Tension with Israel represents only one of Biden’s immense election challenges

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — If Joe Biden wins a second term later this year, he will have defied one of the most complex political environments for a president seeking reelection in years.

At home and abroad, he is facing the kind of headwinds that would normally cast severe doubt on his chances of convincing voters that they should send him back to the White House.

Biden’s difficult dynamic was on show in an exclusive interview with CNN this week, in the swing state of Wisconsin, which he only won by around 20,000 votes in 2020 and that could be decisive again in November.

The president is facing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine that carry a constant threat of escalation and repeatedly throw up challenges to his credibility as a leader. At home, Biden is beset by campus protests triggered by the Israeli offensive in Gaza and a revolt by some progressive and young voters vital to his coalition. More broadly, the electorate isn’t yet buying his “morning in America” vibe. They’re suffering from high prices and interest rates that confound his reassurances that the economy is in great shape and mask a strong legislative record that stands comparison with any recent president. Then there’s the challenge of being the oldest president in history, running for a second term that would end when he is 86.

Biden’s saving grace, however, may be that Donald Trump – his opponent in a 2020 election rematch that Americans have repeatedly told pollsters they don’t want – may be saddled with even more vulnerabilities than he is. Trump spent this week in a Manhattan court listening to embarrassing testimony about an alleged liaison he had with an adult film star in 2006 that is now at the center of a hush money trial. New York prosecutors claim he falsified business records to hide a payment to Stormy Daniels in an early act of election interference in 2016. He’s denied the affair and pleaded not guilty in the case.

Trump also has a habit of alienating the key suburban voters likely to decide which of the two one-term presidents wins a second mandate in November. His recent warnings that he couldn’t rule out violence after the 2024 election, and his refusal to say he’d accept the result, revived dark memories of his attempt to steal the 2020 election and underscored his fundamental threat to democracy. Trump’s base voters have no problems either with his criminal trials or his false claims that he was cheated out of office. But the most recent midterm and presidential elections suggest that he does scare off large sectors of the general electorate.

Trump has also talked himself into a difficult corner on abortion – one of the few issues where Biden outpolls him and which Democrats believe could enthuse their voters and produce the kind of turnout that could swamp the ex-president in November. Trump’s role in building a generational conservative majority on the Supreme Court is coming back to haunt him after the justices overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. While Trump insists the issue must be left to the states, it’s offering Democrats an opening every time a Republican legislature or conservative court delivers an extreme new anti-abortion measure or decision.

Israel may be far from the biggest worry for Trump’s campaign

Polls consistently show that voters care most about the economy. And the president’s ratings on the issue are underwater.

A CNN poll in April showed that Biden had a 34% rating on the economy — and 29% on inflation — as voters say economic concerns are more important to them when choosing a candidate than they were in each of the past two presidential elections. And voters who say the economy is very important to their vote backed Trump over Biden 62% to 30%.

This deficit for the president comes despite three years of solid growth and job creation numbers. But inflation, a corrosive political force that can ruin political careers and that only voters who remember the early 1980s have experienced before, has bequeathed a period of high interest rates. This is proving punishing to home and car buyers, for instance. And many Americans still get a shock every time they go to the grocery store.

In his interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, the president pushed back on the notion that the economy is in poor shape while expressing some understanding for the pain caused by high prices. But he was still defensive on the issue — recalling some previous presidents who appeared irked that voters weren’t appreciating their efforts.

Asked by Burnett when he would restore consumer confidence, Biden replied: “We have already turned it around,” then added, “The polling data has been wrong all along. You guys do a poll at CNN. How many folks you have to call to get one response? The idea that we’re in a situation where things are so bad … we have created more jobs. We have made – we’re in a situation where people have access to good-paying jobs.”

Biden has also balked at Trump’s efforts to conjure nostalgia for the economy in his first term – before jobs and growth went into free fall during a once-in-a-century pandemic. “Let me say it this way, when I started this administration, people were saying there’s going to be a collapse of the economy. We have the strongest economy in the world. Let me say it again, in the world,” the president said.

