Discussing a new poll that some claim that Palestine cost Harris the election

 So, a new poll is floating around and people are claiming it implies that we lost the election because of Palestine. Now, to be fair, I think people framing it this way are pushing an agenda, but at the same time, let's go over the figures presented. 

Basically, it looks at people who voted for Biden in 2020 but didn't vote for Harris in 2024. It found a litany of issues that led to them to not support Harris. The biggest ones are the economy and gaza. In the country as a whole, gaza took precedence with 29% of people citing that as their top concern, however, the number dropped to 20% in battleground states. On the flip side, 24% of people said the economy played the biggest role, but this went up to 33% in battleground states. While trends outside of battlegrounds shouldnt be completely ignored, given what they imply for future trends, let's face it, only the 7 battlegrounds actually had a reasonable chance of flipping. Anything from VA/NH/MN on up still went for Harris by several points. And we lost all 7 swing states, both in the rust belt, and the sun belt.

Among those who didnt vote for Harris, 36% claimed that they would have been more likely to support Harris had she broke with Biden's policies more on the issue.  10% said less likely. 54% said it made no difference. In terms of enthusiasm, breaking would've made 35% more enthusiastic, 5% less enthusiastic, and 59% said it makes no difference. 

So....in practice, let's say a net quarter of them would've been more likely to support Harris had she broken from Biden's policies. This still leaves the majority of them upset over other issues like the economy, but it is a more substantial chunk than I would have guessed.

So let's do some math here.

So, based on this quick math on the subject, I get basically a no. No state would have flipped. If anything, Harris's net losses werent that large in the swing states and if anything she gained in many of them from sheer population growth. As such, the numbers measurable aren't big enough to be measured. It is true that she gained significantly less votes than Joe Biden did on the whole (75M vs 81M), but these were in safe states.

Still, say we take the quarter figure and apply it nationally. Harris lost a net of 6,264,244 votes relative to Biden in 2020. If 1/4 of those lost votes voted, what would the difference be? 1,566,061. Overall that would've given her 76,585,318 to Trump's 77,303,573. So even if we got all of those voters to vote for Harris, she still would've lost the popular vote, and the election. Given the electoral college voted almost exactly in line with the popular vote, we wouldnt see a big difference. It wouldn't have swayed the election. 

So all in all, did Gaza cost Harris the election? Not really. I mean, it did hurt her, but honestly? She lost for a lot of reasons. All in all though, I will say this. The net effect of all of these issues did likely cost her the election. And the big takeaway I'm taking away is that she lost because she wasn't far left enough. She wasn't progressive and populist enough on the economy, and she wasn't progressive enough on Gaza. Im not sure Harris could have won in any circumstance given low enthusiasm, but at the very least, I think we could argue that dampened enthusiasm did hurt her, and that most of this came from her not being progressive enough. 

EDIT: I did some further math and came up with this map:

It would have possibly shifted Wisconsin, but yeah, it wouldn't have won us the election. Would've reduced the margin to about 0.5% though, so a little over a point.