Biden’s Record Fundraising Night Faces Backlash from Gaza Protest: A Pivotal Moment for Democratic Unity and Dissent

On March 28th, the Biden campaign set a record-breaking one-night fundraising total of $26 million dollars. Throughout the star-spangled event, celebrities such as Mindy Kaling, Queen Latifah, Lizzo, Ben Platt, Cynthia Erivo, and Lea Michele all made appearances in support of the President. The headlining event featured a conversation between President Biden and his predecessors Obama and Clinton, moderated by Late Show host Stephen Colbert. According to NBC News, the conversation between the former and current leaders of the free world was interrupted at least five times by pro-Palestine protesters, whom Bidenworld has made every effort to shield the president from. 

The inciting event took place in January, when Biden was interrupted twelve times while giving an abortion rights speech. Rather than place pressure on the Israeli government to stop starving Palestinians in the region, Biden is instead choosing to run from the consequences of his own actions. According to an NBC News report published in March, Biden’s aides’ strategy to prevent further interruptions is to hold smaller events, withhold the president’s location from the media until he arrives, entirely avoid college campuses, and in at least one especially cowardly instance, consider hiring a private company to vet event attendees. 

Outside of the fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall, more than 100 people protested Biden’s current handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Even as these protesters attempted to rain on Biden’s multi-million dollar parade, calling the event anything short of a massive success for Biden would be disingenuous. In the grand scheme of things, this small-scale individual protest’s influence on policy is next to none. Those five brave interruptions will not be enough to convince Biden that enabling Benjamin Netanyahu to do whatever he wants in Gaza, despite rhetorically slapping the Israeli government on the wrist, is wrong.   

However, the 45% of Democrats who believe that Israel has gone too far in its military campaign in the region won’t just go away or change their mind when faced with the possibility of a Trump presidency. I believe that if the Biden campaign continues to attempt to limit the president’s engagement with his constituents, they’ll organize more effectively and more fervently around larger events that they know the president can’t skip: chief among them, the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago this August.

This year’s Democratic National Convention is the perfect opportunity for protesters to voice their disagreement with the President’s Gaza policy. In 2020, 21.6 million viewers tuned in to the four-day event, and even if these numbers continue to decline (as they have since 2016,) millions of people will be watching. I believe that protest organizers and activists will be able to turn out massive numbers of people to interrupt the event and paint President Biden as complicit in this ongoing crisis, which in the eyes of many Democrats, he already is. If a hundred protesters merits limited discussion in the press, then imagine how long coverage of one thousand or even ten thousand protesters would last. Much has been made of whether Biden has permanently lost the large subset of Americans who disagree with his policies regarding Gaza. I’m not so sure about that, but a large-scale, visible expression of the pain many Americans are currently going through, could very well push many voters past the point of no return. If the plan is to not to vote for the opposition, but to stay home this coming Election Day, President Biden’s re-election effort could be destroyed.