Opponents of the Iraq War gathered to disrupt the Republican National Convention in 2004. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in New York City; some put the total as high as 200,000. A minority of the protesters disregarded police lines. More than 1,800 people were arrested.

Yet the convention itself proceeded exactly as planned. President George W. Bush was renominated, and subsequently won reelection. In so doing, he became the only Republican presidential candidate to win a popular-vote majority in the 35 years since the end of the Cold War. In 2014, New York City paid $18 million to settle the legal claims of people who contended that they had been wrongly swept up in the 2004 convention arrests.

Some radical opponents of President Joe Biden hope they will have better success disrupting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this year. They imagine they can do to a political convention what they have done at America’s prestige universities. They are almost certainly deluding themselves.

Biden’s opponents have based their plans on a folk memory of events in 1968. For The Free Press, Olivia Reingold and Eli Lake reported from an activist planning meeting: “‘Have you heard that the Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago?’ [a leader] asks the crowd. ‘Are we going to let ’em come here without a protest? This is Chicago, goddamn it—we’ve got to give them a 1968 kind of welcome.’”

In 1968, a poorly disciplined Chicago police force brutalized protesters and journalists in front of television cameras. The horrifying images symbolized a year of political upheaval that smashed forever the New Deal coalition of pro-segregation, conservative white southerners; unionized workers; northern ethnic-minority voters; and urban liberals. A Republican won the presidency in 1968—and then again in four of the next five elections.

Exactly why the utterly self-defeating tumult of Chicago ’68 excites modern-day radicals is a topic I’ll leave to the psychoanalysts. For now, never mind the why; let’s focus on the how. Is a repeat of the 1968 disruption possible in the context of 2024? Or is the stability of 2004 the more relevant precedent and probable outcome?

From 1968 to today, responsibility for protecting political conventions has shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This new federal responsibility was formalized in a directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998. The order created a category of “National Special Security Events,” for which planning would be led by the Secret Service.

National Security Special Events draw on all the resources of the federal government, including, if need be, those of the Defense Department. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major-party conventions.

Those funds enabled Cleveland, the host of the 2016 Republican convention, to deploy thousands of law-enforcement personnel. Officers were seconded from across Ohio, and from as far away as Texas and California. Federal funds paid for police to be trained in understanding the difference between lawful and unlawful protest, and to equip them with body cameras to record interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to buy 300 bicycles to field a force that could move quickly into places where cars might not be able to go, and that could patrol public spaces in a way that was more approachable and friendly.

[George Packer: The campus-left occupation that broke higher education]

In the end, the convention was mostly orderly and peaceful—despite the presence of civilians taking advantage of Ohio’s open-carry laws to bear rifles around town. A rare moment of public-order drama was recorded on the second-to-last day of the convention, when about 200 officers faced a small group that tried to burn an American flag. One of the protesters inadvertently set his own pants on fire. A police officer was recorded yelling, “You’re on fire, you’re on fire, stupid!” The man pushed away officers as they doused the flames and was arrested for assault.

At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in 2016, police negotiated ways of permitting peaceful protest with demonstrators. At one point, dissident Bernie Sanders supporters tried to breach the convention perimeter. More than 50 were arrested; most were released without charge.

The mostly virtual conventions of the pandemic year 2020 attracted fewer demonstrators. At the one-day Republican convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, police had little difficulty turning back protesters who tried to breach the convention’s perimeter. At the Democratic convention in Milwaukee, demonstrators apparently did not even try to force a breach; instead, they marched up to the security perimeter, made speeches, then marched away again.

The widespread recent pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses have been distinguished by more rule-breaking than the convention protests of the past two cycles. But campuses are special places, lightly policed and weakly governed. Pro-Palestinian protesters have proved considerably more circumspect when they march in places where laws of public order are upheld.

On January 13, 2024, a protest sponsored by American Muslim groups drew thousands to Washington, D.C., culminating in demonstrations at the White House. Only two people were arrested. Many more arrests occurred on January 16, when a group sponsored by the Mennonite Church trespassed inside the Capitol’s Cannon House office building, but that protest involved old-fashioned civil disobedience—lawbreaking that did not threaten injury to anyone, followed by peaceful acceptance of arrest.

Pro-Palestinian groups have blocked bridges in some U.S. cities to stall traffic. But this tactic, too, has depended on tacit permission from the authorities. The 80 pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested for halting traffic on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in November 2023 escaped criminal convictions by each accepting five hours of community service. That leniency was more or less an open invitation to try it again, which they did on the Golden Gate Bridge in April.

In this country and in Europe, some have inflicted criminal violence against Jewish people. Just last week, for example, French media reported on the case of a Jewish woman in France who was allegedly kidnapped, raped, and threatened with murder by a man who told her that he sought to “avenge Palestine.” At a protest in California in November 2023, a pro-Palestinian protester inflicted fatal injuries on a Jewish man. But these crimes have occurred in the absence of police, not—as at a national political convention—in front of thousands of officers.

Where faced with clear rules backed by effective enforcement, pro-Palestinian protests on this side of the Atlantic have generally deferred to lawful authority.

Past practice is, of course, no guarantee of future behavior. A large number of people do seem to want to mess up the Democratic convention. When I spoke with Democratic Party officials involved with convention planning, they seemed acutely aware of the hazards and deeply immersed in countering the risks.

Maybe they will overlook something. Maybe protesters will discover an unsuspected weak point, overwhelm police, wreak viral-video havoc, embarrass President Biden, and thereby help Donald Trump. The better guess is that they will not only fail in that but also be unable to mobilize any large number to attack police lines and risk serious prison time.

In the meantime, however, the talk of convention disruption has achieved one thing: It has at least temporarily diverted the conversation toward the antidemocratic extremists who may assault the Democratic convention that will renominate Biden, and away from the antidemocratic extremists who will take the stage unmolested to address the Republican convention that will renominate Trump.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders sent letter on Wednesday to Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen announcing that the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which Sanders chairs, has launched an investigation into the high prices the company charges for its blockbuster diabetes and weight loss dugs.

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“The entire world knows exactly why the U.S. is trying to ban TikTok,” James Li declared on March 16 to his nearly 100,000 followers on the social-media platform. His video then cut to a subtitled clip of a Taiwanese speaker purportedly discussing how “TikTok inadvertently offended the Jewish people” by hosting pro-Palestinian content. “The power of the Jewish people in America is definitely more scary than Trump,” the speaker goes on. “They have created the options: either ban or sell to the Americans. In reality, it’s neither—it’s selling to a Jewish investment group.”

