Hope and the 2022 Midterm Elections
Just a few months ago, the Democrats looked certain to get blown out, now they look like they should hold on to the Senate
Back in April when I started this blog, I wrote my first post on the ineptitude of the gerontocratic Democratic Party and how a Republican landslide this November seemed inevitable:
A simple mean reversion election would lead to a historic Republican landslide given the current state of gerrymandered affairs. But a simple mean reversion election feels like a favorable result given that inflation is the highest it’s been since the 1970s, Democrats yet again are letting their core voters down, all while the administration bungles and politicizes a pandemic it promised to make ending its top priority (while also reneging on their promise to the 18-34 cohort to forgive some student debt, which may have something to do with the poll I shared above).
It.is.going.to.be.U.G.L.Y.
Since then, the Democrats finally passed their ambitious legislative agenda which includes the most aggressive action to curb climate change that the United States has ever seen. In addition to getting his signature legislation through Congress, President Joe Biden has dramatically deescalated the drone war, ended the longest war in America’s history and is making good on (some of his) promise to forgive student loan debt, all while a positive image of him amongst young people has finally emerged with the proliferation of Dark Brandon memes like the one at the top of this blog (some may laugh at the notion of Dark Brandon being electorally meaningful, but it is the only image of him that has emerged in pop culture to meaningfully counteract the confused old man that was his sole reputation just a few months ago).
In the last few months, the Democrats have gone from having quite literally nothing to run on outside their tired old “wHaT aRe YoU gOnNa Do, VoTe RePuBlIcAn?” condescending strategy to having the upper hand from a policy perspective. Whether we got here intentionally is of secondary importance. My hunch is that Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer were using Manchin’s well-known intransigence to manipulate the GOP in order to get CHIPS passed, but it is impossible to figure out whether the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act unfolded as planned given the typical disorganization of the Democratic Party.
Regardless, that is for the historians to sort out, as the headline now is that Democrats actually did something ambitious with the power America handed them in November 2020—and the narrative around the midterm elections is now shifting in their favor in light of some favorable results in last night’s special elections.
In addition to finally creating a positive narrative around the party, Democrats have been aided by Republicans enacting their wildly unpopular agenda and breaking through the bothsides bullshit that the media has hammered into people’s brains. Despite the best efforts of America’s braindead elite media class, the notion that both parties are equally intransigent is becoming more manifestly absurd by the day. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has made the GOP’s rabid extremism undeniable and activated a ton of voters who earlier this year looked likely to sit out the midterms. Now we’re seeing early voter registration trends that have the potential to radically alter American politics as we know it.
The Center for American Women and Politics has tracked party affiliation by gender since 1952, and generally around 50% to 55% of women have identified as Democrat, while around 30% to 38% have identified as Republican. The latest figures are a nightmare for Democrats, as in 2020 the proportion of women identifying as Democrats dropped to the lowest level measured in this time-frame at 45%, while women identifying as Republican landed near the high end of the range at 36%. The potential for women to monumentally shift electoral politics in America is evident in the data, as some of the most overwhelming Democratic presidential elections coincide with spikes in women identifying as Democrat, like 63% in Barack Obama’s 2008 rout of John McCain and 62% in Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 blowout of Barry Goldwater. If these figures become the baseline in a post-Roe world, then the American electoral landscape will experience its largest fundamental shift since the Reagan revolution.
Earlier this year, poll after poll indicated that young people, and particularly young nonwhite people, would not show up to vote this November. However, voter registration figures are now revealing a groundswell of Democratic support amongst a demographic that the army of mindless Democratic lanyards were already setting up to blame for the party’s expected failure in November. Now President Biden is making good on (part of) one of his major campaign promises in forgiving (some) student loan debt that doubles as a key policy needed to get young people to the polls, and the momentum is very clearly shifting in the direction of the Democrats.
Aiding this narrative shift is Republican incompetence. Rick Scott, serial defrauder, was put in charge of winning the Senate back for the GOP, and he was last seen on a yacht in Italy after blowing a gigantic hole in the Republican Senatorial campaign budget, as Axios highlighted how “At the end of July, the NRSC reported just $23.2 million cash-on-hand. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee reported $54.1 million in its account.” The GOP is now dialing back on its advertising in key states as Mitch McConnell publicly laments their inability to run normal human beings while the Democrats are going on the offensive.
The media loves running with “Democrats in disarray” stories, but disarray is by far the most accurate adjective to describe the current shitstorm that Republicans have created for themselves. They appointed a man who never saw a bag of money he couldn’t steal to manage their bags of money and oversee a slate of candidates who fail the essential “would you like to have a beer with them” test that is the animating principle at the heart of American electoral politics. Dr. Oz is trying to appeal to working class folks by complaining about the price of crudité, J.D. Vance has seemingly disappeared off the face of the Earth, Herschel Walker is a walking talking billboard for the dangers of CTE, and Blake Masters’s campaign has basically been one long KKK meeting.
Given the fact that incumbent parties are always underdogs in the first midterm elections of a new president and the economy is slowing down, there is no reason the Republicans shouldn’t be solid favorites going into November, and yet these key Senate races in purple states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona are all currently leaning Democrat according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregate. Ohio is the only key state they have Republicans winning, but The Daily Beast’s reporting indicates that the GOP is panicked about Vance’s lackadaisical effort, and his lead can largely be attributed to the fact that Ohio is the reddest of the four states and the Republicans injected $28 million into his fledgling campaign.
Additionally, the absence of Trump on the Republican ticket this year should not be underestimated. Creating a cult is a good political strategy when the cult leader is at the top of the ticket, but as soon as his name disappears from the ballot, the stakes go down dramatically for the cult followers.
This doesn’t mean that Democrats can rest on their laurels and cruise to a Senate majority in November. Narratives can change quickly in politics, as demonstrated by Joe Biden’s approval rating rising from sub-Trump levels earlier this year to a figure that is by no means good but is far from the catastrophic percentages he was at earlier this year. Additionally, the student loan “forgiveness” is heavily means tested which should result in its popularity waning as more and more people realize they are either not eligible for it or that the “forgiveness” was nowhere near what they expected upon the announcement of the policy. Joe Biden is president because young people voted at historic rates in 2020 and there is still plenty of time for the party to do what they do best and alienate them.
Given that the Democrats have never seen an election they couldn’t fuck up and the perpetual losing machine that is the Democratic consultant class loves to run and cry to their favored political “reporters” as to why young people lost them an election that has yet to take place, the midterms are far from settled. We have simply moved from an environment that looked like near worst-case scenario for Democrats to a mildly favorable one for them.
Add in the fact that the mainstream media treats the Republican Party like their assignment editor (ie: their fixation on migrant caravans every time Fox News decides to put it in their primetime A block), and there are plenty of opportunities for the GOP to shift the narrative in their favor. In this age of breakdown, we have all internalized the notion that the worst outcome is the likeliest, and while that is still firmly in the realm of possibility, there is good reason to be hopeful as the likeliest outcome as of right now is that the Democrats will still control the Senate come November.