Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. In tonight’s email, I take a look at Joe Biden’s biggest challenge heading into 2024—and it’s not his age. It’s the economy.

But first, Abby Livingston’s update from Capitol Hill…

Santos haters (who include most of the New York Republican delegation and House Ethics Chair Michael Guest) will need two-thirds of the chamber to oust him, but that seems very doable this time around. Then again, given the persistent unpredictability of this Congress, who knows if Santos will be in office in a week. Here are the latest considerations and complexifiers…

• Expelling Santos will be costly: Typically, special elections in competitive places like New York’s 3rd district are mostly about bragging rights and setting a media narrative for the fall general election. But much more is at stake in this situation: Democrats anticipate competing here, and a win could further reduce the already historically tight Republican House majority’s margin.

  Moreover, this race will take place in the New York City media market, the most expensive in the country. “It’s gonna be an absolutely insane special election, no doubt,” a Democratic operative who’s close to spending decisions told me. This strategist suggested that spending in NY3 could surpass the most expensive House special election ever: the 2017 Georgia 6th District race that led to the political rise of now-Sen. Jon Ossoff, although House Republican sources pushed back on the narrative, suggesting that the race could be a cheaper cable-plus-digital-plus-direct mail war (which is often the case in New York region House races).

• Democratic candidates have a financial edge: Most House special elections are reactive scrambles, taking place in response to a member dying or a surprise resignation. It’s a different situation here, given Santos’s long-known and profound weaknesses. So far, nine House candidates have already raised six figures for their campaigns, as of their most recent finance reports. Democrats currently have the upper hand in candidate fundraising, which is crucial because candidates secure a lower ad rate compared to the House campaign committees and super PACs. But it’s fair to assume that fundraising on all fronts will jump if a special election comes to pass.

  It’s an open question whether this race will foretell the fall of 2024. Nathan Gonzales, the analyst who runs Inside Elections, rates this seat as a pure tossup, and Long Island’s North Shore could well be a fruitful testing ground for fall messaging. But on the other hand, the political ghost of Santos could overwhelm the messaging on this race and drown out chatter on top issues, like abortion.

For the rest of us, though, the real highlight was the president’s appearance before the traveling press at the White Elephant, a harborside hotel. Biden announced that Israel and Hamas had agreed to a four-day pause in fighting, allowing for the release of 50 hostages kidnapped by Hamas militants in October, including a 4-year-old American girl. He called the deal the result of “extensive U.S. diplomacy” and said he’d been working the phones for weeks to make it happen.

Joyful news, yes, for the families of the kidnapped Israelis. But politically, Biden’s announcement was also a rejoinder to impatient progressives here in the United States—many of them young people who have soured on the president over the war, are demanding a ceasefire, and are accusing Biden of supporting genocide. One of their more surreal protests took place during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday, when 34 protesters blitzed Sixth Avenue and unfurled a banner reading “Genocide Then, Genocide Now, Free Palestine”—blocking a McDonald’s float from moving down the parade route, leaving a person in a Grimace costume looking seriously confused. More protesters were seen yelling at Biden over the holiday weekend on Nantucket, chanting “We charge you with genocide,” even as the president’s negotiated pause in fighting was allowing the United Nations and Red Cross to move more humanitarian assistance into Gaza.

Some of the louder voices on the left have made the case that Biden’s support for Israel might cost him support among young progressives in 2024, and particularly with the Arab and Muslim voters who populate battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. They might protest Biden and sit the election out, or give their votes to third-party gadflies like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Cornel West.

But a majority of Americans support Biden’s handling of the crisis in Israel, and it’s unlikely that a foreign war will swing a presidential election. That’s never happened. Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam—those were American wars fought by American soldiers. The battle between Israel and Gaza? Like the conflict in Ukraine, it’s already fading from the headlines after the initial shock of violence gripped the world. I have a hunch Hamas won’t be as salient to voters in Arizona and Georgia one year from now.

Regardless, Biden has a much, much bigger problem as he heads into 2024—and it’s not just his age. It’s the economy.

The fourth-cheapest Thanksgiving point aside, the White House’s messaging on the economy was more or less summed up over the weekend by Jared Bernstein, the chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. Anchor Shannon Bream read him a poll showing that 67 percent of American voters think the economy hasn’t turned around and the worst is yet to come. (She could have read him an even uglier poll from earlier in the month, from the Financial Times, showing that only 24 percent of Democrats say they’re better off economically under the Biden administration.) “For most people, their experience is not good,” Bream told him.

Bernstein was honest about the challenges: higher interest rates, stubbornly high prices, the almighty scourge of bad (economic) vibes. He copped to the fact that voters aren’t happy about any of it, but said the president is working overtime to make things better, fighting for middle-class Americans, a pointed contrast to MAGA Republicans who want to cut taxes for wealthy people. Unmentioned were several of Biden’s economic accomplishments, measures that apparently haven’t broken through to voters: efforts to shore up the supply chain, a boom in manufacturing and green energy jobs, investments in infrastructure, eliminating junk fees. “We are moving in the right direction, but we have more work to do to reach average Americans,” Bernstein said. “We are seeing shoots of improvement.” He cited low unemployment numbers, the decline of inflation, modest growth in real wages, lower prices for gas and airline tickets. He also pointed to Black Friday sales “setting records.”