Li, who calls himself an “indie journalist” and subsequently posted another video blaming Israel for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, got more than 160,000 views for his TikTok theory—and the video was one of the poorer-performing entries making similar claims on the platform.

What prompted this outburst? On March 13, Congress advanced a bill that would give TikTok’s Chinese parent company six months to sell it or be banned from American app stores. The legislation passed 352–65, with overwhelming bipartisan support, and the rational observer will have no trouble understanding why.

The United States has a long history of preventing foreign adversaries from controlling important communications infrastructure. Washington spent more than a decade, under Democratic and Republican presidents, leading a successful international campaign to block the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from Western markets. Donald Trump attempted to force a TikTok sale back in 2020. The reasons are straightforward: The app has access to the data of some 150 million American users—nearly half the population—but it is owned and controlled by the Chinese company ByteDance. Like all companies in the country, ByteDance is effectively under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party, which regularly punishes and even disappears business leaders who displease it. A former ByteDance executive has said that the CCP had “supreme access” to the company’s data, and used the info to track protesters in Hong Kong, for example.

[Read: Beijing is ruining TikTok]

Recent polls show robust public support for TikTok’s ban or sale, and for years, Gallup has found that Americans see China as the country’s greatest enemy. In short, Congress has strong electoral and political incentives to act against TikTok. But spend some time on the platform itself, and you’ll discover a very different culprit behind all this: Jews.

“We were all thinking it: Israel is trying to buy TikTok,” the influencer Ian Carroll told his 1.5 million followers last month. The evidence: Steven Mnuchin, the former Trump Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs executive, has sought investors to purchase the app. “He’s not Israel, right?” continued Carroll. “Well, let’s peel this onion back one layer at a time, starting with just the fact that he’s Jewish.”

Carroll’s TikTok bio says “do your own research,” and he certainly had research to share. “The censorship is not about China on TikTok,” he explained. Rather, “as a TikTok creator who gets censored all the frickin’ time, I can tell you that the things you get censored about are the CIA and Israel.” Carroll did not address why Israel would go through so much trouble to acquire TikTok if it already controlled the platform, or why the Semitic censors somehow missed his video and its more than 1 million views, not to mention the several similarly viral follow-ups he posted.

In truth, far from suppressing such content, TikTok’s algorithm happily promotes it. I purposely viewed the videos for this piece while logged out of the platform, and it nonetheless began suggesting to me more material along these lines through its sidebar recommendations.

Characteristic of anti-Semitic online discourse, these videos and others like them interchangeably reference individual American Jews, American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, American pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC, and the state of Israel, as though they are all part of one single-minded international conspiracy to take down TikTok. When a commenter asked Carroll to “look into universal studios pulling their music from TikTok,” a reference to the Universal Music conglomerate’s dispute with TikTok over royalties, Carroll replied, “Universal CEO is a Jewish man.”

“A foreign government is influencing the 2024 election,” the leftist podcaster and former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray declared on X in March. “I’m not talking about China, but Israel. In a leaked recording, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that Israel had a ‘TikTok problem.’ Suddenly, a divided Congress agrees on one thing: A social media ban.” Greenblatt is an American Jew, the ADL is an American organization, the bill isn’t a ban, and the push for a forced sale predated the Gaza war, but other than that, Gray was on the money.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why Facebook and Twitter won’t ban antisemitism]

“Banning TikTok became a crucial emergency because what they saw was a bunch of young individuals, essentially people that are going to be the future leaders of America, who were not pro-Israel,” the far-right commentator Candace Owens claimed in March on her popular show at The Daily Wire. She then issued an implied threat: “If TikTok is in fact banned, there is no question that Israel will be blamed, AIPAC will be blamed, the ADL will be blamed, Jews are going to be blamed … You can see that sentiment building.” (Owens left The Daily Wire a week later following a string of anti-Semitic incidents, which included claims that Jews were doing “horrific things” and “controlling people with blackmail,” as well as her favoriting a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood.”)

At this point, it’s not uncommon to find videos about the TikTok legislation that do not even mention Jews or Israel—like this one with 1.5 million views—yet are flooded with hundreds of comments, garnering tens of thousands of likes, accusing “Zionists,” “Jews,” or AIPAC of being behind it, despite years of national-security reporting on concerns over the platform’s Chinese owners. That alleged Jewish malefactors are being assailed on TikTok even when they are not invoked explicitly in a video illustrates how widely the meme has spread.

Like many conspiracy theories, the notion that Jews are out to ban TikTok contains a grain of truth. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have raised concerns about TikTok’s failure to moderate anti-Semitic content for years, including when it pertains to Israel, but they have never called for the app to be shut down. After the TikTok sale legislation was proposed, the Jewish Federations of North America said it “appropriately balances free speech and individual rights with regulatory action” while asserting that “our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in antisemitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.” (Presumably, the organization arrived at this conclusion by spending 10 minutes on the app.) Researchers have found that pro-Palestinian content dwarfs pro-Israel content on TikTok, likely reflecting the platform’s young and international demographic.

But no conspiracy theories or appeals to recent geopolitical developments are necessary to understand why U.S. politicians wouldn’t want one of the most-trafficked social-media networks in America to be run by Communist China via a black-box algorithm. Just this past December, researchers at Rutgers found that anti-China posts on topics like the Hong Kong protests or the regime’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims were dramatically underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.

TikTok’s response to allegations that it could function as a foreign influence operation have not exactly allayed concerns. Shortly after the Rutgers study was published, the app restricted access to the tool used by academics to track its content. Last month, it sent multiple alerts to its American users falsely warning that Congress was about to ban TikTok and urging them to contact their representatives. In fact, the bill seeks to force a sale to new ownership, much as congressional scrutiny over data privacy led the dating app Grindr to be sold to non-Chinese owners in 2020.

Simply put, none of what is happening to the social-media platform is new. Neither is the tendency to blame Jews for the world’s problems—but that doesn’t make the impulse any less dangerous. Many understand anti-Semitism as a personal prejudice that singles out Jewish people for their difference, much like other minorities experience racism. But anti-Semitism also manifests as a conspiracy theory about how the world works, alleging that sinister string-pulling Jews are the source of social, political, and economic problems—and this is the sort of anti-Semitism that tends to get people killed.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-semitism]

Consider recent American history: In 2018, a far-right gunman who blamed Jews for mass immigration murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. In 2019, assailants tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing three; one of the shooters had written on social media about Jews controlling the government. In 2022, an Islamic extremist took an entire congregation hostage in Colleyville, Texas, and demanded that a rabbi get a convict released from a nearby prison. These perpetrators—white supremacist, Black extremist, radical Islamist—had essentially nothing in common other than their belief that a Jewish cabal governed world affairs and was the cause of their problems.

