This is, of course, going to become an election issue.
It's already an election issue.
And Biden wasn't the only candidate for president to talk about this this week.
Let's listen to what former President Donald Trump had to say about the war in Gaza.
DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Candidate: I'm not sure that I'm loving the way they're doing it, because you've got to have victory.
Israel is absolutely losing the P.R.
war.
They're losing it big.
But they've got to finish what they started, and they've got to finish it fast.
FRANKLIN FOER: Leigh Ann, can you help us decipher what he's doing there?
Is he just talking?
Is there some sort of subtext there?
LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: I was like, please don't come to me first to decipher Donald Trump.
But who knows where Donald Trump's.
Maybe this is his pure instinct.
As we were talking before, he really reacts and responds to images and who is actually winning the messaging game and Israel at this moment is not.
But it does break with the Republican Party, he does break with the Republican Party in some respect here, who has really -- especially on Capitol Hill, Republicans have used Democrats' discontent with Israel and Netanyahu to attack them as being sometimes anti-Israel or politicizing this moment when Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, came out a couple weeks ago saying that Netanyahu has lost his way and should perhaps step back.
Republicans really seized on that.
We didn't see Donald Trump going very far, but the fact that there was some -- you know, he portrayed the fact that this is not great is actually a little bit of separation between him and his party at this moment.
FRANKLIN FOER: Francesca, as it happens - - not Donald Trump -- you've been talking to voters in swing states about the war.
What have you learned -- FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Progressive voters.
FRANKLIN FOER: Progressive voters.
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Progressive voters in particular in battleground states, and this goes back to what I was saying earlier about words just not being enough from President Biden at this point.
He gave a State of the Union Address, he's issued various threats and phone calls, but anything short of action at this point that addresses the situation is just not going to be good enough for these voters.
And I think that the Biden campaign has, to this point, written off some of these things, like the uncommitted vote in Michigan, is something that's ultimately not going to hurt him in the general election, that these voters will come home to the Democratic Party, that surely they're not going to vote for Donald Trump, that democracy being on the ballot will weigh more for them.
But there are a lot of Democrats who just don't think that that's the case.
There are these voters, these progressive voters who were saying that they're going to stay at home in the general election.
And this is really something that the Biden campaign is going to have to contend with.
FRANKLIN FOER: Did you believe them when they told you that or did you just -- not that you -- but as you kind of project forward and you think about the psychology of statements like that, when you project forward to the moment where it becomes a binary choice between Trump and Biden, do you believe that they're going to stay home?
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: For the voters, these voters, for Arab-American voters, for progressive voters who this is the number one issue for them, I mean, I take them at their word that if they didn't vote for Biden in the primary, and if they say that they're grappling with whether or not to vote, I understand that it's still really early in the election cycle, and there are months and months of things that can happen.
By the way, you know, Biden could change his position on some of these things.
It's still early in the year, but this is what the concerns that they are raising at this time.
PETER FOER: That early.
I mean, the problem for the White House is they had hoped that they could get Netanyahu to wrap this up in January.
So that by now, by summer, by the time people are focusing on the election, that the talk will be about peacemaking, about reconstruction, about how to make things better, and the angry people would kind of, you know, calm down a little bit and come to that binary choice you're talking about.
We're now getting pretty far into the year where that binary choice may not be enough.
And it doesn't have to be a lot of people.
It does not -- it could be just enough people that Francesca talked to to change a state like Michigan and Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, the only states that really matter, and we saw the last two elections, how close those were.
FRANKLIN FOER: Well, that's a delightful segue for us to put up on the screen some recent polling that The Wall Street Journal has conducted about the state of the race in the swing states.
In six of the seven swing states, Trump is ahead of Biden.
They are tied in Wisconsin.
Leigh Ann, can you decipher this for us now and give us a sense of the state of play for the coming elections?
LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: So, this Wall Street Journal poll is not an outlier.
This is reflective of recent polls over the past couple weeks, maybe a month or so, where Biden is really struggling in these swing states and the states that matter.
The challenges for Biden though are different than the challenges for Trump.
The fact that Biden is losing support among his base, his base voters of black voters, Latino voters, young voters as well, which this poll reflects, where Donald Trump is very strong among his base.
And so Biden is going to have to do the work, of course, to win the middle, but also to win back the enthusiasm and the motivation so that the voters that Francesca talked to don't stay home.
FRANKLIN FOER: As it happens, I think you were both on the ground in Nevada this week, one of the -- this week's states, what did you learn?
