in August, undermining an event intended to show the party’s unity and competence to lead the nation.

The president has focused on pressing Israel and Hamas to accept a cease-fire that could both save lives in the region and quell protests in the U.S. Failure could prompt the Israeli government to start a long-planned operation against Hamas fighters in Rafah, where roughly 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering and the prospect of high civilian casualties has sparked international concern.

But his cautious approach to policymaking and public statements has drawn criticism even among some in his party who hoped for more muscular efforts to shape events.

On Thursday, Biden, under pressure from both Democrats and Republicans, addressed the growing campus protests, in remarks that were hastily scheduled. He condemned violence and vandalism while acknowledging that “peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

But he had stayed largely silent for two weeks since Columbia University students set up their pro-Palestinian encampment—even as other political leaders, including the Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, appeared on campus to demand the restoration of order.

In recent days, Biden has instead focused his public speeches on abortion rights and investments in semiconductor manufacturing—issues his campaign wants to highlight. He is also expected to address the spike in antisemitism at the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual ceremony at the U.S. Capitol next week.

National polls show the incumbent essentially tied in his expected rematch with presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, who narrowly leads in most surveys of the handful of states likely to decide the election. Trump, like many fellow Republicans, has called on college leaders to crack down on protests. At a rally in Wisconsin Wednesday, Trump said Biden was “nowhere to be found” on the issue.

“You’ve got the Biden administration in two strategic cul-de-sacs—one is domestic and one is foreign. I’m not sure how the administration extricates itself from either one,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran U.S. diplomat in the Middle East now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He’s got to change the pictures in Gaza in order to try to right the ship at home.”

Biden’s delay in responding was rooted in the thinking of White House and campaign officials that the students participating in or influenced by the protests are a small minority. Biden advisers and some strategists in both parties cite data showing that the conflict in Gaza isn’t a top priority for young voters more broadly.

Some Biden aides are privately hopeful the campus protests are temporary and will fade when schools break for the summer, although they acknowledge pro-Palestinian demonstrations will continue elsewhere.

With views of U.S. policy and the protests dividing his party, Biden has tried not to further inflame the rifts, according to his advisers.

Voters feel chaos

Any decline in support among young voters, an important part of his 2020 coalition, would be damaging. In Wall Street Journal surveys this year, Biden has drawn 50% support among voters under age 30, well below the 61% that exit polls found him winning in 2020.

More broadly, Israel’s military offensive has aggravated divisions within the Democratic Party. A growing number of voters object to soaring civilian casualties and starvation in Gaza, while pro-Israel members defend the operation, which was launched after Hamas attacked on Oct. 7.

The threat of key Democratic constituencies staying home or voting for third-party candidates could imperil Biden’s re-election. At the same time, he can’t afford to lose moderate and independent voters who helped secure his victory in 2020.

The protests are the latest of many events that are weighing on the American sense of well-being and views of the president’s competence. Voters see the economy as in poor shape, despite strong labor and stock markets. The corrosive force of inflation remains stubbornly strong, the Fed acknowledged this week. The war in Ukraine is stalemated, despite billions of dollars in U.S. and European aid aimed at holding off Russian aggression.

Only 38% of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance, compared with 46% for former presidents Trump, 48% for Barack Obama and 52% for George W. Bush at about this point in their re-election campaigns, Gallup surveys show.

“When voters feel that there’s chaos, they tend to tilt more conservative in their voting habits,’’ said J.J. Balaban, a Pennsylvania-based ad-maker for Democratic candidates. He cited the example of Lyndon Johnson, who won a landslide victory in 1964 only to watch his party lose the 1968 election to Republican Richard Nixon amid widespread civil unrest, including large demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

Protests over racial injustice in 2020, following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, turned violent in some places and prompted Trump to argue that he could best restore order. Trump lost the election, but the outcome was close.