The reality is the reverse: Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, and although they exercise influence like any other minority, they frequently disagree among themselves and do not dictate the destiny of the majority. Politicians voting against TikTok are pursuing their conception of the national interest, not being suborned to serve some nebulous Jewish interest. Remove the Jews from the equation, and the situation will be the same.

Conspiracy theorists typically claim to be combatting concealed power structures. But as in this case, their delusions make them unable to perceive the way power actually works. Thus, conspiratorial anti-Semitism hobbles its adherents, preventing them from rationally organizing to advance their own causes by distracting them with fantastical Jewish plots.

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” the Black civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.”

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories won’t safeguard TikTok from the bill that’s currently moving through the U.S. legislature. But the more people buy into them, the more they will imperil not only American Jews but American democracy as well.

The Iranian attack on Israel has heightened the fierce cross-pressures shaping President Joe Biden’s conflicted approach to the war in Gaza.

Throughout Israel’s military engagement, Biden has struggled to square his historic inclination to support Israel almost unreservedly with growing hostility in his party toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war. For months, Biden has been escalating his criticism of Netanyahu, but once the Iran attack began, the president snapped back to his instinct to rally behind Israel.

The barrage of missiles and drones that Iran fired at Israel on Saturday may have a similar short-term effect on slowing what has been a steady increase in congressional Democrats urging Biden to suspend offensive weapons sales to Israel until it fundamentally changes its strategy in Gaza. Yet, unless Israel and Iran descend into a full-scale confrontation, last weekend’s hostilities are not likely to end that pressure. That’s especially so because some of the same Democrats critical of Israel’s behavior in Gaza also believe the Jewish state was misguided to launch the air strike on senior officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria that precipitated the current exchange.

If the Iranian threat tilts Biden back toward his instinct to lock arms with Israel, it will widen the breach between him and the increasing number of Democrats who want a more fundamental break in U.S. support for the Gaza war.

Before Saturday’s attack, Biden faced greater division in his own coalition over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war than any other Democratic president has confronted on a foreign-policy choice in decades.

The Democrats who have preceded Biden as president over the past 50 years—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—all faced discontent within their ranks over key foreign-policy decisions. But many veterans of previous Democratic administrations believe that none of those controversies generated as much sustained discord as Biden is now experiencing on three central fronts: criticism in Congress, disapproval in public-opinion polls, and persistent public protest.

“It’s very powerful when people who don’t ordinarily get involved in foreign policy do,” Ben Rhodes, who served as the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications under Obama, told me. “I don’t remember that happening in my administration or the Clinton administration. But now there has been a coalescence of real core pillars of the Democratic base that are just totally repelled by what is happening and a lack of pressure on Israel to change course. I can’t really think of anything like this.”

The current conflict hasn’t divided Democrats as badly as the second Iraq War, which began in 2003; former Senator Hillary Clinton’s vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq was one reason she lost the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to Obama. But those internecine conflicts centered on how Democrats responded to the decision to launch the war by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

The breadth of public and congressional discontent over this conflict also doesn’t compare to the magnitude of party opposition that developed against Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. But although the current dissent doesn’t approach that historic height, it has exposed Biden to a distant echo of the charge from those years of supporting an unjust war.

Aides in the Biden White House and on his reelection campaign uniformly expressed optimism to me that, despite polls showing growing unease about the war among Democratic partisans, the conflict would not cost the president votes among people otherwise inclined to support him against former President Donald Trump. Not everyone in the party agrees that that optimism is justified. But many Democrats fear that even if Biden’s team is correct for now, the president’s political risks will only grow the longer the war persists.

[Alan Taylor: Gaza on the brink of famine]

“If it stops in three months, there is probably enough time” for Biden to recover, said one senior administration official, who asked for anonymity while discussing internal deliberations. “If it doesn’t stop in six months, we are going to really feel it.”

The fear among party strategists is not so much that Democrats discontented over Biden’s approach to the war, especially young people, will vote for Trump. He is even less likely to impose constraints on Israel, and his top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, has openly threatened to deport pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Instead, the concern is that with many younger voters already unenthusiastic about Biden, his handling of the war will provide them with another reason to choose a third-party candidate or to simply not vote at all. “I think it has complicated Biden’s current standing with young people,” Ben Tulchin, who served as the lead pollster in both of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, told me. “It’s just one more thing he is going to have to mend fences on. The hope is, in six months from now, the temperature gets turned down.”

The discontent among Democrats about the war and Biden’s approach to it is mounting across all three measures of dissent.

The first is in Congress. After the Israeli missile strikes that killed workers from the World Central Kitchen, a group of 56 Democratic House members sent Biden a letter urging him to suspend the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel until an independent investigation into the attack is completed. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, a centrist who served as Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential nominee in 2016, earlier this month also called on Biden to stop the transfer of “bombs and other offensive weapons that can kill and wound civilians and humanitarian aid workers.”

Earlier this year, a group of 19 Democratic senators led by Chris Van Hollen of Maryland filed a bill that could have restricted U.S. military aid to Israel. To defuse the threat, the Biden administration issued a national-security memorandum establishing a new process for assessing whether Israel, and other countries receiving U.S. military aid, are using the weapons in accordance with international law, and also cooperating in the distribution of humanitarian aid provided either directly by the United States or by international organizations it supports. If that report, due on May 8, finds that Israel has failed to meet those standards, it could encourage more Democrats to demand that Biden suspend the transfer of offensive weapons.

“There is growing frustration with the pattern of the president making reasonable requests and demands, and the Netanyahu government mostly ignoring them and doing so with impunity, in the sense that we send more 2,000-pound bombs,” Van Hollen told me. “I think there are a growing number of senators who agree we can make more effective use of all the policy tools at our disposal. Our approach cannot be limited to jawboning Prime Minister Netanyahu.”

In the near term, the Iranian attack may inhibit more Democrats from demanding a suspension of offensive weapon transfers to Israel, such as the F-15-fighter-jet sale to the Jewish state that Biden is lobbying Congress to approve over resistance from some party leaders. (Iran’s assault highlighted the difficulty of distinguishing between offensive and defensive weapons; two squadrons of American F-15s helped intercept the Iranian attack.) But several Democratic opponents of the arms transfers issued statements this weekend reaffirming their position. In one of those, Van Hollen said Sunday that although the U.S. “can and should continue to replenish” the defensive systems Israel employed against the Iranian barrage, “the Biden Administration should use all the levers of its influence to” sway the Israeli decisions on Gaza; that’s clear code for indicating Van Hollen believes Biden should still threaten a suspension of offensive weapon transfers.

