Think of the Tom Brady-led New England Patriots overcoming a 25-point deficit against the Atlanta Falcons to win the 2017 Super Bowl in overtime. Or the 1978 New York Yankees, clawing back from a 14 and 1/2 game midseason deficit against American League East Division arch-rival the Boston Red Sox, on their way to winning the World Series.
That’s the depth of the political hole Democrats have faced for most of the 2022 election cycle, ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections. President Joe Biden’s poor approval ratings, based in part on sky-high gas prices and the worst overall inflation in 40 years, already put Democrats at a deep disadvantage as they tried to hold on to razor-thin House and Senate majorities and grow their ranks of governors. Add historical trends over the past century that show the president’s party usually loses seats in the midterm elections. So, Democrats faced an electoral disaster up and down the ballot.
BIDEN TO FRAME MIDTERM ELECTIONS AS WAR FOR DEMOCRACY — AND AGAINST TRUMP
The conventional wisdom has changed somewhat in recent weeks as Biden’s approval ratings have inched up and prices have fallen to a degree. Democrats have some big data points in their favor arguing the elections may go much better than originally expected. Abortion rights advocates won a Kansas ballot measure and, in four House special elections, improved upon Democratic 2020 performance considerably, including winning a swing upstate New York House seat that was widely expected to go Republican. And on Wednesday, a victory for Alaska’s lone House seat by Democratic Rep.-elect Mary Peltola. She won the special election over former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee.
A bit over two months out, here’s the best-case midterm elections electoral scenario for Democrats, which would see them hold power in Congress and pick up seats elsewhere as Biden nears the halfway point of his presidential term. And conversely, here’s the Democrats’ worst-case scenario, which would involve a string of races previously thought to be close moving toward Republicans. Both are possible or, just as likely, a result somewhere in between, in which Democratic candidates thought to be goners hold on but Republicans still win at least a share of power.
Best case: Democrats make the midterm elections a choice between them and Republicans, not a referendum on Biden
Heading into the 2022 election cycle, it was easy to see why Republicans were so enthusiastic about their midterm chances. The tumultuous 2020 presidential race, in which Biden beat GOP White House incumbent Donald Trump, gave Democrats full power in Washington — but only narrowly so. Unexpected 2020 House Democratic losses left the party with only a five-vote edge in the 435-member chamber. Across the Capitol, in the Senate, the Democratic majority in the 50-50 body rested with Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote.
Throw in traditional midterm election results, with the party in power losing badly, and electoral disaster loomed for Democrats. Over the past century-plus, the president’s party has picked up seats in the midterm elections only three times. The November 2022 elections looked like a characteristic midterm cycle, a referendum on the party of the president in power.
But a series of events are making this election cycle more of a choice between the parties, a dynamic usually in play during presidential races, and that now favors Democrats. The last couple of months have brought waves of negative headlines for Republican electoral chances, noted Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of NDN, a Democratic think tank and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C.
“I think the election is trending the Democrats’ way. If the election were held today, I think the Senate would stay Democratic,” Rosenberg told the Washington Examiner, adding that Democrats have reasons to be optimistic about holding the House majority.
“There was never any evidence of a red wave, and there isn’t any now,” said Rosenberg, who is one of his party’s leading thinkers and strategists. “I don’t see any scenario where the rest of the election cycle gets better for Republicans. It’s more likely to be dominated by things Republicans don’t want to be talking about.”
The Democratic turnaround began on a somber note. The mass killings at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store and the slaughter of students and faculty at Uvalde Elementary in Texas were, tragically, just the latest in a yearslong string of deaths due to gun violence. But this time, the episodes struck more of a nerve with the public and have buoyed gun control activists and Democratic officeholders and candidates. And congressional Democrats, with some Republican help, enacted one of the most substantial firearm reforms to become law in more than 25 years. While gun control is an issue Democrats once ran away from, they now see it as enough of a booster that Biden on Tuesday talked it up at an event in Pennsylvania, a top swing state in November featuring competitive gubernatorial, Senate, and House races.
The next event that helped transform the campaign landscape was the earth-shattering Supreme Court decision on abortion. On June 24, justices issued their ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case concerning a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks. The court struck down Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which legalized abortion nationwide. In the new ruling, the court found that there is no constitutional right to an abortion. The ruling makes the legality of abortion a matter for individual states, meaning abortion will be legal or illegal under state rather than federal law.
And that’s proved an enormous political problem for Republicans, who now can’t speak about abortion in abstract terms of being “pro-life” but must confront often-difficult details of state abortion restrictions, including the case of a 10-year-old Ohio girl who was raped and later traveled to Indiana for an abortion.
