What President Biden Could Learn from Ronald Reagan

They’re called election cycles for a reason. In politics, everything’s on repeat.

In 1982, a new president faced his first midterm elections after he was swept into office amid an economic slump, high inflation and deep dissatisfaction with the previous occupant of the White House.

Sound familiar?

Forty years later, President Biden is facing a completely different set of problems, including a persisting pandemic and a predecessor who refuses to accept that he was defeated. Yet Biden and Ronald Reagan have shared a similar burden: getting blamed for economic woes that began before either one was elected. Both men won the presidency by promising restoration, but both saw their approval ratings sink when they couldn’t immediately deliver.

“Blame in American politics runs through the president,” said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution and a political science professor at George Washington University. “He is the most prominent salient actor in American politics.”

Reagan began his presidency with a double-digit inflation rate. In the months leading up to the election, as inflation settled down, unemployment rose. Throughout 1982, Reagan’s approval rating hovered in the low 40s, where Biden has been stuck since late last summer. In those November midterms, Republicans lost 26 House seats and gained one Senate seat, by replacing one conservative independent with a Republican.

We spoke with several historians and Republicans directly involved with the 1982 campaign, and they all warned that as long as the country feels economic pressure during Biden’s first midterm, it’s nearly impossible to dodge the dictum that the party in power loses House seats. Republicans’ 1982 campaign message — “Stay the course”— might have stemmed their losses, but losses were inescapable.

The comparison breaks down in one key way for Democrats. Reagan had already been crowned “the Great Communicator” by the 1982 midterms. Biden’s failure to communicate a clear, compelling message to voters has been one of his biggest liabilities so far.

However, there’s still time for an upswing in the economy. And even if the economy doesn’t rebound by November, it’s possible for Biden to cut his losses and even win back seats in 2024.

Edwin Meese III, who was counselor to Reagan in 1982 before becoming attorney general, noted that Reagan’s “Stay the course” midterm was followed by his optimistic “Morning in America” re-election. He won a second term in a landslide.

“It’s a matter of faith,” said Meese, 90, an emeritus fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “President Ronald Reagan knew that there would be difficult times, and the difficult times were not yet over, but that they would be.”

‘Give the guy a chance’

In 1982, concerns about midterm losses and disagreements over economic policy led to divisions and finger-pointing within the Republican Party. Even so, the party urged voters to “give the guy a chance.”

Nancy Dwight, who was running the House Republicans’ campaign arm at the time, cautions against reading too much into the 1982 example, but sees Biden taking a page from Reagan’s playbook in urging patience as he attempts to get the economy back on track. “He wouldn’t dare use that line, but he’s staying the course,” Dwight told us.

Reagan was determined to see his economic plans through, even as the public lost confidence. Given the circumstances, Dwight recalled that she felt relieved that Republicans didn’t lose even more House seats. “I knew it could have been much worse,” she said.

Joe Gaylord, who worked with Dwight at the House campaign committee in 1982, said Reagan’s economic crisis was more deep-rooted than Biden’s — with interest rates, inflation and unemployment all blocking recovery.

But he said the basic contours of the problem that Biden faced were all too similar. Combine Reagan’s low approval rating with a country that believes it’s on the wrong track, and one thing happens, he said: “You get change.”

A “huge problem that Biden has right now is that none of the things he’s done is working, either,” Gaylord added.

When the unemployment rate surpassed 10 percent in September 1982, Gaylord said, “Republican candidates just dropped like flies,” as voters’ patience with the Reagan administration evaporated. He recalled hearing frustrated Republicans assert that the problem was simply a failure to communicate with voters — that if Republicans had been clearer about their accomplishments, voters would have supported them.

That’s a theory that many Democrats, including Biden himself, have repeated in addressing why the public hasn’t been more supportive of his administration.

But the message won’t get through if it doesn’t resonate, Gaylord said: “​​It’s a little tough to make a communication work when people don’t feel it.”

Still, in some congressional races, Gaylord credited the “Stay the course” message with keeping seats in 1982. Republicans’ House minority shrunk, but they managed to keep control of the Senate and even gain a seat.

The blame game

There are plenty of reasons a president struggles in the midterms.

Binder, the fellow at the Brookings Institution, ran through some of them. Voters like to distribute party power when they think it’s too concentrated. Supporters of the newly-elected president are more content and therefore less excited to turn out. Voters aren’t following the intricacies of policy.

Jill Lepore, the historian and journalist, suggested thinking about the situation not as political intrigue, but as family drama.

“You think about some bad situation in your extended family where your cousin and your aunt don’t speak to each other,” she said. But the conflict all began, she added, with a past inflammatory comment from your grandmother, who’s not engaged in the drama but lit the fire in the first place.

“You need the whole story. But that’s not how we think politically, right?”

Looking back, Meese said that he and Reagan, along with his top advisers, were confident that the policies Reagan enacted would allow Republicans to rebound in 1984. He didn’t see losing about 25 seats as all that bad, but rather “in keeping with historical norms.”

“I don’t think anybody likes the idea of losing seats,” Meese said. “But I think the president felt that to do anything other than continue the program he had started was the wrong thing to do.”

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in the moment

Criticizing the R.N.C., from the bench

A federal judge took a swipe at the Republican National Committee on Thursday, taking issue with the committee’s recent move to condemn two Republican lawmakers for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

The R.N.C. used the phrase in its resolution censuring Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who are the only Republican members of the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6 riot. R.N.C. officials have since clarified that the line was not intended to refer to those who broke the law on that day.

The resolution was nonetheless roundly condemned by Republican senators, notably Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, who said the riot was a “violent insurrection.”

Federal judges have now joined the chorus.

The assault on the Capitol was not “legitimate political discourse,” said Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, at a sentencing hearing for two Jan. 6 defendants.

One of the two defendants, Brian Stenz, expressed remorse for his actions on Jan. 6. “What happened at the Capitol building was not a protest,” he said.

Last week, while sentencing another Capitol rioter, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the same U.S. District Court gave an extended lecture on the continuing efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

“It is not ‘legitimate political discourse,’ and it is not justified to descend on the nation’s Capitol at the direction of a disappointed candidate and disrupt the electoral process,” Jackson said. “Canceling out the votes of other people with a show of force is the opposite of what America stands for.”

Both judges were appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama.

In a statement, Danielle Alvarez, a spokeswoman for the committee, said, “The R.N.C. has condemned the violence that took place on January 6th since the day it happened.”

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