Public-opinion polls offer another vivid measure of Democratic discontent over the war and the U.S. approach to it. In a recent national Quinnipiac University poll, almost two-thirds of Democrats said they opposed sending further military aid to Israel. In a CBS News/YouGov national poll released Sunday but conducted before Saturday’s hostilities, most Democrats wanted the U.S. to support Israel if Iran attacked it. But two-thirds of Democrats again opposed weapons transfers to Israel for the war with Hamas, and nearly half said Biden should push Israel to entirely end its military action; another fourth of respondents said he should encourage it to wind down the campaign.

These negative opinions about the war, and Biden’s approach to it, have been especially pronounced among younger voters. That points to a third central measure of dissension within Democratic ranks: widespread campus-based protests. One telling measure of that challenge for Biden came earlier this month, when the president of the University of Michigan issued new policies toughening penalties against disruptive campus protests.

The fact that the leading university in a state that is virtually a must-win for Biden felt compelled to impose new restrictions on protest underscored the intensity of the activism against the Gaza war. Protest “has been pretty persistent since October,” Ali Allam, a University of Michigan sophomore active in the TAHRIR coalition leading the campus protests, told me. “I don’t know very many people who are planning on voting for Biden, because they have seen time and time again, he is a person who says, ‘We’re concerned about the situation,’ and yet he continues to sign off on providing more and more weapons. And that is just not something young people are willing to get behind.”

Michigan is a somewhat unique case because of the state’s large Arab American population, which provides an especially impassioned core for the protest movement. But the student hostility to the war has extended to a broad range of left-leaning younger voters that Democrats count on. In Michigan, for instance, some 80 campus groups are part of the TAHRIR coalition, including organizations representing Black, Latino, Asian, and Jewish students, Allam said. Ben Rhodes, who now co-hosts a popular podcast aimed primarily at liberal young people, Pod Save the World, sees the same trend. “It’s not just Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan, or foreign-policy lefties,” he told me. “It’s this kind of mainstream of the young part of the Democratic coalition.”

As Biden advisers point out, the other recent Democratic presidents also provoked internal opposition in Congress or in polls to some of their foreign-policy decisions. But it’s difficult to identify an example under Carter, Clinton, or Obama that combined all three of the elements of Democratic discontent Biden is now facing.

Probably the most controversial foreign-policy decision of Carter’s presidency, for instance, was his support for the treaty ceding control of the Panama Canal back to Panama. That produced a heated and lengthy public debate, but the conflict was fought out mostly against conservative Republicans led by Ronald Reagan: In the end, just six Senate Democrats voted against the treaty.

[Graeme Wood: What will Netanyahu do now?]

The principal foreign-policy controversies of Clinton’s presidency revolved around his anguished decisions on whether to intervene in a series of humanitarian crises. After an early military action in Somalia went badly (in the events depicted in the book and movie Black Hawk Down), a chastened Clinton stood aside as a horrific genocide unfolded in Rwanda in 1994. Clinton also wavered for years before launching a bombing campaign with NATO allies in 1995 that ultimately produced the peace treaty that ended the Serbian war in Bosnia. Later, Clinton launched another bombing campaign to end Serbian attacks in Kosovo.

Although neither party, to its shame, exerted any concerted pressure on Clinton to act in Rwanda, he did face congressional demands to more forcefully intervene in the Balkans. Shortly before the 1995 bombing campaign, both the House and the Senate approved legislation essentially renouncing Clinton’s policies in Bosnia, and almost half of Democrats in each chamber voted against him. But the issue did not provoke anything near the public activism now evident on the Israeli war in Gaza, and even in Congress, the issue scrambled both parties. Many Democrats from all of the party’s ideological wings shared Clinton’s caution.

“I don’t think domestic opinion per se affected” Clinton’s choices about the Balkans, James Steinberg, who served as his deputy national security adviser, told me. “There were Democrats and Republicans on both sides of the issue. It was more Clinton’s own feeling about responsibility, leadership, and America’s role in the post–Cold War world.”

Obama faced intermittent discontent among some Democrats over his major foreign-policy choices, including his “surge” of additional military personnel into Afghanistan and his plans for air strikes during the Syrian civil war. But none of these generated sustained resistance across all three of the fronts now challenging Biden. Nor did many Democrats dissent from what was probably Obama’s most controversial foreign-policy move—the treaty he reached during his second term to limit Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. In the end, just four Senate Democrats voted against approving the pact.

The Democratic unity behind the Iran agreement was notable because it came despite an intense lobbying effort against it from AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel group in the U.S., and Netanyahu himself. In an extraordinary intervention into U.S. domestic politics from a foreign leader, Netanyahu, who was also Israel’s prime minister then, delivered a speech to Congress opposing the deal at the invitation of congressional Republicans.

Netanyahu’s long history of aligning closely with U.S. Republicans and conflicting with Democratic presidents meant that few Democrats began the Gaza war with much confidence in him. Many Democrats have also been outraged by Netanyahu’s efforts to eviscerate judicial review of government actions in Israel, which has drawn comparisons to Trump’s efforts to weaken pillars of U.S. democracy. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that just one in 20 Democrats have a favorable impression of Netanyahu.

Biden initially insisted that his best chance to influence Israel’s policies was to wrap Netanyahu in a “bear hug.” But given all this history, many Democrats outside the administration viewed that strategy as doomed from the start.

“The administration’s initial approach seemed to be based on the belief that the best way to maintain influence with the Israeli government was to sympathize with their objectives and be inside the discussion rather than outside the discussion,” said Steinberg, who also served as deputy secretary of state for Obama and is now the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “But everything that has happened over the past months reinforces the view that, with Netanyahu, that strategy counts for little.”

Over the past several months, as the devastation inside Gaza has mounted and Netanyahu has openly dismissed Biden’s calls for a two-state solution after the fighting, the president has significantly intensified his public criticism of the Israeli prime minister. When I asked the senior administration official whether Netanyahu has exhausted whatever goodwill he possessed when the war began within the administration and with Democrats in Congress, the official replied, “It’s awfully close.”

But Biden has so far refused to match his critical words for Netanyahu with concrete consequences. Administration officials point out that the ongoing arms transfers to Israel are primarily occurring under a long-term arms deal approved during the Obama presidency. And they note that providing Israel with sophisticated weaponry advances U.S. strategic interests in deterring Iran—an argument that gained relevance after Saturday’s Iranian barrage. The October 7 attack also provoked genuine outrage across the American political spectrum and cemented a broad bipartisan conviction that Israel is justified in seeking to disable Hamas.

