Despite the terrible reality of the war in Ukraine, rising inflation and record gas prices, a faint ray of sunshine has fallen on Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. According to strategists for both parties, the Democrats now have a 50-50 chance of retaining control of the Senate in the midterm elections, crucial for the appointment of federal judges, but nowhere near enough electoral strength to give them a shot at keeping their House majority.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, agrees that “Biden is finally getting some good news after a long period of horrible events,” but those pluses stand against the more sustained setbacks the president has experienced.
Ayres argued in an email that Biden
drove his own job approval down by hanging onto an obviously hopeless BuildBackBetter, muddying his bipartisan success on the infrastructure bill. He ran as a center-left moderate but tried to govern as a progressive. That had two results: raising the hopes of liberals, when it was obvious he was never going to get Manchin or Sinema, before dashing those hopes, leaving liberals demoralized. On top of that, he left a bunch of people who voted for him thinking they were sold a bill of goods. Along with the fiasco of the Afghanistan withdrawal, he squandered majority job approval.
Ayres noted:
It’s hard to imagine Republicans not winning the House, given historical trends and Biden’s lousy job approval ratings. Control of the Senate depends on the kinds of candidates Republicans nominate. Nominate sane governing Republicans like Rob Portman, Richard Burr and Pat Toomey, and the Senate is theirs. Nominate far-right wing-nut cases and the Senate stays in the hands of the Democrats.
Still, Biden has had some significant success and Republicans face serious obstacles.
On the plus side for Democrats: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in February, employers added 678,000 new jobs and unemployment fell to 3.8 percent. Meanwhile, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection disclosed on March 3 that it has “has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
Politico reported on March 8:
President Joe Biden’s approval rating is on the rise — for now — in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Biden’s State of the Union address last week. Multiple surveys over the past week, including a new Politico/Morning Consult poll out Tuesday, show a modest-to-moderate uptick in voters’ views of Biden’s job performance, up from his low-water mark earlier this year.
And then there is the setback that never materialized: While many predicted the post-2020 census redrawing of congressional districts would be a disaster for Democrats, in practice the new congressional lines are a wash. “We now estimate Democrats are on track to net 4 to 5 more House seats than they otherwise would have won on current maps, up from two seats in our previous estimate,” David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report wrote on Feb. 24.
On the negative side for Republicans: Donald Trump’s admiration for and long courtship of Vladimir Putin has begun to backfire, causing conflict within Republican ranks; and these intraparty tensions have been compounded by Mike Pence’s growing willingness to challenge Trump, as well as by an internal strategy dispute between Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Senator Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. who now heads The Organizing Group, a political consulting firm, contended in an email that the Biden administration has done a poor job promoting its successes:
We’ve been canvassing white working-class voters in Southwestern PA and in the Lehigh Valley. They have no idea what the president and the Democrats in Congress have already done that directly impacts the issues they raise. When they hear about Biden sending $7 billion to PA for their roads, bridges and schools, they’re moved by it. This isn’t rocket science.
“It’s a volatile environment,” Rosenthal adds: “Covid, war in Ukraine, inflation — and a lot can happen between now and November. But I definitely like the hand the Democrats are playing better this week than last. For now, let’s take it one week at a time.”
Dean Baker, a co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal-leaning think tank, made a similar case in his emailed response to my inquiries:
On the economic front, President Biden and the Democrats really need to up their game in pushing their record and their agenda. We have had record job growth since Biden took office, and somehow the economy is supposed to be a liability for the Democrats? If the shoe were on the other foot, the Republicans would be plastering the job numbers across the sky. This is the best labor market in more than half a century. Workers can leave jobs they don’t like for better ones; that is a really great story.
In Baker’s view:
Biden and the Democrats really need to move forward on what they can get from his Build Back Better agenda. This means sitting down with Senator Manchin and figuring out what he will go for. It is kind of mind-boggling that they didn’t do this last spring.
The point, Baker argued, “is to get something that will have as much benefit as possible — climate tops the list — and push it through quickly.”
Baker wrote that he has “no idea if the Democrats can hold one or both chambers in November, but things are looking somewhat better,” especially in the Senate, where “the Republicans are having trouble getting strong candidates in many potential swing states like New Hampshire, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia and possibly even Ohio. This raises the possibility of the Democrats picking up seats.”
Control of the House, where Democrats hold a slim 222-211 majority, will be another matter after the coming election.
Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, made the case in an email that
It would be a major historical anomaly if Democrats retain control of the House in 2022. One of the most predictable features of American politics is the loss of seats in Congress for the president’s party at the midterm. Even presidents with majority public approval still almost always see losses for their party in Congress. With Democrats’ margin so narrow, the party just cannot spare any losses.
Biden’s favorability rating, currently averaging 41.6 percent according to Real Clear Politics, would have to rise “above 60 percent — like George W. Bush in 2002 or Bill Clinton in 1998 — before it would become reasonable to expect Democrats to avert a loss of House control,” Lee observed. “Since the advent of public opinion polling, all presidents with approval ratings below 60 percent have seen losses of congressional seats at the midterm, in every case more than the 5 seats that Democrats can spare in 2022.”
Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, provided historical data to The Times based on Gallup polling and House election outcomes in nonpresidential contests from 1962 to 2018. When the president’s approval rating was 60 percent or higher, the president’s party gained one seat; when the rating was in the 49 percent to 59 percent range, the president’s party lost an average of 12 seats; when the favorability rating fell below 49 percent, the average loss was 39 House seats. Biden, with eight months until the midterms, is well below that mark.
The picture, according to Lee,
is not entirely bleak. The employment recovery is strong; the pandemic seems to be abating. The battle for the Senate is more evenly matched, and Republicans have come up short in some high-profile candidate recruitment efforts. But Democrats have no margin for error. Any losses given a 50-50 balance will tip Senate control to Republicans. In a midterm year, one would have to rate that outcome as the more likely outcome.
