As midterm congressional elections arrive, there’s new force to the old saw about facts, the law, and banging the table. Like a desperate attorney thumping furniture because the facts and the law undermine his argument, President Joe Biden’s Democrats are forced to make a lot of empty noise because empirical evidence and voter sentiment cut against them.
Red signals of imminent Democratic defeat are flashing everywhere.
WATCH: HUGO GURDON SAYS DEMOCRATS ARE ‘LIVING IN AN ALTERNATE REALITY’
In this week’s New York Times/Sienna College poll, 49% of likely voters — the most important category — said they’d vote Republican, compared to 45% choosing Democrats. That is a small lead but a solid one and, notably, a 5-point swing to the GOP in just a month.
The tide has turned since it inched in Biden’s direction over the summer, and it may be picking up the pace against his party — which is to be expected. As Election Day becomes less of a hazy prospect over the horizon and more an imminent date on the calendar, voters avoid being misdirected by extraneous issues and distracting noises from the party that has nothing good to say on the subject everyone cares about.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the hapless White House press secretary, unwittingly highlighted that in an answer at her press briefing. When a reporter noted, “18 months ago, when the president took office, inflation and gas prices started rising,” she blundered into an admission, replying, “18 months ago, the president signed the American Rescue Plan …” It was the neatest possible encapsulation of what voters are realizing — that Biden came to office with the economy in full recovery. All he had to do was stay out of the way, and he refused to do that.
Unemployment was already down from 15% to 6%, and inflation stood at 1.4%. No “rescue” was needed, and yet Democrats spent $1.9 trillion on left-wing pet projects, pouring excess money onto an acute shortage of goods and services, stoking inflation to 7% before the Ukraine war and the so-called “Putin price hikes” began. The Republican National Committee, grateful for Jean-Pierre’s gratuitous resupply of ammunition, tweeted out the video clip, which Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton and others retweeted. One almost feels sorry for the spokeswoman; it’s not her fault her boss dealt her such terrible cards to play.
By far, the most important issue for voters (44%) is inflation and the state of the economy, which even President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says is being accelerated into a recession by Biden’s policies. A CBS/YouGov poll out Sunday shows that 7 in 10 voters blame Democratic policy for inflation, 45% blame the president “a great deal,” and 65% say the economy is getting worse.
When great swaths of voters, indeed nearly everyone, are noticing crossly that they’re paying 8.2% more across the board than they were a year ago and that core inflation is accelerating — it’s now 6.6% — despite scything interest rate increases from the Federal Reserve, they pay more attention to their rising credit card payments, mortgages, and car loans than to anything else.
Democrats try to gin up their base by saying the key issue this year is Republicans’ restriction of abortion rights — Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) did so in his debate against J.D. Vance for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio Tuesday night — but only 5% of likely voters agree that is their most important issue. That same New York Times poll shows independent women swinging by 32 points away from Democrats toward Republicans in the past month. So much for any issue pushing inflation and economic woe to the margins!
If Democrats were heading for an upset retention of the House next year, or if they really thought they were going to secure a majority in the Senate, which is divided 50-50 at the moment, Biden wouldn’t have found himself heading into blue-state Oregon last weekend to eat ice cream and try to sure up voter support for three-term incumbent Sen. Patty Murray (D).
Democratic pretensions of this year being about something other than their economic mismanagement and their boasts about how much the country likes what they have done over the past two years cannot conceal that the party of the Left has screwed up royally. Nov. 8 is long past the Democratic Party’s sell-by date. And voters aren’t buying it.