But many of the national-security experts I spoke with argued that Biden’s reluctance to push harder against Netanyahu also reflects the fact that the president formed his fundamental vision of Israel decades ago, when the country was an underdog besieged by larger neighbors, which is no longer the way many Democrats see the nation. “This is a generational issue, and in Biden’s head, he’s of the kibbutz generation,” Jeremy Rosner, a senior adviser at the National Security Council under Clinton, told me. “I don’t think it was tactical on his part, how he responded, or political; I think it was heartfelt.”

The rising tension with Iran will likely delay a reckoning between Biden and Netanyahu over Gaza. But it will grow only more difficult for Biden to avoid a deeper breach with the Israeli government around the war. For instance, the administration probably won’t be able to avoid sharp criticism of Israel in the May 8 report to Congress. Senator Van Hollen says the report cannot credibly claim that Israel has met the required performance for allowing the distribution of international aid over the duration of the war, even if it is now allowing in more shipments after Biden’s stern phone conversation with Netanyahu about the deaths of the World Central Kitchen workers. “If anybody suggests that the Netanyahu government has met the standard [on facilitating humanitarian aid] for the last many months, it would be hard to have any confidence in that conclusion,” Van Hollen told me.

A larger inflection point is looming over Rafah. Netanyahu has insisted that Israel is still planning a full-scale military operation in the last major Gaza civilian center that it has not invaded; Biden has urged him to instead use only more surgical military missions against Hamas leadership and, in an MSNBC interview last month, called an all-out attack of Rafah a “red line” that Israel should not cross.

Yet in that interview, Biden sent mixed signals about what consequences, if any, he would impose if Netanyahu crossed that line. Likewise, administration officials have remained vague about what penalties, if any, they will impose if they judge that Israel has failed to meet the performance standards mandated in the May 8 report.

Biden has no simple political choices on the conflict. In polling, about one in four Democrats consistently express support for Israel’s conduct of the war—roughly that many in the party, for instance, said in the Quinnipiac poll that they support more military aid to Israel and, in recent Pew Research Center polling, said that they view the Israeli government favorably. Biden might alienate some of those voters if he imposes more constraints on Israel. The veteran Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, the president of the pro-Israel group Democratic Majority for Israel, recently argued to Politico that if Biden took a harder line on the war, he would lose support not only among voters who strongly back the Jewish state but also from others who would view him as weak for reversing direction under political pressure.

Any move to limit arms sales to Israel would also draw intense attacks from Republicans, who seized on the Iranian barrage to denounce the Democratic criticism of Israel over Gaza. “Get behind the Israeli government,” Republican Representative Mike Lawler of New York insisted on CNN while the attack was under way.

Yet the political risks to Biden of staying on his current course are also apparent. Already, a clear majority of the Democratic base disapproves of Israel’s conduct of the war. The number of Democratic voters and elected officials critical of the invasion is likely to grow as the conflict persists—particularly if Israel continues to employ the same harsh tactics. As the senior official told me, the administration expects that “if there isn’t a cease-fire and this thing drags on and there isn’t a dramatic change in the ways the Israelis operate, the erosion” in Democratic support for Biden’s posture toward the war “is going to continue.” Even among independent voters, Israel’s position has dipped into the red: In a recent Gallup survey, independents by a ratio of 2 to 1 disapproved of the Israeli military action, and in Sunday’s CBS News/YouGov poll, the share of independents who said the U.S. should no longer send arms to Israel was nearly as high as the percentage of Democrats.

[Hussein Ibish: The United States and Israel are coming apart]

Biden’s team still holds out hope that, partly because of his tougher tone, Israel will agree to a cease-fire with Hamas that in turn could unlock a broader agreement for normalization of Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia that includes steps toward negotiating a Palestinian state. Such a transformative deal could erase much of the discontent among Democrats about Biden’s approach to the war.

But with Hamas displaying even more resistance than Israel to another cease-fire, such a sequence of events seems very distant. (The unprecedented step of Iran launching attacks from its own territory into Israel might encourage Saudi Arabia and other regional adversaries of Tehran to consider aligning more closely with Israel and the U.S., but the overall increase in regional tensions may not be conducive to an immediate diplomatic breakthrough.) This means the most likely prospect in the coming weeks is for more fighting and more civilian suffering in Gaza that exacerbates the tensions inside the Democratic Party over the war.

“This can get worse,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think people have their heads fully around that, because what’s already happened feels extreme. But if the current status quo continues for another couple of months, where there is an Israeli military operation in Rafah and there are extreme restrictions on aid getting in, we are going to be looking at a much worse situation than we are today.”

If the administration’s months of support for Netanyahu on the Gaza war ultimately costs Biden support in November, then the president’s failure to break from a right-wing aspiring authoritarian in Israel may doom his effort to prevent the return to power of a right-wing aspiring authoritarian in America.

In the days after the November election in 2020, I traveled from Laredo, Texas, down along the Rio Grande into one of the great heartlands of Mexican America, a place locals proudly refer to by its area code, “the 956.” Along this stretch of the Texas border, towns are up to 98 percent Latino; Spanish is so common that Anglos have to learn the language if they want to order at restaurants. Yet on Election Night, residents had shocked the country by turning out for Donald Trump in record numbers.

In Zapata County, where Trump became the first Republican to win the presidential vote since Warren Harding in 1920, I asked Cynthia Villarreal, a longtime Democratic organizer, what explained Trump’s success after four years of immigration raids and family separation. Villarreal told me that, in South Texas, many Mexican Americans don’t identify as immigrants; her own ancestors lived on the Rio Grande before Texas even existed. In Starr County, where Trump had almost quadrupled Republican turnout, the then–county chair of the GOP, a retired colonel named Ross Barrera, said that he and many other Latinos in Texas wanted a border wall. He felt pity, but no solidarity, for those crossing the border; he explained that some South Texans call them mojaditos—Spanish for the slur “wetback.”

Since 2020, Texas politicians have seemed to absorb the lesson that many Latinos will tolerate border crackdowns. In early 2021, Republican Governor Greg Abbott sent thousands of state police and National Guardsmen into Texas’s southernmost counties as part of his “Operation Lone Star.” Residents appeared to reward him: Even if the police SUVs and razor wire were an eyesore, in the 2022 governor’s election Abbott improved on his 2018 results in almost every border county.

