Biden Might Lose 2024 If He Doesn’t Back A Ceasefire
Photo by Ömer Yıldız on Unsplash
I want to preface this by saying that I have a long history of encouraging people to vote. One of my most popular articles is Pop Culture Has Never Understood Politics And Voting, where I break down what, at the time, I argued was a simplistic binary between total optimism in the system and blind pessimism. Shortly after I published that piece, I made the argument that elites historically have tried to prevent many people from voting (see Elites Don't Want You To Vote).
In 2021, I published an article directed toward my fellow leftists, arguing that electoral politics was not a failed project and that we should still engage in the Democratic process (see Why You Should Still Vote, Even If You Hate The Democratic Party). I provided three justifications for engaging in electoralism: harm reduction, the potential for radicalization, and successful elections making on-the-ground activism easier. As I wrote in that piece:
“You might not be able to get a single-payer law passed or to create a lasting autonomous zone successfully, but you can convert people to your cause and fight for small changes on the local level. Those tangible victories can galvanize people to support your cause and funnel them toward the types of activism you consider more effective.”
I still believe in democracy, and I am not encouraging people not to vote. That being said, many of the arguments I advanced in that piece simply do not apply to the situation in Gaza. The argument of harm reduction has truly gone out the window now that Biden has rejected the policy of a ceasefire and said some genuinely abhorrent language in defense of a regime many consider to be genocidal. The same can be said for elections "making on-the-ground activism easier," as many of the candidate's leftists have backed recently, including Senator Bernie Sanders, are not engaging with calls for a ceasefire, instead kicking out activists who once supported them from their offices.
As things currently stand, many Democrats will not support Biden going into the 2024 election, and perhaps any candidate who refuses to back a ceasefire against genocide as well. If the Democratic Party cannot meet these criticisms, it will most likely lose significant ground in the year ahead.
The reason why people are upset
Some say that progressives and leftists should “suck it up,” as any dissent will lead to the election of a Republican candidate such as Donald Trump. As micro influencer Karen Piper commented: "A vote against Biden is a vote for Trump. Period. I'm discouraged by leftist voices thinking otherwise because of a problem in Gaza. It will pass, and then we'll have a stupid dictator in charge."
Yet you have to understand that many are coming from this perspective from a moral angle, believing that they should not be linking our rejection of genocide to an election. In the words of another micro-influencer: “…if you can’t vote for either party, then don’t! Vote for the people who are actively pushing for a ceasefire, who best represent the average American experience, and aren’t maintaining the status quo.”
And make no mistake, what is happening in Gaza is genocide. The Israeli government is bombing hospitals, schools, and refugee camps. Over ten thousand are confirmed dead (a number estimated to be much higher), including over four thousand children. Entire bloodlines have been culled. As legal and political scholars from prestigious schools all over the world asserted in a letter on October 15th:
“Israel’s current military offensive on the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023, however, is unprecedented in scale and severity, and consequently in its ramifications for the population of Gaza….huge swathes of neighbourhoods and entire families across Gaza have been obliterated. Israel’s Defence Minister ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water and other essential necessities. This terminology itself indicates an intensification of an already illegal, potentially genocidal siege to an outright destructive assault.”
Israel has long maintained a settler-colonial project against the Palestinian people. Hundreds of thousands were expelled from their homes following the partition of Palestine by the UN (and the ensuing war in the late 1940s) and then crammed into the world's largest open-air prison. In the words of the United Nation's website describing this history:
“The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.
In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under a UN administration. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing that it was unfair and violated the UN Charter. Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee. The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948, with the end of the British Mandate and the departure of British forces, the declaration of independence of the State of Israel and the entry of neighbouring Arab armies. The newly established Israeli forces launched a major offensive. The result of the war was the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population.
As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called for refugee return, property restitution and compensation (resolution 194 (II)). However, 75 years later, despite countless UN resolutions, the rights of the Palestinians continue to be denied.”
These actions have been (and are currently being) funded directly by the United States. From 1951 to as recently as this year, hundreds of billions of dollars have been funneled to the Israeli government, many of which have been used to fund the military and its apartheid regime against Palestine.
