Young Americans’ outrage over the Israel-Hamas war has dominated the political conversation for weeks. Democratic and Republican lawmakers have made pilgrimages to Columbia University and other campuses to offer support to demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza or to denounce them, and President Biden addressed the upheavals in remarks on Thursday.
But these headlines are not reflective of young voters’ top concerns this election year, according to recent polls. Surveys taken in recent months show young voters are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians in the conflict, but few of them rank the Israel-Hamas war among their top issues in the 2024 election. Like other voters, young people often put economic concerns at the top of the list.
And while young voters are cooler to Mr. Biden than they were at the same point in 2020, there is little evidence that American support for the Israeli invasion of Gaza is a critical factor in their relative discontent.
“When you have two presidents that have the same stance on one issue, that automatically puts that issue — I hate to say lower down the list, because it’s obviously an important issue, but it doesn’t make it an issue where I’m going to choose Donald Trump over Joe Biden,” said Devon Schwartz, a student at the University of Texas at Austin.
A student of both Muslim and Jewish descent who is active in a campus group promoting interfaith dialogue, Mr. Schwartz, 19, thought the protests at his college, which have drawn police crackdowns, were “a historic moment.” And he said he would have liked the opportunity to vote for a candidate who is “more progressive on Israel” than Mr. Biden in November. But he plans to vote for him anyway.
“I want to see policy changes from Joe Biden,” he said. “I don’t want to vote for Donald Trump and then just see the same exact policies.”
American sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shifted modestly toward Palestinians over the past decade. Although 51 percent of Americans remain more sympathetic toward Israelis, 27 percent now sympathize more with the Palestinian people, up from 12 percent in 2013, according to Gallup.
The shift is substantially generational, most likely reflecting not only changes in the conflict itself, and a rightward turn in Israeli politics, but also a decade in which pro-Palestinian activists have worked to connect the cause to domestic movements in the United States like Black Lives Matter and campaigns to divest from Israel have gained ground on college campuses.
The latest polling from the Pew Research Center finds 18-to-29-year olds three times more likely to sympathize with Palestinians in the conflict than those over 65, and twice as likely as adults as a whole.
“Not necessarily everyone is as fired up about it as we see from those out protesting,” said Laura Silver, the associate director of global research for Pew. “But 18-to-29-year-olds are far and away different from older Americans.”
Recent polls suggest these sympathies have yet to translate into prioritizing the war as a voting issue in 2024.
In the Harvard Institute of Politics’ Youth Poll conducted shortly before the past month’s wave of campus demonstrations and crackdowns, 18-to-29-year-old Americans overwhelmingly faulted Mr. Biden for his handling of the conflict in Gaza, with 76 percent disapproving and 18 percent approving. But only 2 percent of them rated it their top concern in the election, compared with 27 percent who said they were most concerned about economic issues.
In an Economist/YouGov poll taken more recently, in late April, 22 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 listed inflation as their most important issue. Two percent named foreign policy as their top concern. (The poll did not specifically ask about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
“My friends and I, we all are very concerned about the war in the Middle East, and we disagree with the Biden administration’s agenda…
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