Lee suggested that “the more plausible question for Biden is how bad things are likely to get for Democrats.”
She pointed out:
Thirty House Democrats have already retired rather than run for re-election. Inflation is expected to be running well above Federal Reserve targets through the rest of 2022. Even though Biden has been able to rally the democratic world in opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, few experts expect a favorable outcome of the conflict on any near-term horizon. The pandemic has defied predictions to date, and public patience is wearing thinner.
Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report, argued in an email that Biden is in a deep hole very difficult to climb out of:
Between the Mexican border, not anticipating a rush across the border when Trump left town, being caught flat-footed, Kabul made the fall of Saigon look fairly dignified, ignoring/dismissing inflation. The worst sin for most voters, inflation, hurts 100 percent of people, a totally unrealistic legislative agenda, party line vote on coronavirus package, 7.5 months to get half of what they wanted on infrastructure, he has pretty much soiled his nest. Republican voters are hyper-motivated, Democratic voters lethargic, independents alienated, doesn’t sound terribly promising to me.
Alex Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, is pessimistic about Democratic prospects, but less so than Cook.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Theodoridis wrote by email, “is an awkward one for GOP elites and voters. They have spent the last few years downplaying the nefariousness of Putin’s regime and portraying Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt hotbed of profiteering for the Biden family.”
This message, he continued, has
trickled down to the Republican rank-and-file. UMass Poll data from 2020 and 2021 show that Republicans, on average, rate Democrats, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and even people who vote for Democrats, as greater threats to America than Vladimir Putin and Russia. In the weeks before the invasion, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, among others, peddled takes flattering to Putin. This stance has grown uncomfortable as Russia and Putin have clearly played the role of unprovoked aggressor and Ukrainians and Zelensky emerge as both sympathetic and heroic.
But, in Theodoridis’s view, the “positive signs for Biden and Democrats over the last couple weeks” do not “yet rise to the level of changing the expectation that 2022 will likely follow the historical pattern of midterm loss for the president’s party. And, Democrats have precious little margin with which to sustain any loss of seats.”
There are still major uncertainties to be resolved before Election Day, Nov. 8. These include the possibility that Trump will be embroiled in criminal charges and the chance that Trump himself will become an albatross around the neck of the Republican Party.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a Mississippi case that could unwind Roe and bar access to abortion for millions of women with the political response quite likely to cost the Republican Party a significant number of votes. Trump’s legal status, in turn, will be determined by prosecutors in Georgia, New York and possibly the United States Justice Department.
Finally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a wild card, giving rise, among other things, to mounting speculation about Trump’s judgment and his fitness for office.
On Feb. 22, the day after Putin said he would recognize the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk, two regions in eastern Ukraine, Trump remarked, “This is genius”— a comment in line with Trump’s history of fulsomely praising Putin.
On March 2, Trump tried to cut his losses and abruptly told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News that the invasion amounted to a “holocaust” and Russia must “stop killing these people.” He condemned the Russian military: “They’re blowing up indiscriminately, they’re just shooting massive missiles and rockets into these buildings and everybody is dying.”
On March 5, speaking at a meeting of top Republican donors in New Orleans, Trump wandered farther afield, suggesting, however insincerely, that the United States should paste Chinese flags on F-22s and “bomb the [expletive] out of Russia.”
On Feb. 27, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas was clearly discomfited by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” when Stephanopoulos, speaking of Trump, noted:
Last night, he finally condemned the invasion, but he also repeated his praise of Putin, calling him smart.
Earlier in the week, he called him pretty smart. He called him savvy. He says NATO and the U.S. are dumb.
Are you prepared to condemn that kind of rhetoric from the leader of your party?
Pressed repeatedly, Cotton ducked repeatedly:
George, if you want to know what Donald Trump thinks about Vladimir Putin or any other topic, I’d encourage you to invite him on your show. I don’t speak on behalf of other politicians. They can speak for themselves.
Mike Pence, on the other hand, has determined that his best strategy as he continues to explore a presidential bid is to defy Trump.
“Ask yourself, where would our friends in Eastern Europe be today if they were not in NATO?” Pence asked the Republican National Committee donors on March 4. “Where would Russian tanks be today if NATO had not expanded the borders of freedom? There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin.”
The biggest unknown on the political horizon is the repercussions of the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies on Russia, which are certain to raise energy and food costs, exacerbating the administration’s continuing difficulties with rising prices.
“War and sanctions means higher inflation,” The Economist warned on March 5. “Things could get much worse should sanctions expand in scope to cover energy purchases or if Russia retaliates against them by reducing its exports.” On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced that it was banning Russian oil imports.
“JPMorgan Chase,” The Economist went on,
projects that a sustained shut-off of the Russian oil supply might cause prices to rise to $150 per barrel, a level sufficient to knock 1.6 percent off global G.D.P. while raising consumer prices by another 2 percent. The stagflationary shock would carry echoes of the Yom Kippur war of 1973, which sparked the first of the two energy crises of that decade.
A political minefield lies ahead and negotiating this terrain will require more tactical and strategic skill than the Biden administration has demonstrated in its 14 months in office.
This is especially relevant in the context of another explosive unknown, the possibility of the largest land war in Europe since 1945 metastasizing into a global conflict.
In an essay he posted on Monday, “The Nuclear Threat Is Back,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the recipient of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize and the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, argues that “beyond the bloodshed and needless destruction, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also increased the risk of radiation leaks and even nuclear war” — events, it is almost needless to say, that would create mind-boggling suffering, throw current electoral calculations into disarray and raise the stakes of every political decision we make.
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