Republican candidates were immediately put on the defensive over the abortion issue. Michigan GOP gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon drew blowback after saying a child victim of rape and incest should carry her baby to full term. So did Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn (R), who said after the Dobbs ruling that if a 12-year-old girl is a victim of incest, she should still be made to carry a resulting pregnancy to term.
Beyond policy issues, Republicans continue to grapple with the presence of Trump, who left office grudgingly on Jan. 20, 2021, after watching violent rioters at the Capitol trying to block the certification of Biden’s win.
Trump has been a divisive figure for Republicans since he declared for president in June 2015 and sometimes has helped his party brethren by supercharging support for GOP candidates. Just as often, though, Trump’s public presence cuts against Republicans. Republicans lost the House, Senate, and, of course, the presidency during Trump’s single White House term.
He seems to be hurting his party again after the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of the former president’s primary home, the Mar-a-Lago estate and club in Palm Beach, Florida. The feds sought privileged documents the former president wasn’t supposed to keep after leaving office, and Trump has lawyered up facing the prospect of legal action.
At the very least, the episode and aftermath are likely to remind voters what they didn’t like about Trump, Rosenberg said.
“This is ugly stuff. It’s hard to understand how a former president stealing secrets is going to help Republicans,” he said.
Congressional Republicans and GOP candidates around the country now are asked repeatedly about the Trump/FBI episode rather than their own policy plans should they win power in November. Even some conservatives are now treating Trump as a drag on the Republican ticket — just as he ponders declaring he’s running for president again in 2024.
“There is a reason Democrats are eager to keep Trump at the center of the conversation: half of independents say Trump is a major factor in their vote, and they’re breaking 4-1 for the Democrats. Republicans shouldn’t play that game. If they do, they’re cruising for a bruising,” conservative radio show host and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro tweeted Aug. 29.
With these political winds at their backs, Democrats have a chance of achieving their best-case scenario — holding the House majority, expanding their Senate ranks, and electing more governors and down-ballot candidates. That it’s even a possibility reflects how dramatically political ground has shifted over the past several months.
Worst case: None of it matters and Republicans will win big anyway
Of course, Democrats can talk up their November chances all day long, but the laws of political physics may just be too hard to overcome. After all, Republicans are the “out” party, meaning they’re not in power, and that’s enough to win broad voter support while a still-unpopular Biden flails in the White House.
Republicans note that even if gas prices have fallen and inflation has eased, costs are still exceptionally high for most people. Moreover, even Biden’s rise in the polls hasn’t been that dramatic — from a low of 36.8% in the RealClearPolitics average earlier in the summer to 42% in late August. And Biden’s disapproval during that time only went down, from 57.4% to 54.7%.
The “red wave” is very much real because the election cycle’s fundamentals haven’t really changed, Republicans say. After all, GOP strategists and operatives note, the party in the White House loses an average of 26 House seats and four Senate seats — a number that would easily hand both chambers back to the GOP.
In addition, 75% of the public believes the country is on the wrong track, compared to just 18% who believe the country is headed in the right direction, according to the RealClearPolitics average. That’s usually not good for the party in power, and voters are likely to turn their ire on Democrats controlling the executive and legislative branches of government.
“Americans cannot afford Biden’s recession and will see right through his desperate vote-buy attempt with the loan bailout,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Emma Vaughn told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “Skyrocketing prices on everything from gas to groceries, rising crime in Democrat-controlled cities, and increased taxes will drive Democrats, independents, and our base to the polls for Republicans in November.”
Some Democratic seats are already good as gone. In the House, where every seat counts for Democrats trying to hold their slim majority, Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District is set to tip to Republican. Democratic Rep. Ron Kind first won the western Wisconsin seat in 1996 but is retiring after the November elections. Republican Derrick Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL and Trump supporter who spent the afternoon of Jan. 6 on the Capitol grounds as the riots got underway, has a healthy lead over his Democratic rival, state Sen. Brad Pfaff. Van Orden led Pfaff by nearly 13 points, 50.3% to 37.5%, in a mid-August poll of Wisconsin’s 3rd District, which was slightly tweaked in redistricting.
Whether that open-seat House race stays the rule or an exception for Republicans remains to be seen. Democrats are undeniably climbing out of the electoral hole they found themselves in early in the summer.
Still, it’s an open question whether they can make up enough ground by Nov. 8 to hold on to power — just as, in years past, few would have predicted the Patriots’ Super Bowl comeback or the Yankees digging out of their midseason hole to become World Series champions.
In politics, as in sports, that’s why they play the game.