But telling voters things are great when they don’t feel they are is a questionable political strategy.

Any time a president looks like he isn’t fully in touch with the reality of voters’ lives, he’s on dangerous ground. In 1992, for instance, President George H.W. Bush was running for reelection. He was asked in a campaign debate, “How can you find a cure for the economic problems of the common people if you have no experience of what is ailing them?” Bush got off to a bad start by looking at his watch, making it look like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. He then offered a halting and confusing answer that ended with: “Of course you feel it when you are president of the United States and that is why I am trying to do something about it.”

His rival, Bill Clinton, then stood up and gave a national audience a taste of his burning “feel your pain” political talent. He directly addressed the questioner, said that as Arkansas governor he knew by name many people who lost their jobs, and told the nation: “This decision better be about what kind of economic theory you want. Not just people saying I want to go fix it.”

A few months later, Clinton was in the White House.

Biden has more time than Bush to convince voters that better economic times are ahead, and he’d be considerably helped if the Federal Reserve begins to ease rates in the summer. He’s been contrasting his own humble origins with Trump’s billionaire lifestyle in recent weeks, trying to puncture the idea that the ex-president cares more about working Americans than he does, while warning his predecessor would destroy the Affordable Care Act if he gets back in the Oval Office. “I look at it from a position – not being facetious – from a Scranton perspective,” Biden told Burnett. “He looks at it from a Mar-a-Lago perspective. He wants to give more significant tax cuts to the super wealthy.”

And Biden is fortunate in that he faces a rival with his own massive liabilities, rather than a young rising star with a gift for coining a middle-class economic narrative like Clinton.

Biden’s path becomes even more complex

But if anything, the president’s path to reelection is becoming even more complicated. He’s now locked in a showdown with the prime minister of Israel — always a treacherous proposition for US leaders. This crisis risks playing into Trump’s contention that the world and the nation is spinning out of control and needs a strongman to fix it.

The fracture with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu occurred after the president warned in the CNN interview that he would halt the transfer of some weapons to Israel if it went ahead with a major offensive into the Gazan city of Rafah. Biden has been under enormous pressure from progressive activists, supporters on Capitol Hill and Arab American voters in the key swing state of Michigan to rein in Netanyahu after the deaths of many thousands of Palestinian civilians in Israel’s war against Hamas following the October 7 terror attacks that killed 1,200 people. Campus protests have, meanwhile, caught Biden between young and progressive voters who are furious with his support for Israel in the war, and moderates who might be susceptible to his predecessor’s chaos narrative.

It’s not clear that heated Republicans attacks on Biden over Israel Thursday will seriously wound him with his own voters. But the tone of the criticism bolstered a wider Republican narrative that Biden is weak and incapable of stabilizing an increasingly restless world. “That’s a failure of leadership. That is cowardice, that is answering, trying to make a political calculus here that it helps him get out from underwater,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said. The North Carolinian’s colleague from Missouri, GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, added: “This is the message to our allies that, you know, if it’s politically inconvenient for the president to send you arms then, you know, sorry, you’re on your own.”

Biden has tried to insulate himself from the political impact of the protests with centrist voters by arguing that while the right to demonstrate is constitutionally guaranteed, any property damage from students occupying college buildings is unacceptable. And in a speech on Capitol Hill memorializing victims of the Holocaust earlier this week, he condemned examples of antisemitism reported at some of the protests. He warned that too many people were “denying, downplaying, rationalizing and ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7.”

Still, polls show that the Israel-Hamas conflict is well down the list of issues that most concern voters — including the young voters most often cited as deserting Biden in droves over the conflict. But in an election that could come down to thousands of votes in a few states, the potential for defections or no shows from angry Democratic voters is an alarming one for the president.

The-CNN-Wire
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