I Voted for Biden in 2020. Why I Won’t Be Voting for Him in 2024
Over the last couple of weeks, there has been a lot of ink spilled on President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities and whether his mental acuity makes him fit to serve another four years as president. While I find all these doubts and concerns about Biden’s candidacy valid and to be true, I have concluded that I will not be voting for him again in 2024. And it has nothing to do with his age. As a first generation Armenian American and registered Republican, I voted for Joe Biden in 2020 because I believed he would be the most consequential president for Armenian Americans. That belief was based on his record as a U.S. senator, where he consistently championed our interests including the recognition of the Armenian genocide. Biden was a dependable friend to our community which further explains why Armenian Americans, including myself, overwhelmingly supported his campaign for president in 2020. Not since Bob Dole, did Armenian Americans have such a pro-Armenian candidate on top of a major party ticket. But that trust was soon broken once Biden became president. Since then, Biden has arguably been the most anti-Armenian president to ever occupy the Oval Office.
Like most Americans, I quickly got tired of former President Donald Trump’s antics and behavior. His policies toward Armenia and Armenian American interests were no different from his predecessors, where they would play politics with the Armenian genocide and curry favor with Armenia’s two longtime hostile neighbors, Turkey and Azerbaijan. But it was under Trump’s watch that Azerbaijan launched an illegal and unprovoked war in the fall of 2020 against ethnic Armenians living in their ancestral homeland of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh). With the country mired in a pandemic during an election year, President Trump did nothing to stop Azerbaijan’s aggression. In fact, Biden on the campaign trail vowed to hold Azerbaijan accountable and rightly criticized the Trump administration for coddling Turkey in its efforts to support and help Azerbaijan. That version of Joe Biden was consistent with the one Armenian Americans saw in the U.S. Senate for close to four decades.
Armenian Americans also saw that version of Biden when he officially recognized the Armenian genocide, something no other president had done since Ronald Reagan. Biden fulfilled his campaign promise to hold Turkey responsible for the first genocide of the 20th century. But like most things in Washington, D.C., that watershed moment was quickly engulfed by a swamp when days after recognizing the Armenian genocide, Biden waived Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act that bans foreign aid to Azerbaijan, which started a cascade of moves and policies that continue to loom over Armenia and its future.
For seemingly geopolitical reasons, Biden has refused to hold Azerbaijan accountable for its war crimes or levy any sanctions against its leadership. He allowed Azerbaijan to implement a 10-month blockade of the only road linking Armenians in the region to the outside world that culminated last September when Azerbaijan forced more than 120,000 Armenians to leave their homes, upending a civilization that stood for a thousand years overnight. It became the biggest displacement of Armenians since the Armenian genocide of 1915. In one fell swoop, Biden was allowing history to repeat itself.
And while Biden’s silence on Azerbaijan’s aggression has been deafening, other members of his administration seem to be tone deaf to the realities of what is happening on the ground in the South Caucus today. Samantha Power, Biden’s administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) recently visited Armenia where her agency spent more money on photographers than on humanitarian aid, while Biden aides have even gone as far as to use the president’s recognition of the Armenian genocide to tout his human rights record.
For a president who vociferously claims that there is an existential threat to democracy in this year’s election, it is hard to take him at face value when he has failed to hold Azerbaijan’s petro-dictator Ilham Aliyev in check.
His indifference toward Azerbaijan sends the wrong message to autocrats around the world and to voters here in the United States, particularly Armenian Americans, who find that his actions have inconsistently squared with his words.
The stakes in the upcoming election are too high for not just our country but for other fledgling democracies like Armenia. They might not get the same type of attention or headlines like Ukraine, but they still matter. Voting is both a right and a privilege. As a grandson to survivors of the Armenian genocide, I take that responsibility seriously. That is why I can no longer in good conscience vote for Biden. He has lost my trust. Hopefully, there is still time for other candidates to earn it.
Stephan Pechdimaldji is a communications strategist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a first-generation Armenian American and grandson of survivors of the Armenian genocide.