That is the framing many leftists and progressives now hold. They do not believe we should play the “accept genocide for political convenience” game and are withholding their vote because they consider it morally correct. As one person remarked: “…why Biden lost my vote…I am making this statement not because it will change anything in this country. I am making it so the country won’t change me. I am making this statement so they don’t [rob] me of my humanity. I won’t support this race to the bottom. I cannot support genocide or rationalize it.”
If Biden is not willing to be on the right side of history here, the argument goes, then he is a bad leader unworthy of the presidency.
The political implications
The fact that so many people are now staking their vote to Palestinian Liberation is a bad sign for Biden going into 2024. Biden won partly because of young voters — a demographic that increased their turnout by 11 points from 2016 to 2020. One NBC exit poll suggested, "…that 65% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 voted for Biden."
Younger people are also more likely to support Palestinian liberation and a ceasefire. What Biden’s supporters are accomplishing by shaming those angry with this administration's anti-Palestine stance is creating a rift between them and this crucial bloc of voters. It signals to all those paying attention that such naysayers have no intention of listening to this vital demographic, and this willful blindness makes it more likely that young voters will check out in 2024. As the political director for the Sunrise Movement, Michele Weindling told The Rolling Stone:
“Biden has the opportunity to listen to the majority of people in this country that are calling for him to call for a ceasefire, and an end to unconditional support to the Israeli military. And we are seeing an immense risk around whether or not young people will feel alienated ahead of the 2024 election and risk staying home.”
The same can be said of many groups in America, such as American Muslims, whose support for Biden has plummeted. The same might also be true for Black Americans, whose support has likewise dipped. In general, Biden's approval now sits at just under 40%, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, and he has lost significant ground in a hypothetical pairing with Republican contender Donald Trump.
Supporting a ceasefire would ensure that that hemorrhaging does not continue. If Biden were smart, he would budge here on demanding a ceasefire and then change nothing else (i.e., still provide funding to Israel). It's a move that would piss off leftists who believe we must stop funding the Israeli war machine but would appease those on the more liberal end of the spectrum and prevent mass disengagement.
Instead, he's denying the existence of a genocide, and the world is watching him do it. Forget morals for a second; this is bad politics — the thing Biden is supposed to be good at. Democrats need massive support to win the 2024 election, in some cases in margins in only the tens of thousands, and he's willing to gamble that margin away to support a genocide.
If you want to guarantee that he loses swing states, then by all means, shame these constituencies into disengagement. Watch as Biden loses states such as Michigan, which is home to over 200,000 Muslim voters, and Georgia (and really much of the South), where young voters were a deciding factor in the 2020 election.
Because the message coming out of the Palestine Liberation Movement is quite clear: no ceasefire, no votes. As Nihad Awad, the national director at the Council on American–Islamic Relations, said in a speech during the pro-Palestine march on Washington, DC: "The language that President Biden and his party understands is the language of votes in the 2023 elections, and our message is: no ceasefire, no votes….No votes in Michigan, no votes in Arizona, no votes in Georgia, no votes in Nevada, no votes in Wisconsin, no votes in Pennsylvania."
The Biden administration ignores this ultimatum at their peril.
Biden’s flawed gambit
There is a certain cynicism that is related to the genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip. With the election about a year away, the Biden Administration is gambling that the voting public will stop caring about this issue by the time they go to the polls.
And yet, moments like this are formative ones for the electorate. In the same way, the George Floyd Uprising shifted how many (though not all) talk about race in America, countless on the Left are educated about Palestine liberation in a way they simply weren’t four months ago. We might not be talking about this issue in six months in the same way (that depends on the extent of the campaign in Gaza and the West Bank), but that doesn’t mean voters won’t remember.
It only takes tens of thousands of votes to swing an election in a state one way or the other. Biden is already an unpopular candidate (so too is Trump, for that matter), and Genocide Joe is a much worse nickname than Sleepy Joe. This baggage will stick with him if he doesn’t get ahead of it because, unlike four months ago, the world is more aware of the situation in Gaza, and many don’t like what they see.