Mark Mellman, a veteran Democratic strategist who also leads a pro-Israel political group, said that the vast majority of Americans aren’t focused on the substance of the Gaza debate—on U.S. policy toward Israel or the calls for financial divestment—but rather on the TV images and tenor of the domestic protests. He said the appearance of the country being out of control, even when in his view that wasn’t the case, was a risk to his party.

Doug Sosnik, a White House aide to President Bill Clinton, said the protests could help Trump establish a contrast with Biden. “That’s really his meta-narrative: He’s a strong leader, and his objective is to contrast that with Biden being a weak leader,’’ he said.

Biden’s advisers don’t believe that argument would have credibility given that many voters remember the Trump presidency as a chaotic time. Democrats also point out that the Republican says he would pardon his supporters who broke into the Capitol and assaulted police officers on Jan. 6, 2021, as part of their effort to overturn the 2020 election results. Trump has also made the comparison, claiming the response to campus protesters shows the Jan. 6 rioters were treated unfairly.

Biden’s campaign is counting on voters who are upset over the president’s handling of the Gaza conflict to eventually back him in November when the choice is between him and Trump. But many, like Abbas Alawieh, a Democratic strategist, remain uncommitted.

Alawieh, who was among the group of community leaders who met with administration officials in Dearborn, Mich., in February, said Biden has failed to play a productive role in turning down the temperature on college campuses with his continuation of funds for Israel without conditions.

“Since our meeting, the sense of betrayal has deepened,” Alawieh said. “President Biden has heightened tensions, he has inflamed the environment among key constituencies in our Democratic base by continuing to not only cheerlead this war but champion it.”

Issues of campaign

Another challenge from the protests is that voters have only so much capacity for outrage, and feelings about the Israel-Hamas war are overtaking issues that could push voters toward Biden. “It obviously hurts Democrats’ chances that college students are protesting about Gaza, an issue that splits the Democratic Party, instead of protesting the loss of abortion rights in huge swaths of the country, an issue that splits the Republican Party and unites the Democratic Party,’’ Balaban said.

Foreign policy has sometimes divided the Democratic Party, and the nation, more substantially than today, especially when American troops have been engaged in conflicts. Tens of thousands joined marches against the Vietnam War, including an estimated 100,000 or more at a 1967 antiwar demonstration in New York, which helped push Lyndon Johnson to end his bid for re-election. As the party picked his replacement at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, protesters clashed with police outside. Far fewer Americans have joined the campus protests today.

Polling finds that only a tiny share of voters—as few as 2% in Journal surveys this year—see U.S. policy toward the war in Gaza as the issue most important to their vote. Economic issues draw much more concern among voters, particularly among those who are undecided or not fully committed to their choice of candidate.

That’s true even among young voters, according to a recent Harvard Youth Poll, which found that foreign policy was much lower priority for voters under age 30 than were economic issues, which remained the top concern.

Richard Thau, who conducts focus groups with swing voters, said his recent work finds that many young voters support the goals of the protests but are only lightly committed to the cause. “Support was a mile wide and maybe three inches deep,’’ said Thau, who conducted two focus groups this week with independent voters from across the University of Wisconsin system, all of whom were too young to vote in 2020. “It became clear that these students had empathy for what the people in Gaza are experiencing, but most would not go the extra mile to relieve the suffering of the Palestinians.’’

Moreover, the students were cynical about U.S. policy, seeing it as beholden to interests such as defense contractors, said Thau, president of the message-testing firm Engagious. None of the 16 students in his groups thought Trump would handle the war better than Biden, and few said the issue would determine their vote. Presented with a two-candidate ballot with only Trump and Biden, six of the 16 students said they wouldn’t vote at all, while seven would back Biden and three would back Trump.

Yet the campus protests have unsettled some Americans over the tradition of resolute U.S. support for Israel. The pro-Palestinian movement, once largely on the sidelines of American politics, has found its most powerful voice ever in calling attention to the decadeslong plight of Palestinians and their aspiration for an independent state.

