An Alternate History of the 2022 Midterms

In “Blame It on Cain,” his biblically infused 1978 song lamenting the fickleness of fate, Elvis Costello croons, “It’s nobody’s fault, but we need somebody to burn.”

It’s as apt a description of the grim mood among Democratic strategists as any I’ve seen this week, with back-seat driving, second-guessing and what-iffing about the midterms rocketing around the left over the past few days.

No single person is in charge of as complicated a thing as 435 House races, 30-odd Senate races and thousands more contests down the ballot. But the collective decision-making of party leaders is already coming under question, so Costello’s words were ringing in my ears this morning as I pored over Democrats’ disagreements.

Even former President Barack Obama has emerged to chide his fellow Democrats, in a recent podcast interview, for “being a buzzkill” sometimes and losing focus on the things voters “care most deeply about.”

The state of play

Let’s make one thing clear: This was always going to be a bad year for Democrats. The only question was how bad.

At the moment, Republicans are expressing growing confidence that they will capture a significant number of seats in the House. They need only five to take back the majority, but G.O.P. operatives are projecting that seats Democrats won by seven percentage points in 2020, such as Representative Abigail Spanberger’s in Virginia, could be winnable. Independent forecasters have shifted their predictions in recent days to what seems to be the consensus guesstimate: that Republicans will pick up as many as 25 seats.

Republicans might even seize the Senate, where just one net pickup could shift partisan control. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto looks wobbly in inflation-racked Nevada, and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s shaky debate performance last night in Pennsylvania has set off a fresh round of teeth-gnashing. If Republicans win those two contests, they can afford to lose in Arizona, Georgia and New Hampshire. And Mitch McConnell will be back in power.

In the big governors’ races, Democrats’ prospects look mixed. In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Josh Shapiro is comfortably ahead of Doug Mastriano, the far-right state senator. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer leads Tudor Dixon by about five percentage points.

But Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin looks vulnerable, while in Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is struggling to hold off an election-denying former television anchor, Kari Lake.

We’ll see what happens on Election Day — anger over abortion could prompt a surge of Democratic turnout, to raise just one scenario, or Trump voters could stay home with their champion off the ballot. Or maybe the polls are wrong. But it’s worth considering whether there were any alternate approaches that could have put Democrats in a better position heading into the final days.

The progressives’ complaint: too much abortion, not enough economy

As usual, the emerging fault line is between progressives who would prefer a sharper line of attack on economic issues, and mostly centrist operatives who are skeptical that those topics will play to Democrats’ advantage.

Representative Ro Khanna of California, one of the main sponsors of bipartisan legislation to increase semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., complained that he had seen few ads promoting Democrats’ economic policies.

“We should be shouting from the rooftops that we’re for putting money in working peoples’ pockets and bringing jobs home from overseas, and they’re for cutting taxes for the wealthy,” Khanna said. “I don’t get it. It’s like running a football team with all offense and no defense.”

On Oct. 10, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote in The Guardian that he was “alarmed” that unidentified Democratic consultants were advising candidates to “focus only on abortion” in the closing weeks of the campaign.

“In my view,” Sanders added, “while the abortion issue must remain on the front burner, it would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered.”

Then, on Friday, four senior Democratic strategists argued in The American Prospect, a liberal magazine, that the party could not wish away the inflation crisis — and needed to talk about it more in the closing weeks of the campaign.

“Democrats need to understand that we have a winning message on the economy and inflation,” they wrote. “But rising costs will beat us if we avoid the issue.”

Mike Lux, one of the co-authors, said in an interview that although some Democrats had run with smart, lunch-bucket messages on inflation — he named Tim Ryan in Ohio, and Fetterman and Representative Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania — he wished “there had been more focus on kitchen-table issues, from the White House on down.”

President Biden has begun doing exactly that, warning this week that Republicans would tank the economy and cut benefits like Social Security and Medicare if they retook Congress. But it’s fairly late to try to alter the trajectory of an election that has largely been fought on Republican terrain.

As for the consultants Sanders alluded to, they counter that it was rational to focus on abortion because the reversal of Roe v. Wade fired up the base of the Democratic Party and angered suburban women without college degrees, a group widely seen as the most important swing demographic in this election.

One challenge Democrats faced, Lux said, was that voters simply didn’t believe that Republicans planned to cut Social Security and Medicare. Voters tend to be skeptical of hypothetical arguments, because they hear them so often. Abortion rights advocates, for instance, had warned for years that Republicans wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Until the Supreme Court did so, it sounded to many voters like political posturing. And now, he said, “the wolf is at the door.”

In Senate races, Democrats have spent roughly 41 percent of their television advertising budgets on abortion, according to Celinda Lake, a pollster who was another co-author of the American Prospect article.

Some of that money could have been spent on shoring up voters’ knowledge of what Democrats have done to help address rising health care costs, some Democrats said.

Others blamed fickle Democratic megadonors for hoarding their money for 2024. Still others faulted progressive House lawmakers, or Senator Joe Manchin, for spending nearly a year and a half fighting over what ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act.

There are also fierce debates over tactical decisions made in Washington. Allies of Ryan, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Ohio, have questioned why party groups have heavily spent to help Cheri Beasley, the party’s candidate in North Carolina, while largely leaving Ryan to face J.D. Vance alone.

Then there’s crime, an emotionally charged issue that many Democrats have pooh-poohed as overblown, pointing to instances of race-baiting by Republicans. Overblown or not, a Gallup poll in April found that voters’ concerns about crime had reached their highest level since 2016, and it’s been a factor in many big races.

James Carville, the former adviser to Bill Clinton and a frequent scold of the left, noted on Twitter that he had urged Democrats last year to “take control of the anti-crime message.”

“Crime is going to be an issue up and down the ballot in 2022, and many local politicians are already feeling the heat,” Carville wrote then in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay. “If we don’t aggressively begin to own the crime issue and make Republicans respond to their own failures, we risk losing our slim majorities in Congress.”

“They did not,” Carville observed in a tweet this week. “Colossal mistake.”

‘It just seems to be his turn’

If there’s anyone Democrats consistently blame for their fate this year, it’s the man in charge of their party: Biden, whose national approval ratings have settled back into the low 40s after a brief summer honeymoon, and they are worse in swing states. It’s telling that he isn’t barnstorming the country right now on behalf of embattled Democratic candidates, and he has stuck to raising money or taking targeted trips to more hospitable places like Colorado.

But not only did most Democrats in Congress vote for the spending bills that Republicans are attacking as inflationary, they are also often at a loss when asked who might be a better banner-carrier for their party in 2024. Kamala Harris? Unimpressive. Gavin Newsom? Too slick or too Californian. J.B. Pritzker? Too rich.

Once again, “Blame It on Cain” sounds prophetic.

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Costello sings in the song’s last line. “But it just seems to be his turn.”

What to read

• John Fetterman’s debate performance is raising anxiety levels among Democrats in Pennsylvania, Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck report.

• A woman who did not identify herself said on Wednesday that Herschel Walker pressured her to have an abortion and paid for the procedure nearly three decades ago after a yearslong extramarital relationship.

• Republicans are targeting Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat whose Hudson Valley seat is becoming one of the most closely contested in the country.

• A judge in South Carolina ordered Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, to testify in an Atlanta-area investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged meddling in the 2020 election.

• Pugilistic press aides have moved from the shadows of campaigns to become stars on social media, Michael Bender writes, netting hundreds of thousands of followers.

Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — Blake

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