What do the US campus protests mean for Joe Biden in November?

The policies of Joe Biden and Democrats towards Israel, which have prompted thousands of students across the country to protest, could affect the youth vote for Biden and hurt his re-election chances, experts have warned, in what is already expected to be a tight election.

Thousands of students at universities across the US have joined with pro-Palestine rallies and, most recently, encampments, as Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 people.

Some of the protests began as a call to encourage universities to ditch investments in companies that provide weapons and equipment to the Israeli military. But as the Biden administration has continued to largely support Israel, the president has increasingly become a focus of criticism from young people. Polling shows that young Americans’ support for Biden has been chipped away since 2020.

With Biden narrowly trailing Trump in several key swing states, it’s a voting bloc the president can ill afford to lose.

“The real threat to Biden is that younger voters, especially college-educated voters, won’t turn out for him in the election,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.

“I wouldn’t expect that the protesters on campuses today are going to vote for Trump, almost none of them will. That’s not the danger here. The danger is much simpler: that they simply won’t vote.”

Turnout could be key to Biden winning November’s election, given the devotion of Trump’s base, and there are signs that Biden’s handling of the situation in Gaza is already costing him support.

In Wisconsin, which Biden won by just 21,000 votes in 2020, more than 47,000 people voted “uninstructed” in the state’s Democratic primary, as a protest against the