Why This Pollster Says the Press Is Wrong About the Politics of Israel

How worried should Joe Biden be about the Muslim American vote in Michigan? What’s the fallout from Chuck Schumer’s speech lambasting Benjamin Netanyahu? And which progressive critics of Israel are actually in danger of losing their primaries?

Mark Mellman has been wrestling with these questions as both a longtime Democratic pollster and as a prominent advocate for pro-Israel policies. As the president of Democratic Majority for Israel, Mellman is targeting House Democrats seen as hostile to the Jewish state. But he’s also a realist.

“Rashida Tlaib, for example, doesn’t have an opponent at this moment,” he told me. “So not going to beat somebody with nobody.” On the other hand, he said, Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush are potentially vulnerable.

For this week’s episode of the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, we discussed not only the increasingly tense U.S.-Israel relationship but most of the big polling questions of 2024: Biden’s age, Trump’s hold on the GOP, the fate of Nikki Haley voters, the nuances of the Latino vote, bad polling questions and whether you should bother paying attention to polls at all.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, with help from Deep Dive Senior Producer Alex Keeney and Producer Kara Tabor.

Let's start with the politics of Israel. We recently had Rep. Veronica Escobar on this show. She said that Gaza was the Democrats’ biggest vulnerability. Do you agree that it's as big a problem or a bigger problem than, say, the border or Biden's age? 

I think there's absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever. The reality is we've asked people whether they approve or disapprove of the way the president's handling this war. And the truth is, the majority of people say they disapprove of the way he's handling this war. It has nothing to do with which side he's on. The next largest number think he's too pro-Palestinian, and the smallest number think he's too pro-Israel.

So it's not being supportive of Israel that’s the problem, it's something else. And the reality is, when we ask people whether they are more likely to vote for the president because of what he’s done in this war, more people are likely to vote for him than against him.

Most people say, “You know what? It really doesn't matter to me.”

The argument on the other side, on the left — and we're really just talking about the crass politics of Biden’s position on Israel — is that this is a problem for him in Michigan, where there is a very large Muslim and Arab American population and where Biden had a slim margin in 2020; and it’s connected to why young voters and non-white voters are showing much less support for Biden than at this stage in 2020. 

If you look at the exit polls, about 1 percent of the Michigan electorate is Muslim American. So it's large compared to other places. In Nevada, Muslims register 0 percent of the electorate. So much larger than that, but not really very large.

For example, the Jewish community in Michigan is about 2 percent of the electorate. In Nevada, it's about 4 percent of the electorate. So, you have to look at this in a number of different ways. First, are you really losing support among these groups because of this issue?

Again, there just is not evidence of that. There's evidence that he's lost support among those groups, but there's really no evidence — and again, we've asked the questions directly — there's no evidence that it's because of this that he's lost support.

And you're talking specifically about the Muslim American or non-white voters and young people?

I'm going to come back to the Muslim voters in just a second. But with those younger voters —

You don't see evidence that Israel is costing Biden there? 

You don't. And they're telling us that the economic issues are what's really most important to them, telling us that in poll-after-poll.

They're not as pro-Israel as their elders are, those younger voters. We definitely have problems with them. But they're not saying that they're voting against Joe Biden because of this issue.

The Arab American voter, potentially different situation, no question about it. My point about them is that they’re a relatively small proportion of the electorate. Number one.

Number two, it is very hard for me to imagine that — and I don't speak for the Muslim community, obviously, in any way, shape or form — but it's hard for me to understand, as an analyst, that a Muslim American is going to go vote for the islamophobe-in-chief, Donald Trump, against Joe Biden; the guy who instituted a Muslim ban, the guy who wants to deport Palestinians when he becomes president. People aren’t going to vote for him.

Now, people say, “Well, they may not vote for Trump, but maybe they don't vote at all. Or maybe they vote for Cornell West or whatever.” Certainly possible.

But again, the closer we get to this election, the clearer it's going to be to everyone that if you are otherwise a Biden voter who votes for a third party or stays home, you're voting for Trump. And that's going to be very clear to the Muslim community. It's going to be very clear to the Jewish community; it’s going to be very clear to every community that cares about preventing Donald Trump from taking back the White House.

The third point is that one has to understand all sides of the equation here, which is to say, is it possible that you lose some Muslim voters or some younger voters? It's possible. Is it possible you gain some other voters? Yes it is.