The problem with the Black Friday example—and the problem for Biden—is that we live in a choose-your-own-adventure economy that really doesn’t have much precedent in the modern era. Yes, experts agree the economy is technically strong. People are spending, jobs are being created, unemployment has been under 4 percent for almost two years—a powerful rebound from the pandemic. But the economy is also very weird—an expert term—and it seems like for every positive example, you can also find a negative one. Gas prices are down, but rent is up. Airline tickets are down, but car insurance is up. We’re living in a maze of contradictory data points, made even more confusing by partisan news sources and social media feeding different economic indicators to different people.

So yes, Black Friday spending was blockbuster, accounting for a record $10 billion worth of online shopping. But at the same time, Americans have been depleting their savings since the pandemic thanks to inflation, so more people this year were putting holiday purchases on their credit cards. Adobe Analytics found, too, that more consumers this year were taking advantage of “Buy Now, Pay Later” plans, taking out mini-loans to pay for their purchases. And while I should caveat here that I’m not an economist, booming Black Friday revenues might have something to do with the fact that products just cost more in 2023 than they used to.

Prices are simply a huge drag for Biden. Cost-of-living is how most people process the words “the economy”—it’s why voter dissatisfaction is so high right now despite the positive economic indicators out there. A common example, however imperfect, is the correlation over the years between high gas prices and presidential approval ratings. Most voters just don’t think about the economy in terms of BLS data or manufacturing outlooks or whatever jargon drives the Washington news cycle. They think about the economy in terms of their own checking accounts. What’s even more challenging for the White House is that once prices go up, they usually stay up over time (if they didn’t, that would be devastating for the economy).

Bloomberg released a detailed study Monday detailing how much prices have risen in the last three years, and found that since early 2020, prices have risen roughly as much as they had in the full 10 years preceding the Covid pandemic. The cost of electricity is up 25 percent. Major appliances are up 12 percent. Restaurant tabs are up 24 percent. Groceries are up 25 percent. Car insurance is up 33 percent. If that’s what Americans are associating with “Bidenomics,” well, Biden is in big trouble.

Republicans tend to have a baked-in advantage on the issue of the economy, in part because voters have a tradition of associating Republicans with business and small government and cutting taxes. But Democrats win presidential races when they win—or come close to winning—on the question of who would best handle the economy. They lose when they don’t.

In 2020, for most of the campaign, Donald Trump was beating Biden on the issue of the economy. But in exit polls, Biden ended up tying with Trump (49 percent to 49 percent) on that question, and he narrowly won. Four years earlier, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by two points on the economy question, and he narrowly won. In 2012, Barack Obama lost the economy question to Mitt Romney, but only by four points on his way to a tight re-election victory. Yes, there’s an inherent flaw when polling “the economy,” because it’s a vague term that can mean different things to different voters. But it’s the top issue heading into 2024, and Biden’s approval rating on the economy is a lowly 38 percent, according to the most recent NBC News poll.

By this metric, Biden would absolutely lose the 2024 election if it were held today. In those attention-grabbing New York Times/Siena battleground state polls from earlier this month, Trump was beating Biden on the economy by a giant 22-point margin. That spells electoral disaster for Democrats. Even if consumer sentiment improves by next November, Biden will also have to contend with the fact that the electorate now associates him with a struggling economy. Memories like that are hard to shake, as George H.W. Bush learned in 1992. Bill Clinton gained steam by blaming Bush for a dismal economy, eventually vanquishing him at the polls. But Clinton’s attacks were mostly based on the recession that was flaring in 1991. By the time Election Day rolled around in 1992, the economy had recovered. Bush was still sent packing.

Biden will try to overcome his deficit against Trump, in part, by using the same playbook Democrats ran to win key races in 2022 and 2023, even as voters were expressing dour opinions about the economy. He’ll run on protecting abortion rights and contrast himself with the chaos of Trump. But those issues alone won’t be enough if he can’t turn the economic narrative around, because Biden can’t get elected again with a coalition that only includes college-educated off-year voters. He has to win over the Americans who don’t really care about politics unless it affects their pocketbook, voters who no longer see him as Middle Class Joe from Scranton. Biden also needs to convince the young people and voters of color that sided with him in 2020 that he’s still worth voting for, because their patience is running thin and polls show that many of them are flirting with the idea of Trump. Those voters very much care about rent, groceries, car loans, and credit card debt.

When I started meditating on Biden and the economy, I was reminded of a conversation I had in October, when I was interviewing students at the University of Wisconsin about the 2024 election for my Snapchat show Good Luck America. I met an undergrad named Ella Smith from Whitewater, Wisconsin, who will be voting in her first presidential election next year. She said if she had to choose between Biden and Trump, she would settle for Biden, but grudgingly. Almost all of her complaints about the president, and the country, were about how difficult it is for her and her friends to get ahead financially. It was a familiar complaint about a stagnant economy, one I’ve heard often from Gen Z voters, who need a reason to trust Biden.

“I was going to be a music teacher, that’s my passion, but I can’t, because the quality of life I would live as an educator would be so low,” Smith told me. “There are people I know in Wisconsin making $35,000 for an entire salary for a teacher. That is ridiculous. No one can really live on that. People are fed up. My partner and I want to buy a house somewhere. It’s just not feasible. Living is just too hard. Me and all my friends, this week we all had separate breakdowns about how hard it is to just exist. You graduate college, you get a good job, but even then you’re so far into debt, you’re absolutely fucked no matter what you do. How is this the best we can do?”