Pundits and politicians, scholars and bloggers are all putting the mid-term election results under the microscope trying to assess the lessons learned from the voters’ collective decisions. Some conclusions seem reasonable and fact-based. Others confirm the continued allure of wishful thinking.
Pennsylvania produced a few of the more well-founded conclusions. A candidate who has held public office and is a native of the state will likely “trump” (I enjoy using that word in this context) a candidate who has never even run for public office, much less held one, and who did not have a home in the state until a month after he declared his candidacy. Also, a candidate whose message and persona reflects his sympathies for white working-class voters is more appealing to those voters than is a wealthy physician who made his money pitching skin care products and dietary supplements on television.
Elections in Pennsylvania also provided evidence that being anointed by former president Donald Trump was not sufficient for victory. This was confirmed in several other states, like Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire, to mention a few.
A more general observation is that a party with an agenda sympathetic to the needs of the public is more likely to win an election than a party without any visible positive agenda, just a stubborn defense of the status quo. GOP majority leader Mitch McConnell tried to manage the election in the latter manner. That apparently got him sideways with the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Florida Senator Rick Scott who proposed upending the status quo in a negative manner; i.e., sun setting Social Security and Medicare. In the election’s aftermath, Scott made a bizarre attempt to use the party’s poor showing in the mid-terms as a weapon to replace McConnell as GOP leader.
Comments attributed to New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu who Republicans tried to persuade to take on New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan reveal the damage McConnell’s approach to governance has caused the party. After being heavily solicited, Sununu responded: “You cannot ever convince me, if you took all 100 members of the US Senate, got rid of them tomorrow, and replaced them with 100 random adults in this room right now, that we would be worse off. No way.”
Sununu chose to run for re-election as governor of New Hampshire. He won handily.
Expectations that Joe Biden’s approval ratings would be a drag on Democratic candidates did not materialize; nor did the frequent stories about the congressional losses always suffered by presidents during their mid-terms. Even though the Democrats did finally lose control of the US House, they lost far fewer seats than those lost in other mid-terms since 2002.
The President’s domestic agenda proved more popular than the polls had indicated, but probably more impressive to the voters was Biden’s performance on the larger world stage. He has managed to reassert American leadership in the international arena in a very positive way and has avoided the recriminations that characterized Trump’s bull-in-the-china-shop approach.
But Democrats should tamp down the euphoria. The party’s losses in the US House reflect the continuing failure to address the flight of working class voters from the party, and leave the agenda of the Biden administration in limbo. Although Republicans did not come anywhere close to fulfilling their expectations, they will control the US House.
Biden will still be able to push his judicial and executive appointments through the US Senate, but he is not likely to find the new speaker of the house a bipartisan legislative partner. Kevin McCarthy, the probably speaker, does not appear to have either the vote margin or the political inclination for bipartisanship.
Apparently, the top priority for the new GOP house majority is investigating key administrative appointees and Biden’s son Hunter. Such probes are not likely to uncover any wrongdoing, but will divert resources and attention from legitimate needs and concerns.
And there is a real danger that Republicans will attempt to use the Ukrainian conflict for political advantage. McCarthy has already echoed the skepticism of the party’s extremist wing, saying there will not be “a blank check” for Ukraine. Also, Ohio Senator-elect J. D. Vance and his billionaire patron Peter Thiel both own sizeable stakes in the platform Rumble which has hosted voices critical of Biden’s arming of Ukraine.
Finally, it would be unwise to discount the potential influence of Donald Trump over the next two years. He may have suffered some setbacks in the recent elections, but a significant element in the Republican Party is still under his sway. As long as he is a factor in American politics, we will be a sharply divided country.
https://whyy.org/articles/dr-oz-reputation-promoting-questionable-products/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/us/politics/democrats-republican-senate-trump.html