The Deep File: Can the Democrats rebound in the midterms?

In which, the Democrats appear to have gotten a summer bounce of legislative wins and voter motivation as primaries close and the race to November begins. Can the momentum hold until November?

August 5: An entirely too early election prediction…. For 2024

The favorable outcome in the Kansas abortion referendum, the success of Democrats backing Trump-favored candidates in GOP primaries, and the movement on legislation (Biden’s ongoing Covid problems notwithstanding) has gotten some election watchers wondering if the midterms won’t be that bad for the Democrats?

It’s a cautious optimism, and one that still presumes losses in the House, but nonetheless Democrats seem to be getting their mojo back just in time for election season… or so political journalists would largely have you think.

I’m going a bit on a limb here and standing by the position I’ve been articulating in this newsletter for the last several months: The Democratic Party is (way) out of step with the American public, is actively contributing to economic malaise, Biden continues to drop in polls (and in the estimation of his Party) and the Democrats have a decidedly weak bench of potential presidential candidates. Even on their apparently newly found wedge issue of abortion, the basic Democratic position is not in line with American voters.

Even in their current state of disarray at the leadership level, Republicans are building a more diverse coalition at the grassroots level that may be divided on culture war issues like abortion, but is largely aligned on economic issues and a broad lack of trust in federal institutions. 

In a strange twist of events, the Democrats appear to be becoming the culture war party while Republican voters are becoming more the economics and governance/reform party.

If those trends hold, not only do I think Democrats will lose as badly as many have anticipated this year, but they won’t be hanging on to the White House either in 2024.

August 12: How should we then govern?

If you’ve got a fragile economic recovery that shows no signs of robust recovery, a polarized population that has one side increasingly seeing the other as a threatening monolith, falling support for the one policy area that’s been a consistent strength (Covid response), and approaching elections, how should you govern? Common sense would seem to dictate a guarded approach to making any big moves, maybe some substantive conciliatory gestures. It would, at the very least, probably suggest some conciliatory rhetoric from national leaders.

That, however, doesn’t appear to be the approach favored by the Biden administration or congressional Democrats.

To support the Inflation Reduction (via taxation) Act, the Biden administration announced a massive expansion of the IRS, including armed personnel because apparently we need a more heavily armed federal government, and Democrats have stepped up their efforts on getting abortion on state ballots in the midterms. 

Doubling down on a divisive culture war issue and expanding one of the least popular arms of the federal government by giving it guns really doesn’t appear to be a sound play. 

To top it all off? The Biden administration doesn’t appear able to control its chief law enforcement agency.

August 19: Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat?

For the last year, you’ve been reading in this newsletter about the impending doom facing the Democratic Party in this year’s midterm elections. But, the thing about electoral politics is that you never know what events may intervene to shift momentum. 

For much of the last year, it was doom and gloom for many observers of the Democratic Party as the economy stumbled, Afghanistan collapsed, war in Europe exploded, and inflation started to gallop. 

Now, however, inflation has at least taken a pause, unemployment is low, President Biden was able to get a major legislative win, and the fall out from Roe v. Wade’s overturning appears to have given the Democrats a chance to hold on to the Senate. 

It may not be so bad in November…

Except, it can be really bad in November. The Inflation Reduction Act may demonstrate the Biden administration’s ability to get things done in Congress, but it’s another big ticket spending bill with most of its anticipated benefits set to go into effect well after the midterms, and even if those benefits all materialize, multiple independent analysts have disagreed with the White House’s rosy optimism to argue that the bill will do little (if anything) to reduce inflation. The implication being that while inflation may be momentarily paused, it might not be headed down. Additionally, numbers in the housing market aren’t exactly promising in terms of staving off broader inflation.

Meanwhile, the frustration and confusion in the general public surrounding the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago has unified Republican opposition and galvanized voters even as some studies indicate a possible lack of motivation among Democratic voters going into the midterms.

Additionally, things at the US-Mexico border continue to be a poor reflection on the Biden administration. The concern about losing key blocs of minority voters appears to be ringing alarm bells in the Democratic Party, but the response appears to (again) be out of step with voter concerns. For example, as more Hispanic voters exit the Democratic Party, the Party’s response appears focused on information control as opposed to substantive policy action.

Bottom line, the Democrats may have found bottom in their downward political slide, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve got momentum on their side. At least not yet. Got a few more months to go before elections. 

August 26: Improving midterms for the Democrats?

In the week following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and with the announcement of the loan cancellation plan, observers were waxing eloquent this week on the building Democratic momentum and the possibility, nay certainty of a better than expected November for the Democrats. Those were the headlines anyway.

But, like the economic news, one doesn’t have to look too far under the hood to see that Democrats are still facing headwinds ahead of November. Those headwinds may not be looking as strong as they looked earlier this year, but they are there nonetheless. Biden’s poll numbers, though improving slightly, are still subpar, Republicans still lead on the generic ballot, though by a narrower margin, and we’ll have another quarter of economic numbers in hand just before the elections, and I don’t believe those numbers will be stellar. This is just the domestic front. 

On the international front, negotiations with Iran remain frozen and tensions in the Taiwan Strait remain high. A well-timed foreign policy failure wouldn’t necessarily sink the Democrats in November, but depending on its scale it could certainly stop any end of year momentum dead in its tracks.

---