Where would you see the gain? 

For example, evangelical Christians are 26 percent of Michigan; 28 percent of them voted for Joe Biden last time. If that got to 30, 31 or 32 percent that would more than cancel out a 100 percent change in the Muslim-American vote. So there are other groups and segments that are important.

But it's also important to look at it from from the inside-out, which is to say, if the president changes his position, he loses votes; not only from the pro-Israel community but he loses votes from people who say, “Wait a second. That guy waffled so much that he would change his position on this issue because of the 10 percent of the voters in Michigan?”

Perhaps the biggest seismic change that I think I've seen in the years of covering this debate was Chuck Schumer’s speech about Israel the other day. Tell us about any insights you had into him making that speech.

So I think it's important to start with two points. One is that Chuck Schumer has a long, strong pro-Israel record.

That's why it's such a big deal. 

Second, I think it's fair to say if you read the whole speech, it was much more balanced and nuanced than the coverage of the speech.

At the same time, I have to tell you that a lot of people in the pro-Israel community were deeply concerned, deeply hurt and angry about aspects of that speech.

What parts?

Let me give you a couple of points. When was the last time an American leader has gone to a democracy and said, “Have an early election, because I don't like the person who's running your country?” We tend not to do that.

There's also the signal it sends to Israel's enemies. We saw already when the administration was trying to negotiate the cease-fire — and before Schumer’s speech, when senators and members of Congress were going out talking about cease-fire and attacking Biden for his policies — Hamas leaders pulled them back from the negotiations, and said, “Let's wait. Let's not do the cease-fire because there's a split coming between Israel and the United States.”

Well, imagine what's happening now in Iran, with Hezbollah, with Hamas as well. What are they saying to themselves?

And finally, as somebody who knows something about Israeli politics, I worry that this speech was counterproductive. It was designed to hurt Bibi. It is more likely to help him than hurt him.

Because why? Because there's a sense in Israel that there shouldn't be that kind of interference? 

That's certainly part of it, but it goes beyond that. The reality is Bibi is in terrible trouble in Israel, right? He's Mr. Security, but the worst terrorist attack in the history of the country happened on his watch. So people are anxious to get rid of him.

And also, he's been very divisive on this judicial reform issue, so more than half the country was ready to get rid of him already. And now just about everybody's ready to get rid of him.

But part of the secret of his campaigning is to say, “The Europeans, the Americans, they want us to do things that you don't want to do. And I'm the only one that's going to stop them. The rest of these characters are going to give in to the Americans.”

It doesn't help Bibi’s opponents is what you're saying. 

Exactly.

Let's talk about the “uncommitted” vote in the primaries and what you make of that.

It does seem to me that there was no coincidence that on the eve of the Michigan primary Biden very emphatically used the word “cease-fire.”

If you talk to people like Ro Khanna, he will say, Biden has changed because of the pressure on this issue from the left and we in the media have played up this “uncommitted” vote as something significant. Do you think Biden should be worried about it? 

I think it was vastly overstated. Every data journalist said this is no big deal. The Nate Silvers, the Kyle Kondiks, the people who focus on data said, “Uncommitted got 2.5 percent more in this year with a huge campaign than it did against Barack Obama when he had no opponent and nobody was asking for an uncommitted vote.”

So all the data journalists said “meaningless.” All the storytelling journalists wanted to tell a big story and they did, irrespective of the facts.

What's the change that you've seen in the polling since Oct. 7 that worries you, as someone whose project is to maintain support for Israel?

Well, there's two kinds of worries. First of all, obviously, in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, we saw a huge increase in sympathy for support for Israel. As the war has gone on, on people's television screens — and as we've seen really disheartening scenes, and disturbing scenes from Gaza — that has changed somewhat. There's no question about that.

But still, we have a majority of Americans and a plurality of Democrats who are saying we shouldn't have a cease-fire until and unless Hamas is disarmed and dismantled. And that's very important.

Now, the question is, could Hamas be disarmed and dismantled in some different way? There are people who think, “Yes.” But none of them have actually been able to come forward with a concrete suggestion about how to do that.

And there are people who say, “Well, perhaps not.” Perhaps the only way, unfortunately, to get rid of Hamas — to dismantle it, to disarm it — is through a war. And with war comes, tragically, very tragically, civilian casualties. That’s unfortunately been true in every war. And it's certainly true in this one.

