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Does Joe Biden’s re-election campaign have a Gaza problem?

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IT IS NEVER nice for a campaign when a steadfast constituency turns irate and threatens to withhold their votes; it is the stuff of nightmares when they happen to reside in a swing state that may decide the next presidential election. Incensed over the Israeli military campaign in Gaza—which is fast approaching 30,000 Palestinian deaths—Muslim-American and Arab-American voters staged a campaign to withhold their votes for President Joe Biden in Michigan’s Democratic primary. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent Palestinian-American congresswoman representing the heavily Muslim western suburbs of Detroit, encouraged her fellow Democrats to vote “uncommitted”, as did most prominent Muslim officials in the state. Over 100,000 Michiganders voted “uncommitted”, representing 13.3% of the total vote.

The threat to Mr Biden is not veiled. “There is not really a path that does not go through Michigan. And there is not really a path that goes through Michigan without the Muslim community,” says Hira Khan of Emgage, a Muslim-voter mobilisation group. Michigan has had a recent spate of tight elections. In 2016 Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a margin of 10,704 votes (or 0.22% of those cast); in 2020 Mr Biden won by 154,188 (or 2.78%). The state also has one of the highest concentrations of voters with Middle Eastern and Muslim backgrounds. In 2020 there were an estimated 206,000 Muslims in the electorate—roughly 2.8% of the total—and most of them probably voted for Democrats. If the anti-Gaza backlash persisted through November (including among the three-quarters of young voters who disapprove of Mr Biden’s handling of it), the effect would be marginal. But in a state like Michigan, marginal effects can matter quite a lot.

That is why the Biden campaign seemed particularly concerned. Weeks ago, it sent Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the campaign manager, to the state to meet Muslim leaders. The meeting was cancelled when all of them refused to attend. Reportedly, a suggested meeting with Vice-President Kamala Harris in Washington was also nixed. The White House dispatched senior policymakers, including Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser. A recording of the conversation, published by the New York Times, shows Mr Finer being unusually self-critical: “We have left a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration and the country values the lives of Palestinians. And that began, frankly, pretty early in the conflict,” he said.

The listening sessions are only going so far. “I think they’re hearing the concerns. The problem is that they’re not acting on them yet,” says Alabas Farhat, a Democratic state representative who has been campaigning for the uncommitted vote.

Despite the display of discontent in the primary, it remains unclear how seriously the grumbling will jeopardise the president’s prospects in the general election. In 2012, when Barack Obama was running for re-election, 10.7% of Democratic primary voters in Michigan voted “uncommitted”, even though there was no concerted campaign to do so. Graded against that baseline, the 13.3% showing mustered by this campaign looks less impressive.

Back in 2012 the discontent was diffuse. This year it was concentrated. In some precincts of Dearborn, a heavily Arab-American city near Detroit, three-quarters of voters were “uncommitted”. If 100,000 Democratic voters were really willing to spoil their ballots in November in order to nix Mr Biden’s chances of winning, he would be in serious trouble. Yet the president would also face an electoral backlash were he seen to abandon Israel. In The Economist’s YouGov poll 36% of those questioned say their sympathies in the conflict are more with Israelis, while just 15% are more sympathetic to Palestinians.

Some Muslims say they are ready to abandon Biden and that his inability to restrain Israel is cause enough to make him a one-term president. Given Mr Trump’s evident antipathy to Muslim-Americans, his favour towards Israel and his general lack of concern for most things that sound like human rights, this might seem paradoxical. Ahead of the primary vote Gretchen Whitmer, the popular governor of Michigan, argued that “any vote that is not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term.” Many Muslims concede that outcomes under Mr Trump would not have been better, but that there would be no offensive pretence of caring about human rights. “I prefer to be stabbed from the front than from the back,” says one.

Others say that Mr Biden can win back their support if he were to call for a permanent ceasefire, if he stops sending weapons to the Israelis and resumes funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (which was cut off after the Israelis said that several of its employees had taken part in Hamas’s attack on October 7th that murdered 1,200). Asked what happens in the next nine months, Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, says: “That’s a question for President Biden.”

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Economics

Andrew Bailey on why UK-U.S. trade deal won’t end uncertainty

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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.

Carlos Jasso | Afp | Getty Images

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.

“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.

“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.

That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.

“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”

“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”

Trump unveils United Kingdom trade deal, first since ‘reciprocal’ tariff pause

In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.

The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.

Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.

“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.

“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”

“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.

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Economics

Trump knocks down a controversial pillar of civil-rights law

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IN THE DELUGE of 145 executive orders issued by President Donald Trump (on subjects as disparate as “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” and “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”) it can be difficult to discern which are truly consequential. But one of them, signed on April 23rd under the bland headline “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy”, aims to remake civil-rights law. Those primed to distrust Mr Trump on such matters may be surprised to learn that the president’s target is not just important but also well-chosen.

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Economics

Harvard has more problems than Donald Trump

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A Programme at Harvard Divinity School aspired to “deZionize Jewish consciousness”. During “privilege trainings”, working-class Harvard students were instructed that, by being Jewish, they were oppressing wealthier, better prepared classmates. A course in Harvard’s graduate school of public health, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health”, sought to “interrogate the relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”: Will these findings by Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29th, shock anyone? Maybe not. Americans may be numb by now to bulletins about the excesses, not to say inanities, of some leftist academics.

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