Will escalating violence in the Middle East affect the US elections?

With the United States presidential election less than four weeks away, analysts caution that Israel’s expanding military campaigns across the Middle East could bruise the chances of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Foreign policy is rarely a top priority for US voters. But Israel’s yearlong war in Gaza, as well as its intense bombing campaign in Lebanon, have spurred questions about the US’s role in the conflict.

The administration of President Joe Biden has been unwavering in its support of Israel, splintering the Democratic base, with some voters — particularly Arab Americans — turning against the party.

With Harris in a tight race against former Republican President Donald Trump, anger towards the Biden administration could mean that Arab voters in key states like Michigan stay home in November.

“This is a constituency that, by the second term of the Obama administration, identified as Democrat by a two-to-one margin,” Jim Zogby, the co-founder of the Arab American Institute, told Al Jazeera. “Now party identification is virtually tied at 38 percent each.”

Much of that decrease, he said, has to do with the Biden administration’s support for the war in Gaza, which has erased entire neighbourhoods and killed more than 42,000 people, many of them women and children.

That campaign has been enabled by about $20bn in US weapons assistance.

“It’s less that this group of voters is getting more conservative, and more that they want to punish this administration for what they’ve allowed to happen,” said Zogby.

“There’s a sense that Palestinian and Lebanese lives don’t matter.”

Eroding support

A September poll by the Arab American Institute found that Harris and Trump were virtually tied among Arab voters, receiving 41 percent and 42 percent support, respectively.

That figure is actually a marked improvement for the Democrats. When Biden was running for re-election, his support among Arab voters cratered after the beginning of the war in Gaza, dropping to just 17 percent in October 2023.

Biden previously won 59 percent of the Arab vote in the 2020 presidential race.

When Biden dropped out of the 2024 race, following a debate performance that underscored concerns about the 81-year-old’s age, some voters hoped his replacement, Harris, would bring a fresh approach.

But Harris has thus far refused to break with Biden or call for an end to weapons transfers, even as a series of escalatory strikes by Israel have brought the Middle East to the brink of a wider regional war.

In a TV interview this week, when asked whether she would have diverged from Biden on any issues, Harris replied: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

The Harris campaign also fielded criticism during August’s Democratic National Convention, after party officials refused to allow a Palestinian American speaker on stage to give voice to the suffering in Gaza.

“People are looking for the slightest gesture of humanity, and the campaign just won’t give it to them,” said Zogby. “They’re making a mistake that will cost them votes.”

Swing states

While US policy towards Gaza may not be a top priority for most voters, more than 80 percent of Arab Americans say that it will play an important role in determining their vote.

Many of those voters are concentrated in a small number of swing states that play an outsized role in deciding the country’s presidential elections.

The Midwestern battleground state of Michigan, for instance, has the second-largest Arab population in the country. It also has the largest percentage of Arab Americans of any state: Nearly 392,733 people identify as Arab in a state of 10 million.

Polling averages show Harris with a lead of only around 1.8 percent there, well within the margin of error.

And her razor-thin lead in the state could be eroded by third-party candidates like Jill Stein, who has actively courted the Arab and Muslim American vote in the area.

“The situation in Gaza has complicated Democratic chances in Michigan,” said Michael Traugott, a research professor at the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan.

“Since we expect things to be close, it will hurt Harris if a large portion of the state’s Arab community stays home on election day,” he added.

But Michigan’s Arab American population is no monolith, and there have been bitter divisions within the community over how best to use its electoral leverage.

Some believe that a Harris loss in Michigan would send a warning to future candidates about underestimating the influence of Arab voters.

Others view a second term for Trump, a pro-Israel hawk, as an unacceptable risk: the Republican has previously said that Israel should “finish the job” in Gaza and vowed to deport foreign nationals involved in pro-Palestine student protests.

One group attempting to walk a tightrope between those perspectives is the Uncommitted National Movement, an organisation born of a protest movement against Biden.

During primaries, the movement called on Democrats to vote “uncommitted”, rather than throwing their support behind the Democratic president.

Now, as the general election approaches on November 5, the movement says it cannot support Harris — but it also opposes a second Trump presidency.

“As a Palestinian American, the current administration’s handling of this genocide has been beyond enraging and demoralising,” a spokesperson said in a video released this week.

“But the reality is that it can get worse. Nobody wants a Trump presidency more than [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, because that is his ticket to wiping Palestine off the map.”

Expanding fighting

The final weeks of the presidential race have coincided with the looming threat of further escalation in the Middle East, adding an element of uncertainty to the final weeks of the US race.

In early October, for instance, Iran launched a ballistic missile attack against Israel, in response to the assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, among others.

On that same day, Israel launched a ground operation in southern Lebanon, in addition to its deadly aerial bombing campaign in the region. Israel is expected to take further action against Iran as well.

Analysts worry that a massive Israeli retaliation could set off a destructive war between Israel and Iran, an anxiety shared by many in the US.

A September poll by the Pew Research Center found that 44 percent of Americans are extremely or very concerned about the fighting spreading to other countries in the Middle East. Forty percent felt the same about the possibility of US forces becoming more directly involved.

Respondents who identified with the Democratic Party were also more likely to believe that Israel’s war in Gaza has gone too far and that the US should do more to bring it to an end.

Laura Silver, associate director of global research at Pew, told Al Jazeera that those results reflect diverging views between Democrats and Republicans over foreign policy.

“Republican-affiliated Americans are much more likely to want the US to provide weapons to Israel, and they’re somewhat less likely to want the US to play a diplomatic role,” Silver said.

She pointed out that younger and older people also had different approaches to the war in Gaza — and the Israel-Palestine conflict more generally.

A February poll found that 36 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 said the Biden administration favoured Israel too much in the current war, compared with just 16 percent of people aged 50 to 64.

But Zogby said that Democrats have yet to recognise the shifts taking place among important constituencies, such as young people and communities of colour, on the question of Palestine.

“The pro-Palestine movement has become part of a larger focus on social justice,” he said. “The Democratic Party hasn’t changed on this, but the people who vote for them have. They aren’t listening, and they’ll pay a price for that.”