Why Gaza and Ukraine could crush Biden’s hopes of winning the election

Come on then. What’s your favourite election aphorism? Is it “oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them”? Or maybe – “the only poll that matters is the one on election day”? If you’re looking at the US, surely the favourite is “it’s the economy, stupid” the phrase coined by James Carville, who himself had the wonderful nickname the “Ragin’ Cajun”, owing to his Louisiana roots.

It’s been a truism in successive elections since he coined it for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race. It’s the basic and obvious piece of advice that all elections come down to people’s sense of economic wellbeing. The answer to the question: am I better off now than I was four years ago?

But what if it no longer holds for 2024? Looking at Biden’s poll numbers, he’s getting no credit for the economic upswing that seems to be taking place in the US. Job numbers are ticking up nicely, inflation is falling. The talk is no longer of recession, but of a soft landing for the US economy.

What’s roiling American politics right now is what is happening in the Middle East and Ukraine. That is partly about the age-old US debate over isolationism: “America first” versus global leadership; pulling up the drawbridge versus protector of democracy and the rules-based international order. But it is also about how the ripples from the shores of the Gaza Strip in the eastern Mediterranean are now lapping against the seaboard of the United States.

Look at the political map of the US. One of the key swing states is Michigan. Trump won it in 2016; Biden carried it in 2020 with a 160,000 majority. But Michigan has one of the highest Muslim populations in the US – about a quarter of a million people. They voted overwhelmingly for Biden in those two elections, particularly after Trump in 2016 proposed banning all Muslims from entering the US. But there is fury over the way Biden has held the Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, so close in his embrace.

Last week, I spent a bit of time with the mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan. He’s a good friend of Joe Biden and is right behind his bid for re-election bid in 2024. But he’s a worried man. The mood in this storied Michigan city is changing, and he believes the White House needs to show much more concern for the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip if it is to have a chance of holding on to the state in next year’s election.

Traditionally, the Democrats are the party that is most pro-Israel. But that is changing dramatically. A poll conducted by Gallup six months before the 7 October massacre by Hamas, found that, for the first time ever, Democrats felt greater sympathy towards Palestinians than they did with Israelis.

Then, look at the wave of demonstrations that have swept college campuses in the US – not only have most been pro-Palestinian, but there has been a surge in ugly antisemitic incidents too. How are these young people going to vote next year, when Biden seems to represent to them an old-fashioned Zionism that is anathema?

Democrats have cause to fret.

And then there is Ukraine. Long before Russia invaded, Americans had grown weary of “the endless wars”. Although there are no US servicemen and women engaged in the conflict, billions of taxpayer dollars are being swallowed up by supporting a counter-offensive that seems to have stalled. The new Republican leadership in the House of Representatives are saying “enough”. They don’t want to give another cent to Ukraine – and Biden can’t just fund Kyiv’s war effort through the petty-cash account at the White House. The money must be approved by the House of Representatives.

All of which is being played like a Stradivarius by that great fiddler, Donald Trump. It’s becoming the campaign of the counterfactual. And being Donald Trump, the counterfactuals are contentious and tendentious.

He and his team are busy telling anyone who’ll listen he was the president signing peace deals between Israel and the Gulf states via the Abraham Accords – but with Biden in charge, war is breaking out. When he was president, his friend Vladimir Putin would never have dared invade Ukraine. He would have been too scared. But with Sleepy Joe in the White House?

It doesn’t need to cohere or be rational, but Trump is finding this riff is working well for him: when I was president, I was building relationships with Putin, breaking bread with Kim Jong-un, talking man-to-man with President Xi. When I was president, the world was a more peaceful place.

So maybe it’s not the economy, stupid. Carville was right with his analysis in 1992 as Bill Clinton sought to broaden support beyond the rust-belt states, but 12 years earlier when the former Georgia peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter was seeking re-election against the former Hollywood actor and California governor Ronald Reagan, it was a different story. And that old saying “history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes”, seems appropriate.

Then, it was the Soviet Union invading a sovereign country, Afghanistan, that was perceived as a threat under its new leadership. Then, it was a botched attempt to rescue 52 American hostages being held in Tehran by student supporters of the 1979 revolution which had brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.

A Russian invasion of a sovereign country and a crisis in the Middle East involving hostages. Any of that sound familiar?

Carter went on to be crushed by Reagan in a landslide defeat. If Joe Biden is sleeping well, he probably shouldn’t be.

Jon Sopel is the former BBC North America Editor and now presents Global’s ‘The News Agents’ podcast