Support for a particular view doesn’t always translate into support for a candidate.

For example, most people are against “shrinkflation”. But when Biden declared his opposition to it, the polls didn’t move. That’s because people generally don’t consider “shrinkflation” to be very important, so Biden’s position didn’t win anyone over.

Likewise, Gaza consistently polls pretty low as a priority, so changing his position on Israel likely won’t help him.

In the April 2024 edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, which Della Volpe runs, 18-to-29-year-olds rated the Israel-Palestine conflict 15th out of 16 possible priorities. (Student debt came last.) Among self-identified Democrats, it was tied for third from the bottom. In another survey of registered voters in swing states, just 4 percent of 18-to-27-year-olds said the war was the most important issue affecting their vote. Even on college campuses, the epicenter of the protest movement, an Axios/Generation Lab poll found that only 13 percent of students considered “the conflict in the Middle East” to be one of their top-three issues. An April CBS poll found that the young voters who wanted Biden to pressure Israel to stop attacking Gaza would vote for him at about the same rate as those who didn’t.