US Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, US, Aug. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Erica Dischino

The New York Times — in two opinion pieces, a news article, and a top-of-the-front-page Sunday headline — falsely blamed Israel and the Gaza war for Kamala Harris and the Democrats losing the 2024 US elections.

The lead news article in the print edition of the Times on the Sunday after the Nov. 5 election carried the headline “Democrats Sift Through Rubble. Seeking Answers/Assigning the Blame/Pointing to the War in Gaza, Misinformation, and Identity Politics.” Online, the subheadline said, “In interviews, lawmakers and strategists tried to explain Kamala Harris’s defeat, pointing to misinformation, the Gaza war, a toxic Democratic brand, and the party’s approach to transgender issues.”

The Times reported that “lawmakers, strategists, and officials” who the newspaper interviewed “conceded that Ms. Harris had paid a price for not breaking from Mr. Biden’s support of Israel in the war in Gaza, which angered Arab American voters in Michigan.”

A photo cutline in the same article reported, “Ms. Harris faced anger from voters over the Biden administration’s support of Israel in the war in Gaza.”

In case any Times readers missed the point on the front page, the newspaper reiterated it on the opinion pages. Peter Beinart, a Jew who in 2020 renounced Zionism, wrote a piece for the Times complaining about what he called “Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians,” asserting, “The outrage has been particularly intense among Black Americans and the young.” The Beinart article was headlined “Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party.”

And in case the point hadn’t been made sufficiently with the combination of the Beinart article and the front-page headline and news article, a second opinion article, this one by Ben Rhodes, a former aide to President Barack Obama, explained the Democratic Party’s losses partly on the grounds that “as a party committed to American leadership of a ‘rules-based international order,’ we defended a national security enterprise that has failed repeatedly in the 21st century, and made ourselves hypocrites through unconditional military support for Israel’s bombardment of civilians in Gaza.”

Not one of the three Times articles reckoned with the reality that President-elect Donald Trump also gained with pro-Israel voters who were angry that the Biden-Harris administration withheld some arms shipments to Israel. Nor, for all the talk about the supposed importance of Arab voters in Michigan, did the Times adequately explain how, if this was all about Israel and Arab voters, Harris managed to lose all the other swing states, too.

As The Algemeiner reported, a survey of swing voters by Blueprint, a Democrat-leaning research firm, found the issue of Israel and the Palestinians barely registered as motivation for choosing Trump over Harris. Voters were more worried about inflation, immigration, even transgender issues. Among those voters for whom it was a factor, the survey found more people concerned that Harris was too “pro-Palestine” than those upset she was too “pro-Israel.”

On social media, some prominent voices rejected the Times theory. “Disregarding all the exit polls in order to retroactively scapegoat the Jewish state for the D’s actual defeat is just as dangerous and indefensible as proactively scapegoating the Jewish voter for the R’s potential loss. Why does @NYTimes publish such ridiculous nonsense?” asked Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

A Democratic member of the US Congress from New York, Ritchie Torres, said the black voters who Beinart was writing about cared more about inflation than anything happening in the Middle East.

“Beware of white progressives who project their own ideological biases onto working-class communities of color,” Torres wrote. “Here’s the ground-level truth. If you’re a young man of color struggling to pay your rent, put food on the table, and keep your family afloat, the furthest issue on your mind is a conflict 5,000 miles away. The existential issue for you is inflation. The crippling cost of living is the cause of your discontent. Anyone claiming otherwise is representing their own ideological imagination rather than reality.”

“The far left seems to have a simple rule of scapegoating: When in doubt, blame Israel,” Torres added.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.