Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich welcomed President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral victory Monday, saying that “the time has come” to extend full Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank.
He made the comment a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a recorded statement that he has spoken three times with Trump since the election and that they “see eye to eye on the Iranian threat.
It does in the very least in swing states, as the polls show. Yet we see a net positive in both swing states and the general populous with a conditional aid policy.
It does among the affected populations. Which makes sense. But to the average voter without any skin in the game, it didn’t crack the top 10.
You’re trying to compare votes gained vs votes lost due to a policy shift in conditional military aid. We see a positive shift both generally, and very much so in swing states. If we’re comparing voters who would vote against Harris compared to voters who would vote for Harris with this change, we see that there would be enough of a positive shift to at least flip the swing states. We saw that there is less than 300k Jewish Americans nationally that would vote against Harris if there was conditional aid. The votes that would be gained by Arab Americans and the Uncommitted movement would far outweigh that, especially in swing states. The argument that the decision to not do conditional military aid was because of the Jewish American vote does not hold.
You can apply all the maybes and the shoulda, coulda, woulda’s you want to try to make your point, but the math simply does not work in your favor. Not even close to it. You are grossly overestimating the size of the Arab/Muslim/Palestine population and their supporters, underestimating the size of the Jewish community and where their support lies, and grossly over-representing the effect of the general population, where this issue didn’t even crack the top 10.
And I just want to restate for the record: I agree with you. We are on the same side here. But supporters of Gaza are simply grossly outnumbered by the Jewish population and those who support Israel, and if Harris had supported Gaza, she’d have lost a million more votes. That’s got nothing to do with which side is right or wrong, or zionism, or judaism, or which side is morally right. It’s just math. There’s more of them. It’s that simple. The entire situation was a lose-lose situation for Biden the day Israel decided that schools and hospitals somehow became valid military targets. From a political standpoint, Harris chose the least politically shitty option.
