What Biden’s exit means for us

What does Biden dropping out of the US presidential election race mean for Pakistan? Before one begins to answer that question, one should perhaps first look at what it means for the US.

Joe Biden dropped out after his disastrous performance at the first debate with Republican candidate Donald Trump; during the debate several times it seemed Biden was talking gibberish and tuning out.

First off, what this means for the US is that the likely Democratic contender (she has to be formally voted as the official candidate of the Democratic Party) in the presidential race is going to be much younger than 81-year-old Biden. At 59, Vice President Kamala Harris is also younger than Donald Trump by almost 20 years. So, an element of relative youthfulness will be injected into the US presidential race.

Having said that, as vice president, she is closely identified with President Biden and all his policies, including those for which he has been heavily criticized – especially his policies related to America’s southern border with Mexico.

As the next presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris will have to own all of Biden’s policies and these policies are part of the reason for Biden’s low job approval rating. The latter is bound to run off on Harris’s presidential campaign so it would be fair to say that she will be hamstrung from the very beginning of her presidential campaign.

This is a significant disadvantage since Trump has been leading on most opinion polls, particularly since the debate that badly exposed Biden. However, right after being endorsed by Biden, Kamala managed to get most of the votes of party delegates that she needed to clinch the presidential nomination. American media also reported that her campaign was flooded with donor funds on the very first day and that she was also attacking Trump. This means that Trump’s win, as many people even in Pakistan are assuming, is far from certain.

For one, Harris is well poised to take a bigger chunk of the female vote than Biden, and her messaging (as well as Biden’s when he was in the race) is focused on the opposition of Republicans to abortion – a hot-button issue in the US, especially for female voters.

Kamala Harris is from two minority communities – Indian and African American – and it is also very likely that she will gain a bulk of votes from minority communities, just like Biden would have. That said, the handful of battleground or key swing states that will potentially decide who will win are for now polling decidedly in favour of Trump. As for the national election polls, Trump is ahead of Harris in most of them – but by a smaller margin than he was against Biden.

Now back to the question: what does Biden dropping out of the US presidential race mean for Pakistan?

Many in Pakistan will think that this clears the way for Trump to win and that if Trump wins – and this is the thinking of most Imran Khan supporters – then Imran Khan will be released from jail and possibly come back as prime minister.

Of course, this thinking is based more on hope and a healthy dose of misguided optimism than anything else. It also conveniently ignores the hypocrisy shown by the PTI and its supporters since Imran Khan squarely blamed the US government for playing a major role in his ouster as prime minister and now his party and supporters think and expect the next government to come to his rescue.

The fact is that Pakistan’s importance as a strategic ally for America is not what it used to be 10-20 years ago when the ‘war on terror’ was in full swing and when American troops were deployed in Afghanistan and Washington relied heavily on cooperation from Islamabad for their safety and security,

That has all changed and so till Pakistan’s economy grows to the level where it can again attract America’s attention, it is unlikely that whoever is elected as the next US president will come to Khan’s rescue. That is unlikely to happen quite simply because there are many other things on the next president’s plate.

For example, in the case of Trump, he has repeatedly stated his priorities as closing America’s border with Mexico, dealing with the flood of immigrant refugees, ending the war in Ukraine, continuing and increasing support for Israel, countering China’s growing influence, dealing with the challenge of a nuclear-armed Iran and so on.

Pakistan – and, for PTI supporters, specifically ensuring that Imran Khan is released – simply doesn’t fit in this scheme of things, and this would probably be the case also if Kamala Harris ends up winning.

For any American government, the current one or the next one, releasing Imran Khan is simply not a priority, however much his supporters would like to think otherwise.

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. He tweets/posts @omar_quraishi and can be reached at: omarrquraishi@gmail.com