Joe Biden May Have Crossed Fatal 'Red Line'

President Joe Biden may have crossed a fatal "red line" that has alienated some of his most critical voters from his reelection efforts.

Biden's response to the Israel-Hamas war has put the president in a difficult position with several key Democratic blocs, including progressives, young Americans, and voters of color, who are increasingly seeing Biden as too pro-Israel.

While foreign policy typically does not take center stage in presidential elections, there are a growing number of Americans who are unwilling to vote for a second Biden term based on the president's refusal to call for a cease-fire in the Middle East.

"I will not be voting for Joe Biden under any circumstance. I don't care about any other policy that he has championed. I cannot, as an Armenian-American, support a president who has green-lit the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip," Ana Kasparian, host of popular online news show The Young Turks, said during a broadcast earlier this month. "This, for me, is the red line."

Kasparian, whose show has 5.65 million subscribers, told Newsweek in a Thursday interview that she has "no problem" with the allyship between the United States and Israel and supports efforts to fight against Hamas.

"What I'm not in favor of is Biden essentially allowing for the complete dismantling of international law in order to engage in this double standard as it pertains to Israel," she said.

Kasparian is not alone. The refusal to vote for Biden in 2024 over his response to the war has been echoed by others, including activist Bree Newsome and left-wing commentator Hasan Piker.

Newsome, who made national headlines for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds in 2015, said she would not support the Democratic Party in the next election if they don't call for a cease-fire. Piker, whose uncle Cenk Uygur is running a long shot bid for the Democratic nomination, expressed a similar sentiment last week, saying voters should not just vote for a Democratic candidate because of the two-party system.

"I think extracting concession from our democratically elected leaders by telling them 'we will never vote for you again unless you stop this ethnic cleansing campaign we are paying for' is perfectly normal and good. annoying blue-no-matter-who voters should stop the browbeating !" Piker, who has 1.4 million followers on X, formerly Twitter, said on the social media platform.

A poll released by Reuters on Tuesday found that 68 percent of Americans support the idea of a cease-fire, with about three-quarters of Democrats and half of Republicans agreeing.

"It is maddening to see a president, the White House and the Democratic Party act so out of step with a majority of voters," Usamah Andrabi, the communications director of the Justice Democrats, told Newsweek. "There's no amount of propaganda or spin from the John Kirbys of the world that can make watching Israeli airplanes bomb refugee camps and hospitals easier to stomach by the average American voter across the political spectrum."

Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who has been tracking public opinion on the issue in the U.S. for decades, told Newsweek that the shift in attitudes has reached a boiling point that he has not seen in the past.

The University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, which Telhami helped conduct, found a decline in support for Israel between the initial October 7 Hamas attack and the following two weeks.

"More importantly, for the election, is that a large portion of young Democrats under 35 thought that Biden was too pro-Israel," Telhami said. "Three-quarters of young Democrats said that he was still too pro-Israel, and a significant percentage of them—over 20 percent—said they're less likely to vote for him."

Young voters were instrumental to Biden's 2020 win. In the last election, he carried young voters by 24 points nationally, according to exit polls. These numbers compound the problem Biden is already facing. Not only is the incumbent president facing dramatically low approval ratings and trailing behind former President Donald Trump in battleground states, but the only group where he's been able to retain support is among older, white Americans, a New York Times/Siena College poll showed earlier this month.

"What President Biden is doing, it seems like he's trying to give this election to Donald Trump or whoever the Republican nominee is," Andrabi said. "I think he's making a great miscalculation to be more aligned with the far-right government of Israel, and the Israel lobbying and super PACs here, than an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters who have said, poll after poll, that they support a cease-fire."

Andrabi, Telhami and Kasparian all emphasized that Biden's stance on the war is spelling trouble in his reelection campaign in Michigan, where more than 200,000 registered voters are Muslim and 300,000 people claim ancestry from the Middle East and North Africa.

Holding a decadeslong streak of voting for the winning presidential candidate, Michigan has not voted for a losing candidate since 2004. Trump carried the state by some 10,000 votes in 2016 and Biden's margin of victory in Michigan was 154,000 votes in 2020. The recent NYT/Siena poll found Trump leading Biden by three points in the Great Lake State.

"The sizable Arab community Muslim community in Michigan has now turned on [Biden] because of his handling of this war," Kasparian said.

Telhami told Newsweek he's heard from Biden administration officials that prominent politicos have warned the president that he's going to lose Michigan because of his stance on Israel.

"Prior to this war, despite what I was seeing in the polling, I really did think there was a possibility for him to eke out a win," Kasparian said. "I've changed my mind since then."

"When it comes to the 2024 election, I'm actually genuinely concerned that [Biden's] going to lose and Trump is going to win. The Democratic Party is insane for not reconsidering having an actual robust Democratic primary," she said.

Arab Americans are not the only voters of color who have been outraged over Biden's response to the war. Other groups, including more than 900 Black Christian faith leaders, have opposed how Biden has handled the conflict. Telhami explained that the growing support for Palestinians in the U.S. has been fueled by social justice movements at home, like the Black Lives Matter movement, which has pushed people to view the conflict in the Middle East through the prism of oppression.

Telhami said the Democratic Party may be grossly taking these constituents for granted and that Biden is miscalculating the moment, seeing as opposition to his stance on Israel as a disagreement on policy instead of what it really is.

"It's an image-forming moment," Telhami said. "This is a moment about who he is and what his character is. The Joe Biden people voted for, may in fact, not be the Joe Biden they're witnessing now, and that I think might be the biggest problem for him in the election."

"What a lot of American voters connected with Biden on [in 2020] was his empathy," Kapsarian said. "The fact that he was able to empathize with American voters who had gone through painful, terrible situation—losing loved ones for instance, because he's lost loved ones. That empathy really resonated with many of his supporters."

"It's really difficult to still see Biden as that empathetic figure as he consistently rejects calls for a cease-fire and consistently provides more and more military aid to Israel," she added.