DETROIT – The incumbent President was growing more unpopular by the day. There were growing whispers that he was too old for the job. He had managed to get elected with barely 51 percent of the vote, but as his party headed into the midterms, inflation was more than six percent, and too many people still didn’t have jobs.
Indeed, the midterm elections were a disaster for his party. They lost in the Senate; they lost a staggering 26 seats in the house. The opposition party captured the governor’s mansions in Michigan and Ohio and flipped seven other states. Columnists suggested that the elderly President announce he wouldn’t run for reelection.
Sound like a description of Joe Biden’s situation? Well, it may sound like that — but it’s not. The above paragraphs describe Ronald Reagan exactly 40 years ago. Yet two years after his disastrous midterms, he carried 49 of the 50 states.
Does that mean that President Biden is headed for a landslide reelection of his own, despite the way things look now? Not at all. He could, indeed, suffer the fate of Jimmy Carter, who four years after inspiring the nation lost badly.
But it does mean that we have no idea what is going to happen between now and 2024 – or even November 2022 — politically or otherwise. Remember that virtually no one in December 2017 thought Biden would arise from the ashes and win the White House three years later. And in December 2013, nobody — and I mean, nobody — dreamed Donald Trump would be the next President.
But there are some indications that things may not be as bad for Democrats in the coming midterms as you might think. True, as of now, Republicans have to be favored to retake control of the House of Representatives. Reapportionment and redistricting, which is controlled by the GOP in most states, should help them.
The age-old trend to vote against the party that controls the White House should be working for the GOP too. But the U.S. Senate races are an entirely different story. Thirty-four senate seats are up in 2022, and 20 of them are now held by Republicans.
Democrats only have 14 – and 12 of those are seen as safe seats. Only in Nevada, where freshman U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is running, and Georgia, where Raphael Warnock, the surprise winner of a special election in January, has to run for a full term, are there major targets of opportunity for the Republicans.
Republicans, on the other hand, have far more turf to defend. Five GOP incumbents are retiring so far (as opposed to only one Democrat, in deep blue Vermont.) That gives Democrats open seat targets in three swing states – Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Should Republican Ron Johnson decide not to run in Wisconsin, Democrats may be slightly favored there as well.
If Democrats should end up with, say, 52 seats in the Senate, the picture would dramatically change if Supreme Court vacancies should occur (and we would certainly see a lot less of Joe Manchin.)
The two great uncertainties are, of course, inflation and the pandemic. Many medical experts think that Covid-19, while not vanishing completely, will lose its pandemic status next year –as long as the vaccines continue to prove effective against new variants, and the percentage of those vaccinated keep rising.
The International Monetary Fund and other economic analysts think inflation is likely to dramatically fall next year as well – depending to some extent on whether the supply-chain bottlenecks that have held up finished products and raw materials can be solved.
That may happen — but Charissa Potts, the principal attorney at Freedom Law, PC, a firm that deals mainly with individual bankruptcy filings, is worried. She thinks that inflation has been spurred on by some of the policies designed to help people cope with the economic effects of the pandemic.
“It surprises me when no one brings up almost two years of non-payment of mortgages, rent and student loans into the inflation equation,” she said. Potts, whose firm has three law offices in the state, thinks only a few people put aside money for the day they would eventually start having to pay again.
“Instead, they bought consumer goods, many of them from China, and also invested in the stock market using consumer-friendly trading apps.” As far as the total economy was concerned, “I think the chickens are going to be coming home to roost, or whatever the idiom is,” she said.
The next few years may be grim for the nation and grimmer for the Democrats – if she is right.
However, other analysts think the core economy is stronger than that, and point to the fast-falling unemployment rate. Nobody can predict the course of events, and some unforeseen foreign or domestic crisis may change all assumptions in a twinkling.
But Presidents do win reelection more often than not. And if two years from now inflation is down, the economy is booming and the virus has mostly vanished, a Biden second term may look a lot more likely than it does today.
(Editor’s note: A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
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