'It's foreign policy, stupid'

How elections might be won -- or lost -- in 2024

It may be hard for us to remember, but five years ago at this point it was far from certain that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be re-elected with an increased majority. If anything, the conversation, including within the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was about how a coalition could be managed if the party dipped below 272. Every single opinion poll conducted in December of 2018 and January of 2019 suggested, in fact, that the National Democratic Alliance would itself fall short of a majority, leaving regional parties as kingmakers.

What happened? How did that turn around by end March/April 2019? It wasn’t merely effective campaigning. What happened were, of course, the Pulwama attack and the Balakot air strikes in February. Much ink has been expended since 2019 on how domestic welfare or some other policy tinkering won Mr Modi re-election. The evidence, however, is that it was foreign policy that got him over the line in 2019.

It has long been assumed that foreign policy does not win or lose elections in most large democracies. A classic quote from James Carville, an election strategist for the Democratic Party in the United States during the era of Bill Clinton, seemed to sum up this belief: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Mr Clinton successfully defeated the incumbent George Bush using this maxim, although Bush was the president who, essentially, won the Cold War and managed the peaceful (up till now) dismantling of the Soviet Union.

Yet it appears that we were largely misled about how true that assertion was. It is not necessarily the case that voters respond to the objective state of the domestic economy. Nor is it the case that foreign policy stances are broadly irrelevant to whether you win or lose.

Of course, the presence of a crisis abroad has always overridden domestic political concerns. The re-election of George W Bush in 2004, with the US at war on multiple fronts, was likely a product of that concern. The subsequent backlash, when the American public decided it had been deceived into supporting the Iraq War, was as strong, sweeping the Democrats into Congress and then the White House in 2006 and 2008.

It is also possible, of course, to turn single skirmishes, strikes, or small conflicts into large enough crises that can influence the electorate. That requires, however, effective media management. When Margaret Thatcher — who spent much of her first term deeply unpopular — won re-election in 1983, it was because the Conservative-leaning press hyped up the Falklands War and turned her into the “Iron Lady”. Arguably, the BJP’s broad dominance of the Indian media played a similar role in the run-up to the 2019 general election.

Yet, in some parts of the world — and perhaps, increasingly, in India — it is becoming clear that we do not need real or manufactured crises for elections to be won or lost on foreign policy stances. In 2019, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom went down to its worst defeat in almost a century — almost entirely because voters in marginal seats became convinced that its then leadership, under Jeremy Corbyn, was too weak on foreign policy and too sympathetic to radicals. Whether this was true or not is beside the point. After the elections, Mr Corbyn declared his tenure as Labour Party chief had caused the left to “win the argument” about domestic policy. But it could equally be argued that his tenure in office showed that a popular domestic programme — and many of Mr Corbyn’s domestic stances received solid majorities in polling — could not win you an election if you were seen as weak on foreign policy.

This, 2024, will be the year of elections. India will have one. So will — in increasing order of electorate size — the European Union, Indonesia, and the United States. The UK also will have an election; Bangladesh just had one; and, to whatever extent you might think it warrants the term “democracy”, so will the Russian Federation.

This is also a year with at least two ongoing wars. It is worth wondering how much the disturbed international environment will affect some of these polls. In the US, at least, some trends are already visible. Under President Joe Biden, unemployment is at record lows and the stock market has hit record highs. Yet voters do not care, and Mr Biden is quite unpopular. In fact, his approval rating never recovered from the botched Afghani­stan withdrawal. And he might lose later this year because young and minority voters, including in swing Midwestern states, refuse to support him after his strongly pro-Israel stance in the ongoing Gaza war. “It’s the economy, stupid” has never felt more wrong.