President Joe Biden, back from his trip to Israel, will appeal to Americans to continue funding its ally in the country’s war against Hamas in a primetime speech on Thursday night.
He does so as there are divisions within his own party on how the US is dealing with the conflict.
But while a few of his Democratic colleagues in Congress may not agree with Biden on Israel, most voters overall and Democratic voters do. It’s one of his strongest issues among voters. The same can be said of his policy on Russia’s war on Ukraine, which is another subject of Thursday night’s speech.
Take a look at polling released by Quinnipiac University on Tuesday. A number of the questions asked in the survey on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are illuminating (keeping in mind, of course, that events can shift opinions).
Just 13% of registered voters answered that their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis based on what they know about the Middle East.
Sixty-one percent said their sympathies lie with Israel, which was the highest amount of support Israel had received on this question since Quinnipiac first started asking it in 2001. It’s up considerably from 41% back in 2021, when Quinnipiac last posed the question to voters when Israel was in armed conflict with Hamas. A Fox News poll taken just after Hamas’ attack on Israel last week also showed that voters’ sympathy for Israel had climbed since 2021.
Notably, much of this shift from 2021 is being driven by Democrats. Democratic support for Israel compared to Palestinians has been declining for over a decade.
In Quinnipiac’s latest poll, 48% of Democratic voters say their sympathies are more with Israelis compared to 22% who said Palestinians. That’s a massive change from the 46% for Palestinians and 23% for Israelis in May 2021. Fox’s poll, likewise, has…
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