[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court has itself to blame for Texas defying its orders]

But soon, Texas Republicans could test just how harsh an immigration policy Latinos really want. In a raucous legislative session last year, the state’s Republican supermajority sent Abbott a monumental bill, S.B. 4. The law, currently on hold in the courts, would essentially give Texas its own immigration system, making “illegal entry”—traditionally enforced by the federal government—into a state crime. If the law goes into effect, a police officer anywhere in the state will be able to stop, question, and arrest anyone they suspect might have crossed the Rio Grande illegally. Judges will be able to coerce defendants to auto-deport to Mexico by threatening them with serious prison time.

S.B. 4 would go far beyond Operation Lone Star, potentially moving immigration enforcement into the state’s interior. Razor wire along the river is meant to control who gets into the state; policing cities such as Dallas and Houston is about getting people out. Will the Latinos in Texas who have welcomed Republicans’ border crackdown feel the same way if state police start arresting their neighbors?

The history here looks grim for the GOP. When Republicans in California and Arizona tried to create the same sort of “show me your papers” system—California’s Proposition 187 and Arizona’s S.B. 1070—the measures backfired. Both laws reeked of racial profiling. People who were around in each state, including my father in California, have told me stories from those years. In Latino neighborhoods, many people came to see the laws not as immigration policy, but as a population control: an attempt to make their state less Latino. They responded by organizing into coalitions that eventually eroded Republican power in both states—and perhaps gave birth to the popular assumption that Latinos vote mostly on immigration.

In California, my father was one of the people for whom Prop. 187 fundamentally changed the way they saw themselves and their place in this country. Growing up in a Mexican American family in San Antonio, he didn’t think of himself as an immigrant. Like Villareal’s family, our roots in Texas run deeper than the state, back to when it was called Coahuila y Tejas. And, like Barrera, my dad heard other Mexican kids at his school smear more recent immigrants as mojaditos. When he moved to California in the 1980s, my father thought of himself as a political moderate. He was an entrepreneur and a family man, besides being Mexican by heritage. He voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential race (“Just like everyone else in America,” he joked to me recently).

Things changed when the Republican governor of California, Pete Wilson, championed Prop. 187. California was in the midst of a historic immigration surge, and as many as 1.3 million undocumented immigrants were living in the state; Wilson was flagging in his 1994 reelection bid. The measure passed, and he held on to his office. When the law went into effect, it instructed public employees—not just cops, but teachers, nurses, and anyone else who worked for the state—to report anyone they suspected might be undocumented.

“I had to start thinking: Was the name ‘Herrera’ probable cause?” my dad said. Prop. 187 erased the conceptual difference he might have felt between himself and noncitizens. He came to believe that, no matter how he thought of himself, some people in this country would only ever see him as Mexican, as an outsider. He never voted Republican again.

He wasn’t alone. In 1984, 45 percent of Latinos in California had, like my father, voted for Reagan. By 1996, that support had cratered: More than 71 percent of Latinos voted for Bill Clinton (a 16 percent increase over his own 1992 result). Turnout among Latinos in California also increased dramatically each election year after Prop. 187. New Latino voters were far more likely to register as Democrats; in Los Angeles County, for instance, six times as many Latinos registered with the Democratic Party than the GOP.

Prop. 187 “created a multigenerational, anti-Republican coalition” among Latinos in California, Mike Madrid, the political director of the California Republican Party from 1996 to 1998, told me. Madrid, who grew up in a Mexican American family in Sacramento, spent years trying to get Republican campaigns to understand Latinos’ complexity. He thought then, and still thinks today, that the party’s best chance of courting Latino voters was with a message geared toward the working class, an “aspirational conservatism.” But Prop. 187 essentially turned hundreds of thousands of Latinos into single-issue voters. Today some of the more prominent Latino officials in the country, including the former San Antonio mayor and Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro and Senator Alex Padilla of California, trace their political roots to their opposition to Prop. 187.

“You can build a multigenerational coalition when a community is perceived to be personally, individually, and as a community under attack,” Madrid said. “If I was naturalized, or my kids were born here, or my grandchildren—everyone came home” to Democrats after Prop. 187. (Madrid clashed with the Republican Party in a very public way when Donald Trump was nominated in 2016.)

[From the March 2022 issue: There’s no such thing as ‘the Latino vote’]

Prop. 187 died in the courts; judges ruled that it violated the supremacy clause in the Constitution and infringed on the federal government’s exclusive jurisdiction over immigration. Almost 15 years would pass before Republicans tried again, this time in Arizona, where Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070 in 2010. Seeking to stop undocumented immigrants from accessing public services, the law mandated that all immigrants over age 18 carry their “papers” with them at all times, and it empowered cops to arrest anyone caught without proper ID.

Academics are still studying how S.B. 1070 changed Arizona. When the bill passed, the state had not only a Republican governor but two Republican senators. Now a Democrat is in the governor’s mansion, along with one and a half Democrats in the senate (Kyrsten Sinema became an independent in 2022). Since S.B. 1070, turnout has exploded in Latino communities, far outstripping population growth. In 2008, just 291,000 Latinos voted in Arizona. By 2012, turnout had increased to 400,000; by 2016, it was more than 550,000. Voter registration has heavily favored Democrats. According to analysis by Televisa Univision, as of 2022, just 17 percent of Latinos in Arizona are registered as Republican, compared with 44 percent as Democrats and 39 percent as independents.

In 2020, more than 813,000 Latinos showed up to vote in Arizona. While some Latino communities in Arizona saw a rightward shift, it was much more muted than it was in Texas; some areas even shifted left. In all, Latino Arizonans voted overwhelmingly for President Joe Biden, sealing his victory in the state.

Underneath Biden’s win was a large network of activists and a get-out-the-vote infrastructure that had first gotten organized in response to S.B. 1070. Belén Sisa, who immigrated with her parents from Buenos Aires at the age of 6, was in high school when the law passed. “I was homecoming queen, varsity cheerleader—like, the last person you would think would be the undocumented girl,” she told me. On the school bus each morning in Florence, Arizona, she looked out at an ICE detention center that employed some of her classmates’ parents, and imagined getting locked up there.

In the years after the law passed, Sisa and her family saw cities like nearby Mesa become relative “ghost towns” as immigrants left the state in large numbers. Sometimes, her family watched protests, but they were too frightened to join in. When Sisa went to college at Arizona State University, she began meeting other undocumented young people, many of whom had started openly identifying as “Dreamers.” She became part of a group of activists that grew throughout the state, often supporting Democrats’ electoral efforts. By 2020, Sisa herself was working as the national Latino press secretary for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down the sections of S.B. 1070 that made immigration violations state crimes—though it allowed Arizona police to continue to question the immigration status of the people they stopped or detained. At the time, some wondered whether the Supreme Court had handed a victory to Democrats by keeping part of the law in place, because of how strong Latino opposition to it was.

