Some observers say that the Gaza war is not a big problem in the 2024 US election campaign, but the truth is that it is a complete political disaster for US President Joe Biden, and the best thing he could do, if not to save countless innocent lives at risk, then For his own benefit, he was moving heaven and earth to end the war as soon as possible.

This sentence summarizes an article by Joshua Cohen in the American magazine The Nation, in which he explained that Biden needs to do something to convince people that America has a captain guiding its ship.

The writer pointed out that there are many contradictions in the 2024 elections. On the one hand, opinion polls seem to indicate nothing less than a Republican revolution, as former President Donald Trump appears to be advancing continuously over the past eight months, in national opinion polls and in crucial swing states. , which could give him an easy victory and make him the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.

But at the same time, a recent New York Times poll showed that Democratic Senate candidates saw strong leads in the same states, which could give them a historic victory over the Republican Party in a year that was supposed to be bad.

Stop Netanyahu

So, with less than 6 months to go until Election Day, the prevailing question in the campaign is, “Why isn’t Biden as popular as his party?” The writer responds that the answer is simple for many on the left, which is “Gaza,” because Biden, among all members of his party, stands alone in the degree of his complicity with the Israeli campaign, which is morally indefensible and does not enjoy popular support.

Biden refused - as the writer says - to distance himself from the war despite the death toll rising to unimaginable levels, and despite horrific accounts of Israeli violations making daily headlines, causing his support to decline among young voters and voters of color, which are two basic Democratic constituencies.

All of this increases the urgency of what people want to end the war, so much so that it can be said that stopping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not only save countless lives, but will also save the presidency, and thus American democracy itself, but some object to this interpretation, and believe that The priority of young voters and voters of color is on domestic issues, not Biden's Gaza policy.

The real culprit

When Biden announced his candidacy a year ago, it was recognized that his biggest struggle was the economy, but this assumption is wrong - according to the writer - and the truth is that despite the badness of some aspects of the economy during Biden’s era, that was not the reason behind the decline in his popularity in the beginning, but rather The real culprit on Biden was his foreign policy record.

The writer mentioned that the aura that was around Biden in his 2020 election campaign revolved around the idea that he was an elder statesman capable of managing America’s role in the world in a way that Trump could never do, and this concept defined every aspect of Biden’s public personality, and made him He is more popular than most members of his party.

But that aura - as the writer says - disappeared a long time ago, and it was not the economy that began to destroy it, but rather the collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, which gave Biden the honor of presiding over the end of a lost war and shattered the ambiguity that earned him the presidency in 2020. The idea that he is an experienced and competent statesman.

They have reached the point of extremism

So, says Joshua Cohen, one of the worst things that could ever happen to Biden in the run-up to his re-election was another massive foreign policy crisis, because it reinforced voters' most damaging perceptions of him, but his team rejected that aspect at their peril. Because they remained indifferent to the president's weakness regarding foreign policy, even though the Gaza issue is much deeper than any other issue.

He added that the delusion in this regard had reached such an extreme level that the White House considered Gaza as an asset that would allow Biden to compare himself favorably with Trump, although this is not absolutely the case, as Joshua Cohen believes.

The writer concluded that voters do not see Biden through the war as a strong and reliable figure, but rather they see him as an absent, incompetent president who has proven unable to run the country, let alone the world, and with every month that the war continues, and with every billion-dollar check that is sent to... Outside, this perception is getting worse, convincing a small but meaningful number of voters that Biden, not Trump, is the more dangerous of the two bad choices.

Source: American press+ Aljazeera