What did you see when you were out there that might get us beyond what the polls are, some other stories or some other sense of the contours of this contest?
LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Yes.
While I was doing this, I was there for a story, for a very policy-specific story.
So, I didn't necessarily talk to voters about the horse race.
But I did talk to people about their economic situation and how in Nevada they are really feeling the economy in different ways, even though the economy has come back in a post-pandemic level, inflation, housing costs, rental costs, they're struggling.
And you can see that in the instance of, you know, the Senate race there, Cook Political Report just switched that from a lean Democrat to a tossup because of how unpopular Joe Biden is there and the trickledown impact.
But I will say Joe Biden has a campaign there now.
He has an infrastructure there.
Donald Trump does not yet have that infrastructure in this key battleground state.
I'm told that he is kind of embedded a little bit with the Nevada Republican Party, which is quite dysfunctional at this point.
And so, as Peter said, it's still early, but it's not that early.
And he has a lot of work, infrastructure-wise, to do in order if he wants to win this state.
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Biden is hitting the right notes, I'm told, when it comes to housing, housing costs in particular are very important, and that was something he touched on when he was there recently.
He's been to Nevada twice this year already.
But when it comes -- you're talking about the Senate race.
I had an organizer tell me just this week that they never believed that this was a lean-Dem seat, that they always thought this was going to be a tossup.
It was very close in 2022 when there was a Senate seat on the ballot.
It's going to be really close in the presidential election.
And you could see a scenario where the Senate seat goes one way, and the election goes another way in Nevada.
We could see a split ticket there.
So, this will be a really key state to watch.
FRANKLIN FOER: Peter, there is also this evidence that in poll after poll, there has been somewhat of an uptick in Biden's direction.
I don't know if the White House is taking solace in that and touting that.
But what is the explanation for this ever so slight but very meaningful movement in these serious polls?
PETER BAKER: I mean, I think that they took a lot of solace after the State of the Union when there seemed to be a little bit of momentum, right, that it wasn't going to win over necessarily Francesca's voters, but it was sort of calming the nerves of what David Plouffe famously calls the bedwetters, people who are so worried in the Democratic Party that Trump -- sorry, that Biden is past his prime and not capable of running the kind of campaign they would like to see.
So, they felt better for a while.
But I remember hearing them say at that point that we'll need to look at these polls a month out.
And that will really tell us.
And here we are basically almost a month out.
And it really hasn't improved in such a way that they should be taking the solace that they initially hoped for.
It's still a very tight race.
All these are within the margin of error.
We can see what happens.
It's about turnout.
A lot of these states don't have very effective Republican organizations or conflicted Republican organizations right now.
But there's no room for feeling overconfident in the Biden camp.
NANCY YOUSSEF: And to that point, in The Wall Street Journal poll, the thing that jumped out to me is on three major issues, immigration, fit and readiness for the job, the economy.
Trump was far ahead of President Biden.
The only issue in which the president led was on abortion.
And yet, when you looked at the breakdown of the economy, voters said, I feel my personal economy is okay, my personal economic situation, but I'm worried about the economy nationally, which suggests that there was a problem around messaging, conflating inflation with other economic issues.
And I just thought, to your point, that it really showed a month out, that we're not seeing the kind of upswing in a sort of sustainable way that perhaps they'd hoped for.
FRANKLIN FOER: Go ahead.
LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: I was just going to say in the entire Biden campaign strategy is to is I'm not Trump essentially.
You know, I talked to the deputy campaign manager a couple of weeks ago, Quentin Fulks, and his response kept saying, look, when it is clear to voters that, like you said, a binary choice between Trump and Biden, that we are confident the voters are going to come back to Biden.
And we'll see if that strategy works.
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: And I just want to note that there are plenty of voters in these battleground states who voted for Biden who are telling me that despite all these things and maybe they disagree on Israel, yes, of course they're going to vote for Joe Biden again in a situation against Donald Trump.
I'm merely making the point that I think they're underestimating the undercurrent of frustration among progressives right now.
PETER BAKER: The advantage that Biden does have, though, is money.
He's way out in front of Trump.
Trump obviously has a lot of other issues he has to spend money on, call his lawyers, they'll tell you.
And Biden said -- there are people who say, look, we haven't really begun to engage.
We're only starting to begin to engage, to make the point Leigh Ann's talking about, which is, did we tell you who we're running against?
We might remind you of what you forgot about from four years ago.
And if they use that money effectively, they think they can make that choice binary.
