Europe|Playing for Time, U.K. Leader Sets Up Chance of U.S. Election Overlap
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/world/europe/election-uk-us-sunak-biden.html
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak signaled that voters will go to the polls in the fall, around the time that the United States will be in the midst of its own pivotal vote.
When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said this week that he was not likely to call a general election in Britain before the second half of the year, he was trying to douse fevered speculation that he might go to the voters as early as May. But in doing so, he set up another tantalizing prospect: that Britain and the United States could hold elections within days or weeks of each other this fall.
The last time that happened was in 1964, when Britain’s Labour Party ousted the long-governing Conservatives in October, and less than a month later, a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, swept aside a challenge from a right-wing Republican insurgent. The parallels to today are not lost on the excitable denizens of Britain’s political class.
“It’s the stuff of gossip around London dinner tables already,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington who is now a member of the House of Lords. For all the Côte du Rhône-fueled analysis, Mr. Darroch conceded, “it’s hard to reach any kind of conclusion about what it means.”
That doesn’t mean political soothsayers, amateur and professional, aren’t giving it a go. Some argue that a victory by the Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, over President Biden — or even the prospect of one — would be so alarming that it would scare voters in Britain into sticking with Mr. Sunak’s Conservative Party, as a bid for predictability and continuity in an uncertain world.