The scale of the deaths in this war is what I think is very concerning to a lot of Democrats. 

The scale of civilian deaths here is really not that much different proportionately to what happened in Iraq, what happened in Afghanistan, what happened in Mosul, what happened when we went after ISIS —

Those aren’t considered great successes either and they also lost support. 

They aren't considered great successes. But the reality is that's the scale at which civilians get killed in wars. Wars can be awful and lawful at the same time. There are people who believe if it's awful, it can't be lawful. That's really not true. It can be awful and lawful. There can be awful and there can be a necessity for it, as there is in this case.

And look, the civilian casualties are increased in this case because Hamas embeds itself in civilian infrastructure, because they want those civilians to be killed. They want those apartment buildings to be destroyed. That's why they build tunnels under them. And they keep out the civilian population [from the tunnels]. They stay in those tunnels. And they say to the Israelis, “If you want to get us, you're going to have to go through these apartment buildings. These mosques, these schools to get us.” But if you're going to get them, that's what you have to do.”

Let's talk about some of the potential primaries where Israel might be important and what your organization may or may not do. What's the goal? 

Our goal is to protect pro-Israel champions who are being challenged by anti-Israel figures.

You had a big victory last Tuesday in Illinois, I believe, right?

Yes. And one in Texas. So that's one part of it. The second part is where we can defeat some of these anti-Israel incumbents. They're very few of them to begin with, and they're even fewer who are vulnerable.

Let's go through them. Who's on your target list? 

You have to look at Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush and say those are the two that are the most vulnerable. Not just because of this issue, but because they also have other problems additionally; and because both of them have opponents who are serious elected officials in their own right with substantial constituencies.

And then you have a couple that don't seem to be vulnerable. Rashida Tlaib, for example, doesn't have an opponent at this moment. So not going to beat somebody with nobody.

Have you guys tried to do any candidate recruiting in this race? 

No. We have not.

Ilhan Omar last time almost lost. But last time she spent a lot of money on her husband's firm, and didn't do any of the normal things that one does in a campaign like run TV ads, send out direct mail, or do phone calls or organizing. I don't think she's going to make that mistake again.

You also had in Minneapolis last time this “defund the police” measure that she was backing, which lost overwhelmingly, and in the white heat of that race I think there were some spillovers. So she's in a stronger place than she was before. AOC is in a relatively strong place. The person in the middle is Summer Lee. I think it's hard to know exactly how vulnerable she is at the moment.

But for now, it’s Bowman and Bush.

Bowman and Bush certainly are at the top of the list.

There is a sense among a lot of Democrats I talked to, that the convention in Chicago is going to be torn apart because of this issue. I'm sure you've heard these same predictions — what’s your sense of them? 

Well, I certainly hope it isn't the case. And having a divisive convention hurts Joe Biden, it helps Donald Trump, and I hope to God that people are not going to help Donald Trump, even unintentionally, by putting on those kinds of demonstrations.

But look, it's not going to be the pro-Israel people that are tearing the convention apart. It's going to be the anti-Israel people that are tearing the convention apart. So it's not our folks. There's nothing we can do about it except hope and pray that people understand the importance of this election and aren't willing to throw it to Donald Trump just to be able to perform on the streets of Chicago or in the convention hall.

Let's talk about Biden and what the polling does and doesn't say. Young voters, Black voters and Latino voters seem to be the groups where he’s losing traction. I know you've written about being very careful when you're pulling data out of cross tabs but it does seem like there's enough evidence now that this should be a serious concern for Biden.

Well, I would say a couple of things are true. First of all, we've gone from a situation where Biden, in the last election, led, to a situation [today] where he’s tied. So somebody has got to have moved from somewhere. And it is, importantly, the groups that you've just articulated where we've seen somewhat greater movement.

But again, there's a need, I think the president is filling here, to tell those folks what the president has accomplished.

Second, until recently, it was not 100 percent clear to everybody in the country that Donald Trump was going to be the nominee, and Donald Trump was defined only by his legal issues. Now he's talking about a “blood bath” and he's doing all the Trumpian things that he does, and it's getting attention. It focuses the public mind on what's wrong with Donald Trump. And there are a lot of people in this country who think there's a lot wrong with Donald Trump, and that's being reinforced for them by the fact that he's in the public eye. So yes, people moved. But there's still the opportunity to move those people back.