Sisa recalled having conversations with other Latinos, some of whom had citizenship.“I could say: ‘You’re a lot closer to my situation than you will ever be to people that are white and born here,’” she said.

As any Texan will tell you, things are different down here. Latinos in the state are more socially conservative than their counterparts farther west. Not only do many of them not see themselves as immigrants—many identify as racially white. Across the country, immigrants are also becoming a smaller percentage of the Latino population. It’s tough to predict how S.B. 4 will play out if it goes into effect.

“Unlike, say, people in New York, I think Hispanics in Texas are more open to the idea that we need to close that border and do the right thing,” Jason Villalba, who served as a Republican in the Texas house from 2013 to 2019, told me.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Texas pulls an ugly stunt on the border]

As controversy around S.B. 4 has grown, and connections to laws like Prop. 187 have been drawn, some Republican architects of the bill have begun signaling that they intend for the law to target recent border crossers, not immigrants already living in the state. Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson told judges at a hearing last week, “There wouldn’t be probable cause in almost all cases, unless a Texas officer sees somebody crossing the border.” Abbott has been ambiguous: After the law was blocked, he said, “Texas has the legal authority to arrest people coming across the razor-wire barriers on our border.”

But legislators have frequently referred to statewide enforcement. When the Fort Worth chief of police released a video in March arguing that immigration enforcement should be left to the feds, Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas house, wrote on X: “Any local law enforcement agency that refuses to enforce Senate Bill 4 is abandoning their sworn duty to uphold the rule of law.” State Senator Charles Perry, the author of the bill, has said in interviews that Texas essentially was forced to pass S.B. 4, because of what lawmakers see as inaction by the Biden administration. The Constitution makes exceptions to federal supremacy during times of “invasion,” and Perry and other Republicans argue that migration constitutes an invasion, one that the feds have failed to prevent. “We’re not challenging federal supremacy. We’re saying you got supremacy. You just chose not to do anything with it. We’re going to take that role for you,” Perry told conservative news site The Texan. (Perry did not respond to an interview request.)

Villalba, the former Republican lawmaker, told me he is a believer in border security; for him, and for many other Latinos in Texas, the fact that the state wants more of a say in what happens on its own border makes sense. “But this is different,” he said about S.B. 4. “On a Saturday afternoon, when I take my son to go play hockey, and I’m wearing a baseball cap, and, you know, and a T-shirt that might not be as clean and crisp as I normally wear, and I have brown hair and brown eyes and brown skin, are they going to do that to me”—ask for his papers—“in front of my son?”

Deep south in the Rio Grande Valley, Tania Chavez is the executive director of LUPE, a direct-aid organization founded by the labor-rights icon Cesar Chavez (no relation). She and her team have spent months running “know your rights” clinics for community members to help them prepare for S.B. 4. She said she has talked with parents about what will happen if they get arrested. “Who’s going to take legal guardianship of their kids? … Who else is listed on your bank account? … What is going to happen to your property? Those are all the things that we’re planning and thinking,” she told me. At one recent meeting, Chavez said she saw something she hadn’t seen before: Two groups of young people had driven all the way from Houston and Corpus Christi to join.

“We’re starting to see a lot of new faces,” she said.

On March 19, the Supreme Court briefly allowed S.B. 4 to go into effect, sending the law back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where judges issued a new injunction less than 24 hours later. Oral arguments are ongoing, and Texas’s defense has gotten less vociferous. Last week, Nielson, Texas’s lawyer, told judges: “Now, to be fair, maybe Texas went too far. And that’s the question this court is going to have to decide.”

But, during those few hours the law was in effect, I felt an alien thought cross my mind as I sat in my home in Austin: Should I start carrying my passport? I won’t exaggerate how worried I felt; I’m insulated by citizenship and light-beige skin. Just having that thought, however, made me dissociate: It was like someone else had forced the worry into my brain.

It’s a species of fear many people live with daily. In the Rio Grande Valley, Chavez spent two decades of her life undocumented; she knows what it’s like driving to work each day wondering if a broken taillight will bring her time in this country to an end. She said that feeling is what gets many young citizens engaged in organizing in the Valley.

But when asked if she thinks S.B. 4 might change the minds of Latinos who aren’t immigrants, who have so far supported Texas’s border crackdown, Chavez was dubious.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to happen until those people start getting arrested,” she said.

Suppose the president asked you to design the ideal piece of legislation—the perfect mix of good politics and good policy. You’d probably want to pick something that saves people a lot of money. You’d want it to fix a problem that people have been mad about for a long time, in an area that voters say they care about a lot—such as, say, health care. You’d want it to appeal to voters across the political spectrum. And you’d want it to be a policy that polls well.

You would, in other words, want something like letting Medicare negotiate prescription-drug prices. This would make drugs much more affordable for senior citizens—who vote like crazy—and, depending on the poll, it draws support from 80 to 90 percent of voters. The idea has been championed by both Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin. Turn it into reality, and surely you’d see parades in your honor in retirement communities across the country.

Except Joe Biden did turn that idea into reality, and he seems to have gotten approximately zero credit for it. Tucked into the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was a series of measures to drastically lower prescription-drug costs for seniors, including by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. And yet Biden trails Donald Trump in most election polls and has one of the lowest approval ratings of any president in modern American history.

In that respect, drug pricing is a microcosm of Biden’s predicament—and a challenge to conventional theories of politics, in which voters reward politicians for successful legislation. Practically nothing is more popular than lowering drug prices, and yet the popularity hasn’t materialized. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Politically speaking, does policy matter at all?

High drug prices are not a fact of nature. In 2018, the average list price of a month’s worth of insulin was $12 in Canada, $11 in Germany, and $7 in Australia. In the U.S., it was $99. America today spends more than seven times per person on retail prescription drugs than it did in 1980, and more than one in four adults taking prescription drugs in the U.S. report difficulty affording them.

Short of direct price caps, the most obvious way to address the problem is to let Medicare—which, with 65 million members, is the nation’s largest insurer—negotiate prices with drug manufacturers. Just about every other rich country does a version of this, which is partly why Americans pay nearly three times more for prescription drugs than Europeans and Canadians do. Price negotiation would slash costs for Medicare beneficiaries, while cutting annual federal spending by tens of billions of dollars.

