On Wednesday, in the midst of final exam week, University of Alabama students gathered in the university's Student Center Plaza to protest Israel's retaliation for the brutal attacks carried out by the Jewish state of Hamas last fall.

Although the protest's organizers, the UA Left Collective, asked protesters via an Instagram post not to post images of other protesters online to “protect their identities,” images and videos of the demonstration went viral across various social media platforms. Some footage was retweeted by conservative commentators such as The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

But the main story focused not on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but on widespread disapproval of President Joe Biden. The video, first posted to X by Maven Navarro, editor in chief of the University of Arizona's campus newspaper, The Crimson White, showed counter-demonstrators waving American and Israeli flags and chanting, “Fuck Joe Biden.” But what was far more amusing was that as the camera panned to the roped-off side of the square, anti-Israel demonstrators were seen chanting together.

Navarro's original post has now been viewed nearly 20 million times, with nearly 40,000 likes, more than 2,000 comments and 12,000 reposts. Among those reacting to the video was Shapiro, who wrote, “You did it, Joe. You finally united the American people,” referring to President Biden.

But for those who follow politics closely, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise: A Gallup poll released in January found that President Biden was the most unpopular president since Jimmy Carter, three years into his presidency.

Biden and other conservative Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have sought to adopt a more cautious approach to Israel and Palestine to appease supporters of both countries, drawing the ire of the party's far-left wing, who confronted anti-Israel activists outside her San Francisco home and was once chased down the hallways of the U.S. Capitol.

RELATED: 'USA' slogans drown out pro-Palestinian protesters at University of Alabama

It remains to be seen how this neutrality will affect Biden and his fellow Democrats in November. Younger, often progressive Democrats seem disheartened by the moderate leanings expressed by their party's leaders. One only needs to look at the video of young liberals yelling “Fuck Joe Biden” at the UA for evidence of this.

2020 and beyond Election polls According to a Pew Research Center survey, Biden has a 24-point lead among 18-29 year olds, but the lead between Trump and Biden is 6 points smaller than the 30-point lead Trump and Hillary Clinton had in 2016 with that age group, the same poll showed.

Democrats have a firm grip on this age group during the midterm elections, but the youth vote during the presidential election season may be gradually becoming more competitive. This is not all that surprising, at least for me. When Trump was still president, I turned 16 and started driving my own car, so I noticed the prices at the gas station changing when the Biden administration crippled U.S. oil production. I started my first job about a month after Biden took office, and I noticed the prices on the menu at my local Chick-fil-A steadily increasing.

If students my age who are now eligible to vote in their first presidential election remember, as I did, the difference between the last year or two of the Trump administration and the Biden administration, I wouldn't be surprised to see the youth gap between Trump and Biden narrow even further in 2024.

The gap is expected to narrow further if younger, progressive Democrats who are dissatisfied with Biden's somewhat old-fashioned views on policy do not turn out to vote for him.

After all, if I were Joe Biden right now and saw a video of a Democrat yelling, “Damn it, Joe Biden,” I might immediately Google “retirement communities near me.”

Riley McArdle is a Birmingham native and a political science major at the University of Alabama, where he currently serves as President of the Alabama College Republicans and Chief of Staff for the Alabama Federation of College Republicans.