Let me just ask this more broadly about the general election. What do you see as Biden's greatest weakness and strength from a pollster’s perspective? 

There's no question that Biden's greatest weakness is the sense of age that has surrounded him. Obviously, the truth is that Donald Trump is not meaningfully less old than Joe Biden. And Donald Trump has severe, I think it's fair to say, severe psychological and mental impairments.

Do you think Democrats should talk about that more? 

I do, yeah.

Give me the litany. If you're Joe Biden, what would you be telling him to do? 

I don't think the president should be doing this, but I'll tell you what I'm going to say: The man [Trump] didn't even remember his wife's name. Now, he's had a lot of wives and a lot of affairs, but it's pretty strange not to remember your wife's name, to think your wife is named "Mercedes." And it's pretty weird to identify a victim of your rape many years ago as your wife, as he did.

So, there's a lot of evidence of these impairments. Democrats, not the president, but other Democrats can and should be talking about this. But the reality is he's going to display it. He's going to show it to everybody — Donald Trump is — because he can't help it, it’s a problem he has.

For Biden, from a polling perspective, what is his greatest strength? 

His strength is that he empathizes with people. And historically, there's nothing that's been more important in people's ultimate political judgment than who really cares about them. And Joe Biden is somebody who really cares about them, and people understand and believe that.

And for Trump, what is his greatest strength right now? 

His greatest strength is that he is not Joe Biden at a moment when people are questioning the president's leadership. There are hard-core Donald Trump voters for sure, and he has real strength with them because they believe that he is willing to suffer the slings and arrows of the establishment in order to articulate the views that they have.

Do you think the indictments have helped Trump? You can't run the counterfactual, but do you think that absent the indictments, we'd be in a different situation?

It's really hard to know. It's really hard to know.

There is this stream of polling that says — and we just did one on Monday on the Alvin Bragg case — that asks voters, “If Trump is convicted, will it change your view?” The wording changes, but in general, the totality of these polls is if there's a conviction, it's really bad for him and voters who say they support him now, some percentage depending on the poll, are going to flip against him. And you think this is bullshit. [Laughs]

I think the questions are bullshit. It may or may not happen that way. But we know from a lot of experience now that these questions do not necessarily measure reality.

What do I mean by that? During Trump's first campaign, there was a period at which half of Republican women said they would not vote for Donald Trump. Yet they did. We saw this with Bill Clinton's impeachment. People said, “Well, if he had sex with Monica Lewinsky, should he resign?” “Oh, yes, of course he should resign.” Then it became clear that he did have sex with Monica Lewinsky, and people said, “No, no, he shouldn't resign.” And then they said, “Well, if he lied about it, should he resign? Should he be impeached?” “Yes. Yes, of course.” And then it was clear he lied about it and people said, “No no, he shouldn't be impeached.” And then they said, well, the question was, “If he's impeached, should he resign or should he stay and fight?” “Oh, he should resign.” And then he was impeached and people said “No, he should stay and fight.” So the reality …

They updated their views at every turn.

Exactly.

And either they didn't want to tell the pollster or they were just bad at predicting how they'd feel.

And I think the honest truth is, people are very bad at putting themselves into an alternative reality and predicting how they're going to respond to some set of facts in an alternative reality. They have a hard enough time predicting what they’re going to have for dinner tonight, let alone how they're going to react to some new situation.

So as a poll consumer — when questions are worded that way, beware?

Beware. Don't pay any attention.

Are there any other categories that you just roll your eyes at in terms of polling that gets a lot of coverage? What are the other bad questions out there these days that dominate the conversation?

That's a good question. I'll go back to the cease-fire question. When you say to people “Do you favor a cease-fire, yes or no?” that’s like asking, “Do you want world peace?”

Unless you sort of describe the circumstances, the effects, the conditions, you don’t really have anything that's very useful. So that's another example of the kind of questions that are not very good. And look, we all do this because we get paid to do it, and that is to ask people about arcane pieces of legislation that they know nothing about and get them to say “yes” so that our clients can forward that material all over the known world.

Yeah, we get about three of those a day at Playbook.

Yes, I'm sure you do. I'm sure you do. But one of the things that consumers should look for on those kinds of issue questions is, do the questions reflect the realities? You have to make sure the parameters that are in the question are similar to the actual public policy parameters at stake.