The pharmaceutical industry argues that lower prices will leave companies with less money to invest in inventing new, life-saving medicines. But the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that even if drug companies’ profits dropped 15 to 25 percent as a result of price negotiation, that would prevent only 1 percent of all new drugs from coming to market over the next decade.

[Ezekiel J. Emanuel: Big Pharma’s go-to defense of soaring drug prices doesn’t add up]

Medicare drug-price negotiation has nonetheless had a tortured three-decade journey to becoming law. Bill Clinton made it a central plank of his push to overhaul the American health-care system, an effort that went down in flames after a massive opposition campaign by all corners of the health-care industry. Barack Obama campaigned on the idea but quickly abandoned it in order to win drug companies’ support for the Affordable Care Act. In 2016, even Donald Trump promised to “negotiate like crazy” on drug prices, but he never did.

Joe Biden accomplished what none of his predecessors could. The Inflation Reduction Act is best known for its clean-energy investments, but it also empowered Medicare to negotiate prices for the drugs that seniors spend the most money on. In February of this year, negotiations began for the first 10 of those drugs, on which Medicare patients collectively spend $3.4 billion out of pocket every year—a number that will go down dramatically when the newly negotiated prices come into effect. The IRA will also cap Medicare patients’ out-of-pocket costs for all drugs, including those not included on the negotiation list, at $2,000 a year, and the cost of insulin in particular at $35 a month. (In 2022, the top 10 anticancer drugs cost a Medicare patient $10,000 to $15,000 a year on average.) And it effectively prohibits drug companies from raising prices on other medications faster than inflation. “Right now, many people have to choose between getting the care they need and not going broke,” Stacie Dusetzina, a cancer researcher at Vanderbilt University, told me. “These new policies change that.”

Yet they don’t seem to have caused voters to warm up to Biden. The president’s approval rating has remained stuck at about 40 percent since before the IRA passed, lower than any other president at this point in their term since Harry Truman. A September AP/NORC poll found that even though more than three-quarters of Americans supported the drug-price negotiation, just 48 percent approved of how Biden was handling the issue of prescription-drug prices. A similar dynamic holds across other elements of the Biden agenda. In polls, more than two-thirds of voters say they support Biden’s three major legislative accomplishments—the IRA, the CHIPS Act, and the bipartisan infrastructure bill—and many individual policies in those bills, including raising taxes on the wealthy and investing in domestic manufacturing, poll in the 70s and 80s.

All of this poses a particular challenge for the “popularism” theory. After Biden barely squeaked by Donald Trump in 2020, an influential group of pollsters, pundits, and political consultants began arguing that the Democratic Party had become associated with policies, such as “Defund the police,” that alienated swing voters. If Democrats were serious about winning elections, the argument went, they would have to focus on popular “kitchen table” issues and shut up about their less mainstream views on race and immigration. Drug-price negotiation quickly became the go-to example; David Shor, a political consultant known for popularizing popularism, highlighted it as the single most popular of the nearly 200 policies his polling firm had tested in 2021.

One obvious possibility for why this has not translated into support for the president is that voters simply care more about other things, such as inflation. Another is that they are unaware of what Biden has done. A KFF poll from December found that less than a third of voters knows that the IRA allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and even fewer are aware of the bill’s other drug-related provisions. Perhaps that’s because these changes mostly haven’t happened yet. The $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket costs doesn’t come into effect until 2025, and the first batch of new negotiated prices won’t kick in until 2026. Or perhaps, as some popularists argue, it’s because Biden and his allies haven’t talked about those things enough. “I’m concerned that Democrats are dramatically underperforming their potential in terms of talking about healthcare policy and making healthcare debates a salient issue in 2024,” the blogger Matthew Yglesias wrote in October.

When I raised this critique with current and former members of the Biden administration, the sense of frustration was palpable. “The president is constantly talking about things like lowering drug prices and building roads and bridges,” Bharat Ramamurti, a former deputy director for Biden’s National Economic Council, told me. “We read the same polling as everyone else. We know those are popular.” He pointed out that, for instance, Biden has spoken at length about lowering prescription-drug prices in every one of his State of the Union addresses.

The problem, Ramamurti argues, is that the press doesn’t necessarily cover what the president says. Student-debt cancellation gets a lot of coverage because it generates a lot of conflict: progressives against moderates, activists against economists, young against old—which makes for juicy stories. The unfortunate paradox of super-popular policies is that, almost by definition, they fail to generate the kind of drama needed to get people to pay attention to them.

Both sides have a point here. It’s true that Biden’s drug-pricing policies have received relatively little media coverage, but it’s also up to politicians and their campaigns to find creative ways to generate interest in the issues they want people to focus on. Simply listing policy accomplishments in a speech or releasing a fact sheet about how they will help people isn’t enough. (The same problem applies to other issue areas. According to a Data for Progress poll, for example, only 41 percent of likely voters were aware as of early March that Biden had increased investments in infrastructure.)

[Ronald Brownstein: Americans really don’t like Trump’s health-care plans]

For the White House, the task of getting the word out may become easier in the coming months, as voters finally begin to feel the benefits of the administration’s policies. The cap on annual out-of-pocket drug costs kicked in only at the beginning of the year (this year, it’s about $3,500, and it will fall to $2,000 in 2025); presumably some Medicare-enrolled voters will notice as their medication costs hit that number. In September, just in time for the election, Biden will announce new prices for the 10 drugs currently being negotiated.

Another assist could come from efforts to stop the law from taking effect. Last year, multiple pharmaceutical companies and industry lobbying groups filed lawsuits, many in jurisdictions with Trump-appointed judges, to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices; meanwhile, congressional Republicans have publicly come out against the IRA overall and drug-price caps in particular. As the failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017 showed, few things rally support for a policy like the prospect of it being taken away.

The more pessimistic outlook is that voters’ impressions of political candidates have little to do with the legislation those candidates pass or the policies they support. Patrick Ruffini, a co-founder of the polling firm Echelon Insights, pointed out to me that, in 2020, when voters were asked which presidential candidate was more competent, Biden had a nine-point advantage over Trump; today Trump has a 16-point advantage. “I don’t know if there’s any amount of passing popular policies that can overcome that,” Ruffini said.

That doesn’t make the policy stakes of the upcoming election any lower. If he’s reelected, Biden wants to expand Medicare’s drug negotiation to 50 drugs a year and extend the out-of-pocket spending caps to the general population. Trump, meanwhile, has said he is going to “totally kill” the Affordable Care Act and that he intends to dismantle the IRA. There’s some drama for you. Whether it will get anyone’s attention remains to be seen.