With the 2022 midterm election season starting this week, I thought I’d share some random thoughts on the situation as I currently see it in the battle for control of congress. Full disclosure: I am a registered Democrat who votes independently.
For months we’ve been hearing about a “red wave” at the ballot box come this November with Republicans taking over both chambers of congress. The reasoning behind this being that the party who has the White House historically loses congressional seats in the midterm election, gas prices were at record highs, inflation was at its highest point in forty years and President Biden’s approval ratings were underwater. The question wasn’t whether or not the GOP would take back Congress, but whether or not it would be a bloodbath for the Democrats. Nobody sane is predicting that anymore.
Whereas polls had given Republicans a significant advantage on a generic ballot (would you vote for a Democrat or a Republican?) That advantage has evaporated to either a dead heat, or the Democrats holding a slight edge. FiveThirtyEight now gives the Democrats a 69% chance of keeping the Senate.
There are several reasons for the shift. While Biden remains underwater in the polls (most recent polling has him running at about 44%), a string of legislative victories that never would have passed under a Republican legislative branch have gotten a number of people, especially young progressives who expected much more after giving the Democrats the White House and Congress, to view the party differently. Action on inflation, climate change, prescription drug prices and student loan forgiveness has shown many disaffected Millennials that there is a difference between the two parties and that elections do indeed have consequences.
Inflation still has prices higher than they were in recent years but they’re falling. As are gas prices.
GOP infighting isn’t hurting the Dems either. The Republicans are forming a circular firing squad looking for who to blame for what should have been an easy Senate pickup. They only need to flip one seat. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is blaming the “quality of the candidates.” Donald Trump and the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee Rick Scott (R-Florida) are blaming McConnell and other Republicans who aren’t enthusiastically backing candidates carrying the elephant banner as “treasonous.”
There is legitimacy to McConnell’s claims of poor candidates. High profile cases in point being Herschel Walker, who has the intellectual aptitude of a four-year-old as he talks about China stealing America’s “good air” and dealing with the mass shooting epidemic by forming a government entity to “look at guys who look at women on the internet,” and TV shyster Dr. Oz running for Senate in a state that he may not even live in. These are Trump-endorsed candidates, by the way.
There’s Trump himself. The January 6 Committee has gotten reasonable Americans, who are willing to actually look beyond the propaganda and at the evidence itself (most of the testimony and evidence is coming from Republicans, by the way), to see the deliberately planned and coordinated attack against our democracy leading ever so closely to the Trump Oval Office. There is also, of course, the Mar-A-Lago scandal with hundreds of Top Secret, classified documents, including nuclear secrets, stolen from the White House by Trump himself. He can delay and get all the Special Masters he wants, but if the DOJ does its job, Houdini won’t be able to get him out of this one.
Money is an issue. Rick Scott raised $181.5 million before the end of July, but 95% of that money has now been spent, leaving the Republicans woefully underfunded as we head into the fall.
There is a growing awareness of MAGA Republican extremism, with its calls for violence over the Trump raid, riots in the street if he’s indicted, civil war and its closeness to hate groups. You need to think long and hard before you vote for the party endorsed by the Proud Boys and the KKK.
Last, but certainly not least, there’s the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds of the country opposes the elimination of reproductive rights, abortion bans and states forcing raped ten-year-olds to carry their assailant’s babies to term. The Republicans greatly underestimated the outrage this would cause across the country and the way that it would energize progressive voters. Even most Republicans disagree with Dobbs and believe that abortion on demand should be legal in most cases. In a landslide, Kansas, a ruby red state, voted down a constitutional change that would have banned abortion in the state. There was a surge of new voter registration largely responsible for this. 70% of those new voters were women.
While anything can happen, the Democrats should be feeling pretty good about their congressional chances right now.