That development shows both greater sympathy among younger Americans for the Palestinian cause and the growing power of the nation’s Muslim and Arab-American communities. Muslim residents grew by 64% between 2007 and 2020, the Pew Research Center finds, reaching 3.85 million, or just over 1% of the U.S. population.

One option for Biden is to try to persuade wavering voters that Trump would leave them even more upset over U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. Stephen Miller, a senior White House aide to Trump, has suggested on social media that immigration authorities would target pro-Palestinian protesters if Trump wins the election. In a recent interview with Time magazine, Trump pointed to the steps he had taken as president to support Israel and played down prospects for a Palestinian state.

House Republicans, meanwhile, have relentlessly criticized Biden and college leaders for their handling of protests.

Aiming for Mideast cease-fire

Biden’s fate rests in part on fast-moving events in the Middle East, where talks for a cease-fire and the release of hostages that Egypt and Qatar have mediated for months with intensive involvement from CIA Director William Burns have failed to produce results.

“If we can get a cease-fire, we can get something more enduring and then maybe end the conflict and then maybe move forward with normalization [between Israel and Saudi Arabia], but it has to start with a deal and getting these people back to their families,” White House spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday.

Kirby indicated that the White House has no “plan B” to the cease-fire and hostage-release proposal that is currently under consideration by the warring sides.

Biden is trying to perform a balancing act with complicated goals, including supporting Israel while moving it toward negotiations, and deepening the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia while maintaining reservations about the kingdom.

Another challenge is that the president is trying to achieve long-term objectives when he may only be in office until January. “He’s dealing with democratic and nondemocratic governments, but he’s staring down his own political clock, which others will use against him,” said Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

The more time that passes without a deal that at least pauses the war, the more likely Israel is to invade Rafah. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday reiterated U.S. opposition to an Israeli offensive in Rafah that doesn’t protect civilians and said he had yet to see such a plan from Israeli counterparts.

The main obstacle to a deal now is that Hamas refuses to accept anything less than a commitment to end the war, which Israel refuses to do without achieving its primary goal of destroying Hamas.

If a deal is secured in May, it could then bring up to two months of calm in Gaza. If that pause in hostilities doesn’t lead to a longer-term cease-fire, though, fighting would resume just weeks ahead of the August Democratic convention.

The Biden administration has so far been unwilling to wield its most powerful leverage to nudge Israel toward a cease-fire on less favorable terms, such as restricting military assistance, a move that would create a bipartisan outcry in Washington. That could begin to change, though, as the urgency of achieving tangible results grows in the White House.

A key requirement for ending the war is a road map to secure, govern and rebuild Gaza in order to avoid a relapse of violence. The White House’s plan for the so-called day after envisions the participation of friendly Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. But those governments have conditioned their involvement on the eventual creation of an independent Palestinian state, which Israel has firmly rejected.

Arab states are reluctant to engage on postwar issues while Israel continues to bomb Gaza and especially if it invades Rafah, which will flood airwaves across the Arab world with more images of Palestinian death and destruction.

Saudi Arabia is also unlikely to move forward with plans to establish diplomatic ties with Israel amid such violence, fearing a backlash at home and across the Muslim world.

As inducements to recognize Israel, the White House is offering Riyadh a more formal defense relationship with Washington, assistance in acquiring civil nuclear power and a renewed push for a Palestinian state—a package that U.S. officials say they are in the final stages of negotiating and would need approval in a deeply divided Congress.

Getting such a deal done before the electoral conventions this summer, including a supermajority in Congress to ratify the U.S.-Saudi treaty, seems unlikely.

“Time’s not an ally on this one, it’s an adversary,” said Miller, the former diplomat now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That’s a huge problem here.”

Write to Aaron Zitner at [email protected], Stephen Kalin at [email protected], Tarini Parti at [email protected] and Sabrina Siddiqui at [email protected]