Will Biden’s resolute stance on Israel cost him the 2024 election?

If you don’t think the bloodshed and mayhem in the Middle East is turning our 21st-century world upside down right now, take a good look at Joe Biden and his efforts to echo Franklin Roosevelt, with maybe a side order of Winston Churchill, as he tries to link the Israeli fight against Hamas to a new iteration of the “arsenal of democracy.”

Biden’s tough words and resolute stance supporting the Jewish state that was created when the 46th president was only 5 years old has won him some new friends in some surprising places — but also created new antagonists among folks who voted for the Democrat in 2020, and who could now stay home and prevent Biden’s reelection in 2024.

You know who really loved the rhetoric of a president who declared immediately after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas forces who slaughtered and kidnapped Israeli civilians that America “must be crystal clear. ... We stand with Israel,” and who doubled down in seeking military aid in last week’s Oval Office address? Brit Hume on the conservative Fox News Channel, who said the prime-time talk “may be remembered as one of the best, if not the best speeches of his presidency,” adding: “He was firm, he was unequivocal, he was strong ...”

You know who doesn’t one bit like what Biden has been saying about the Middle East and how the president has been saying it? Palestinian Americans and other voters of Muslim descent in the swing state of Michigan, where their votes in 2020 were credited with flipping the Rust Belt state back to Biden after Donald Trump narrowly won it in 2016.

“Joe Biden has single-handedly alienated almost every Arab American and Muslim American voter in Michigan,” Democratic State Rep. Alabas Farhat, who represents Dearborn and its large Arab American population, told NBC News in its report from the Wolverine State this weekend. Farhat said his constituents are angered and alienated by the lack of verbal support for the Palestinian cause; the NBC report also said multiple community leaders in Michigan are talking up a plan to vote in 2024 but leave the top of the ticket blank in protest.

Politically speaking, this is the worst possible trade-off for Biden. The praise he is currently receiving on the right from folks like Fox News’ Hume or Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, who called a recent Biden speech “the most passionately pro-Israel in history,” won’t gain the president one additional vote from right-wing couch potatoes otherwise bombarded with daily diatribes that Biden is too feeble to serve. But while Muslim Americans are not a large voting bloc, a loss of their support could cripple Biden in states he narrowly won such as Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin.

And that may not be the worst of it for Biden.

If you’re old enough to remember the 1960s, you surely remember the constant bemoaning of a “generation gap” in American society. Back then, it largely referred to a World War II generation of parents who tended to trust the government and the Pentagon, and their idealistic children who saw the Vietnam War as a betrayal of everything they’d learned about democracy. A half-century later, it’s taken a different war in the Middle East to reveal that the “generation gap” is back, and bigger than ever.

A poll conducted for CNN shortly after the attacks found that 81% of Americans over the age of 65 — that would be Biden’s Silent Generation as well as most boomers, raised in a time of Israel fighting off attacks like 1973′s Yom Kippur War or global terrorism — feel Israel is fully justified in a military response to Hamas. But in the 18-34 age bracket, that number plummets to just 27% — not surprising for a generation instead raised during Israel’s far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu and his iron-fisted policies toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Politically, this poses not one but two problems for Team Biden. In 2020, young voters under 35, deeply alienated by Trump’s four years in the White House, not only overwhelmingly supported the Democrat (despite his barrier-breaking age and a history of political centrism) but also turned out in greater numbers than usual, which was critical to his victory.

How’s that going ahead of 2024? With student loan payments resuming this month and the worst summer ever for climate change, polls had been picking up warning signs of trouble for Biden even before war broke out in the Middle East. Last week, a nationwide poll by Emerson College found that while the incumbent led Trump in an expected rematch by 2 percentage points, among those polled under age 30, the Republican actually was slightly ahead, 45%-43%, with another 12% undecided. The numbers dovetailed with other surveys where young voters said Biden is too “old” or “outdated.”

While those results could be a ballot box disaster for the president in the fall of 2024, a more focused group of young people could cause immediate headaches for the Biden administration in autumn 2023: college-educated progressives who made up disproportionate numbers of the staff on Capitol Hill, in key federal agencies, and in Democratic campaigns and think tanks. This faction — already under fire for having too much influence and moving the party too far to the left — was educated amid highly negative campus vibes around Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Now, these Democratic shock troops seem on the brink of a mutiny against the party’s generals.

» READ MORE: Netanyahu’s disastrous, populist regime is a dire warning for U.S. voters | Will Bunch

Last week, more than 400 Capitol Hill staffers signed on (albeit anonymously, reflecting current fears around open dialogue) to a letter urging their bosses to support a rapid cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas conflict. Their statement, while condemning atrocities by Hamas, also said, “We are tired of leaders pushing us to blame each other, exploiting our pain and our histories to rationalize political agendas and justify violence.” Their words place staffers in direct conflict with liberal but aggressively pro-Israel members like Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who said recently, “Now is not the time to talk about a cease-fire.”

It’s a similar dynamic over at the U.S. State Department, where one staffer has publicly resigned and many more are said to be on the brink of revolt after internal guidance that they were not to use terms like “cease-fire” or talk about de-escalation. Last week, two staffers told the Huffington Post there has been work toward an internal “dissent cable” opposing the current policies regarding Israel and Gaza — again, something rarely seen since the heated Vietnam War era.

These young D.C. power players are, of course, small in number. But they could exercise an outsize influence if they went public with criticisms of Biden’s policies right as he is struggling with other college-educated young voters like them. A lot could happen in 13 months, but even small movement toward a third-party candidate like the progressive academic Cornel West — a sharp critic of Israeli policy — or a rise in stay-home apathy could be brutal for Biden.

The online reaction from pro-Biden liberals to reports like NBC’s from Muslim enclaves near Detroit has amounted to a collective shriek that any naysayers contend are only ensuring the return of Trump, who is far worse on these issues. Intellectually, they’re not wrong: Trump’s policies, from expanding his initial “Muslim ban” to his family’s close financial ties with the Saudi dictators, are terrible. But 25-year-old voters don’t see the world like 65-year-olds who watch hours of anti-Trump agitprop daily on MSNBC. And yelling at them while they’re hurt and confused over the war won’t change their minds.

The huge irony for Biden is the mounting evidence that his full-throated public embrace of the Israeli cause, which has made him something of a hero right now on the streets of Tel Aviv, is just part of a more complicated strategy of gaining trust with Netanyahu to urge him to prevent a wider war, and perhaps take a more humanitarian stance on the situation in Gaza. In other words, the president’s private, closed-door policies may be more aligned than the Muslim Americans or young voters so put off by his public rhetoric realize. If Biden’s strategy somehow defuses tensions in the Middle East instead of inflaming them, the political fallout will dissipate.

But war and electoral politics have always been a volatile, unpredictable blend. All the Beltway pundits who are praising Biden’s wartime rhetoric as practically Churchillian should remember that the actual Churchill was in 1945 unceremoniously voted out of his job, largely thanks to left-wing voters, right as the United Kingdom was joining its allies in victory in World War II.

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