A new poll shows that Israel's war of annihilation on Gaza was the main reason why Americans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 would not vote for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in 2024.

“What few in the Democratic Party were willing to admit was this: Vice President Harris lost votes because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” the YouGov-Understanding Middle East Policy Project poll found.

“29% of national voters who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 say ‘ending Israeli violence in Gaza’ was the top issue that influenced their vote choice,” an IMEU press release explains. The economy ranked second at 24%.

After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the Biden administration flooded Israel with weapons and other military aid that Tel Aviv has used to wreak mass death and destruction in Gaza. A recent study by the Lancet found that at least 64,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the past 15 months. Tens of thousands of children were among the dead, many of them killed when Israel dropped American-made bombs from American-made aircraft. The Lancet study did not count deaths from disease and deprivation caused by the Israeli blockade of Gaza. In recent wars, the number of indirect deaths from conflict is often many times higher than the number of deaths from direct violence.

Before he dropped out of the presidential race last summer, President Biden regularly faced protesters on the campaign trail who called him “Genocide Joe.” Several major international aid agencies have determined that Israel’s military operations and blockade of Gaza constitute genocide.

According to the poll, support for Israel, which included at least $22 billion in military aid during the first year of the attack, may have cost Kamala the election. YouGov found that the war was the top reason voters did not vote for Harris in Arizona (38%), Michigan (32%), Wisconsin (32%) and Pennsylvania (19%). Biden won all four states in 2020.

It came as no surprise to the Harris campaign that Democrats have called the war in Gaza genocide. In May 2024, a poll found that more than half of Democratic voters believed Israel was committing genocide.

Yet in the final days of the 2024 election season, Harris’s team refused to say she would cut off arms transfers to Israel after taking office. Instead, the campaign infamously embraced GOP hawks like Dick and Liz Cheney.