Joe Biden’s re-election team is playing it cool. The Biden campaign has long been shrugging at the president’s fading polls, turning down opportunities to put him in front of voters, and generally doing their best to portray an air of confident nonchalance. The campaign’s apparent lack of concern seems, or perhaps is meant to seem, like an expression of certainty in the outcome: that Biden will win re-election, and that it won’t be close. They want us to think that they’ve got it in the bag.

They do not. Biden is in no way guaranteed re-election, and all available information suggests that the contest will be close. Donald Trump has been narrowly but consistently ahead in national polls. A new dataset released by the New York Times on 13 May found that Biden was trailing in five key swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania – and suffering from disillusionment among young voters as well as Black and Latino ones.

In typical style, the Biden camp brushed this off. “Drawing broad conclusions about the race based on results from one poll is a mistake,” Geoff Garin, a pollster for the Biden campaign, told the New York Times. But at this point, it’s not just one poll. It’s a lot of polls.

What’s driving this discontent among young voters and voters of color – those cornerstones of Biden’s coalition that were so key to his 2020 victory over Trump in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania? There are several factors, but one issue remains consistent in these voters’ accounts of their dissatisfaction with Biden: his handling of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

The indiscriminate bombing and civilian massacres that have accompanied Israel’s assault on Palestinians are a moral catastrophe that has shaken many Americans’ souls. The United Nations now estimates that more........

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