Do you put any stock in the Nikki Haley Republicans saying they won't vote for Trump? Or will the partisan inclinations kick in and they all come home?

Great question. And it's a little hard to know, because we don't have quite the same experience that directly matches that in previous presidential elections. First of all, some of those people are not Republicans who are voting in these Republican primaries. They are independents or Democrats who decided to vote in a Republican primary because they didn't like Trump and there was no action on the Democratic side or whatever. So it's a somewhat unique circumstance in that respect.

Second, what you would normally expect is for those people to retreat to their partisan predispositions. So the real Republicans among those people are likely to end up in the Trump category. The independents, the Democrats — not as likely to vote to end up in the Trump category.

So exactly how those are parsed out is important, and I don't know the answer to that because I haven't really done the deep dive in the exits to see.

But the other question you have to ask yourself is if 25, 40 percent, whatever the number is — it varies from poll to poll — but if some huge number of Haley voters are not going to vote for Trump, where are they in the polls that ask people who they're voting for now? They're voting for Trump. Or else he wouldn't have the support he does.

Right. I guess the other question is, what state is it? The number was pretty big in South Carolina but I don't think Biden's gonna win South Carolina.

Exactly. Right. Well that’s an Electoral College question. But nobody believes South Carolina is going to be a swing state. And they're right. It's not going to be.

One other polling issue that's getting a lot of attention is the focus on “double doubters.” What is your analysis of this group and what are the questions we should be looking at as we discuss this? Are they the key to the election?

It is in an arithmetic sense, which is to say that there are not enough Trump lovers or Biden lovers, to give either one a majority.

So the people who are going to decide the election, just arithmetically, are the people who don't like either one of them. They may like one of them better than the other and that's what you don't get from a lot of these analyses. I may have a very unfavorable impression of Trump and an only somewhat unfavorable impression of Biden. That makes me more likely to be a Biden voter than a Trump voter. And we really don’t get that from most of these public polls.

How important is it that they do or don't have third party options?

Look, I think that third party options work to the detriment of President Biden. I think the polling shows that.

Is it particularly important to this group? Because if you hate both of the candidates, then …

Then why not vote for the third party? Exactly. So I think —

Arguably that cost Hillary the election in 2016.

Yes, I think it did. But I don't think this is firmly set in cement yet. I think that the third party vote always goes down right as we get closer to the election. And again, people realize that if you are a Biden voter who would normally be a Biden voter who’s not voting for Biden, or a Trump voter isn't voting for Trump, that you're voting for the other guy if you vote for these third party candidates.

It is a danger. There's no question about it. I think it's a greater danger to President Biden than it is to Donald Trump. I think there's no question about that either. But just how big a danger it is, I think is really not clear, because the polls are pretty mixed about this.

Are Democrats losing Latinos because they are voting their more conservative values around issues like abortion?

I've heard that argument. The problem is it doesn't match well with the facts. The Latinos who are deserting the Democratic Party are Latinos who are not particularly religious, number one, and number two, who have the lowest levels of ethnic identification. So Democrats make a mistake and they say, “Oh, we are losing votes on Latinos. Let's go talk about immigration.” Because they're talking to people who are least ethnically identified as well and aren't particularly concerned about immigration. Those are the Latinos that we're losing. It's not over choice.

Last question is also from a pollster it turns out — Kellyanne Conway. We had her on the show last week and she asks, “If you weren't doing this and you weren't living in Washington, D.C., what would you be doing and where would you live?”

Well, I’d tell her what I would definitely not be doing, but would like to be doing. I’d love to be a singer in a rock and roll band. But that will never happen.

Do you sing at all?

No. I can't carry a tune in a bucket.

And you don’t play any instruments?

I don't play any instruments.

So this is just total fantasy?

Total. This is a fantasy that I have no chance of achieving.

But something like you actually, in the back of your mind — are you a big music fan?

I'm a music fan. And as Peter, Paul and Mary said, music speaks louder than words.

So for next week, you don't know who the guest is going to be, but give us a question for them.

Who will be Donald Trump's vice presidential pick?

How would you answer that one?

I don't know. I mean, I would think that he would want to pick a woman and particularly a minority woman. But I don't know who he's going to find.

Listen to this episode of Playbook Deep Dive on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.