History has some bad news for Biden Democrats
By: Michael Barone (MSN)
And the beat goes on.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
As in the 1880s, we live in an era of polarized partisan parity, in which changes of opinion among independent voters can sweep election results. One year ago Joe Biden was elected president with 51 percent of the popular vote. Now, with his job approval below 43%, his party is in trouble.
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That's obvious from Republican Glenn Youngkin's 51-49 victory for governor in Virginia, which Joe Biden won by 10 points in 2020, and Democrat Phil Murphy' re-election by only 51-49 in New Jersey (which had gone Biden +16). It's obvious also that, barring a sudden shift in public opinion, Democrats will surely lose their narrow House majority and likely lose their current 50-50 parity in the Senate.
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Historic precedents abound. Presidents' parties almost always lose House seats in mid-term elections for structural reasons. Presidents' parties have gained House seats only three times in the last century (1934, 1998, 2002), but each time the incumbent president had unusually high job approval.
There are structural reasons for this. In an always diverse nation, presidents are only elected by amassing large coalitions with divergent views. Once in office, they take actions and set goals that inevitably displease some previous supporters.
In midterms, members of the president's party are stuck with the president's record. In times of strong partisan polarization, that can hurt even in governor's races. The opposition party, in contrast, has choice of terrain.
One example is the Biden Democrats' proposal to increase the deductibility of state and local taxes. This is wildly popular — politically essential, actually — for high-income Democratic voters in high-tax places in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California.
But the issue can work for Republicans elsewhere, because the lion's share of dollar savings goes to taxpayers earning $500,000 or more. That's a hard sell in places where almost nobody earns that much.
Another historic perspective: three decades ago, Americans emerged from a long era (1952-92) in which they mostly elected Republican presidents and Democratic Congresses. That often resulted in widely accepted bipartisan legislation, since neither party's politicians expected to have total control any time soon.
Since 1994, voters have become both increasingly partisan and more closely divided. So both parties' politicians have reason to shun bipartisan compromise and wait until they can win a political trifecta — control of the White House and both houses of Congress. When they get one, they push for, and sometimes pass, sweeping legislation, then promptly lose their majorities.
This happened in 1994, after Democrats failed to pass Hillarycare, and in 2010, after they passed Obamacare. It happened in 1966, after passage of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, when Republicans won the House popular vote outside the then heavily Democratic South. If Biden's approval remains low, it will probably happen again in 2022.
It happened to Republicans in 2018, after passage of the Trump tax package, and it might well have happened in 2002 if George W. Bush's job approval hadn't been so high after 9/11. In any case Republicans were swept out of control in the 2006 midterm.
Why do voters dismantle trifectas? Partly for the structural reasons already mentioned. And partly because apparently most voters don't want the significant economic and entitlement policies pushed by politicians and policy wonks of both parties.
That's the conclusion one gets from maverick analyst Michael Lind's two articles recommending how each party can win a lasting majority. His advice to both sides is essentially the same: embrace popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, reject left or right think tank solutions, avoid avoidable wars.
In other words, voters may be full of complaints, and they may respond favorably to wouldn't-it-be-great-if-we-had-this poll questions (free child care/free college/zero taxes), but most actually don't want severe disruption in a country where most people live in security and affluence unheard of in human history.
Throw in some more issues. Voters don't like rising crime rates. They don't like surges of illegal immigration. History shows they really don't like inflation. They overwhelmingly rejected Democrats amid post-war bouts of inflation in 1920 and 1946, and they rejected three consecutive presidents (Nixon, Ford, Carter) in the inflationary 1970s.
Farther back in history, they resoundingly rejected the inflationary "free silver" of William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Sympathetic historians note that Bryan swept the then-lightly-populated West, but he lost the previously marginal East and Great Lakes states, with 57% of the nation's voters, to William McKinley by a solid 58% to 40%. All those states' 216 electoral votes, split between the parties in the five previous elections, went Republican.
Will surges in violent crime, illegal immigration and inflation continue in 2022? If so, that's not good news for the Biden Democrats.
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Couldn't happen to a better bunch of folks.
Maybe another lock-down will do the trick. /S
It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of evil people….True social justice!