Joe Biden is fighting a rearguard action to stave off defeat in Tuesday’s midterm elections as Republicans look poised to make sweeping gains in the US Congress, setting up two years of political trench warfare.
The president, along with former president Barack Obama, has been crisscrossing America in a last-ditch bid to persuade voters that a Democratic victory is critical not only to Biden’s legislative agenda but the preservation of American democracy.
But momentum appears to be with Republicans capitalising on frustration over inflation and fears of crime and illegal immigration. Election forecasters and polls say it is highly likely that the party of ex-president Donald Trump will win a majority in the House of Representatives and also have a shot of taking control of the Senate.
“Republicans are peaking at the right time,” said Brendan Buck, a former aide to Republican House speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner. “Democrats did a good job defying political gravity for a long time but it’s finally catching up to them. It feels like a healthy Republican majority in the House and, if I were a betting man, I would guess that Republicans pick up the one Senate seat that they need.”
Midterms are held every four years but in 2022 they are far from routine and have seen a huge increase in early voting turnout. Tuesday’s election represents the first nationwide test of democracy since Trump’s followers staged a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 last year.
At stake are all 435 seats in the House, 35 seats in the 100-member Senate, 36 state governorships, three US territory governorships and numerous city mayorships and local offices. Some 129 ballot measures in 36 states include laws on abortion in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont.
A surprise Democratic victory in the House and Senate would give Biden a mandate to pursue a sweeping legislative agenda on issues such as abortion rights, police reform and voting rights during his two remaining years in the Oval Office.
But Republican control of either chamber would be enough to derail such ambitions and raise questions over the US’s open-ended support for Ukraine’s war against Russia. Biden might face congressional investigations into everything from the withdrawal from Afghanistan to his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings.
Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “At the end of the day it doesn’t matter: one chamber, two chambers, if Republicans have control, the next 18 to 24 months in this country are going to be a new political hellscape unlike anything we’ve seen ever.”
As a long campaign enters the home straight, both major parties are pouring millions of dollars into TV adverts, blitzing social media, knocking on thousands of doors and staging rallies with their biggest stars. Biden’s final swing implies a defensive posture in states that Democrats already hold – California, Illinois and New Mexico – along with battleground Pennsylvania.
Midterms often serve as a referendum on the president of the day. Biden’s public approval rating has remained below 50% for more than a year, coming in at 40% in a recent Reuters/ Ipsos poll. That same survey showed that 69% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track and just 18% said it was on the right track.
History is also against Democrats. The party in power typically loses House seats halfway through a president’s four-year term. In 2006, George W Bush said his Republicans took a “thumping” in the midterms. In 2010, Obama called his party’s loss of 63 House seats a “shellacking”. In 2018, two years into Trump’s presidency, the Republican party surrendered 41 House seats. In all three cases, control of the House flipped.
This year Republicans need to gain only five seats to assume the majority. As if anticipating a Republican takeover, 31 House Democrats announced they were retiring or seeking other office, the most for the party since 1992.
Republicans’ prospects have been further enhanced through gerrymandering, the practice by which one party manipulates congressional district lines to entrench its own power during the once-a-decade redistricting process.
Meanwhile Republicans need to gain one seat to take control of the Senate, currently divided 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. Candidates such as TV doctor Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and former American football star Herschel Walker in Georgia have proved more formidable than expected. Campaigns for Democratic-held seats in Arizona and Nevada are also closely contested.
Polls have been wrong before, however, and there could yet be surprises. Among the uncertainties this time is the fallout from the supreme court’s decision in June overturning the constitutional abortion protections of Roe v Wade, which resulted in a surge of protest votes in a Kansas referendum and sparked a rise in voter registrations among women nationwide.
Democrats have spent nearly $320m on TV adverts focused on abortion rights, the New York Times reported, which is 10 times as much as they have spent on commercials about inflation, which has driven up the cost of food and petrol. But polls show that the economy remains a higher concern for voters, suggesting that anger over the abortion decision will not be enough to save Democrats.
Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton White House, told a press briefing at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington: “It has been a race between inflation and abortion for some weeks now. At the end of the summer, we thought abortion was going to really move votes in this race.
“Now, the conventional wisdom seems to have shifted away from that and towards inflation and questions about the economy. The fact of the matter is, however, it is a completely tight race. In state after state after state, the polls are within the margin of error and we are going to have to look at turnout because turnout is going to determine this race.”
Turnout of women is key, Kamarck added, but if Republicans do prevail, the postmortems will begin. “The Democrats will have a lot of soul searching to do about their position, how they went into this race. Did they overestimate the power of abortion? Did they underestimate the economic message?”
Some commentators believe that the answer is yes. Buck, the former Republican aide who is now a partner at strategic communications firm Seven Letter, said: “It should not have been a surprise to anyone that this election is about economic issues – inflation, gas prices – and they largely ceded the playing field to Republicans on this.”
Biden has pinballed between messages on abortion to democracy to Republican plans to cut social security and healthcare programs, Buck noted. “It’s just basic political communications 101 that you need to stick to some messages and hammer them over and over again and they’ve been all over the map and so it’s not surprising that whatever they’re trying to get across to voters isn’t breaking through.”
There is frustration on the left that Democrats did not better communicate achievements such as the child tax credit, which during the coronavirus pandemic provided relief to working families on a historic scale.
Democrats have also argued that a climate and healthcare package passed by Congress in August will help reduce inflation by making prescription drugs more affordable. The White House also moved to forgive some student-loan debt, potentially boosting turnout among younger voters.
But 8.5% inflation and anxiety about a possible recession have been central to Republican arguments in the election’s final weeks. They have also heavily invested in at times blatantly racist ads stoking voters’ fears about a rise in violent crime, tying Democrats to so-called “defund the police” efforts.
Critics say this is hypocritical from a party that still seeks to play down the violent coup attempt at the US Capitol on January 6. In a primetime address from nearby Union Station last week, Biden warned that democracy itself is on the ballot and issued a dark warning about the threat of voter intimidation and political violence.
Highlighting estimates of more than 300 election deniers running for every level of office in America, and their unwillingness to accept the results of elections that they are running in, Biden said: “That is a path to chaos in America. It’s unprecedented, it’s unlawful, and it’s un-American. As I’ve said before, you can’t love your country only when you win.”
Indeed, just as in 2020, there are fears that a disputed election assailed by disinformation and conspiracy theories could tear America apart. The recent hammer attack on the House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, at their San Francisco home may foreshadow worse to come.
John Hudak, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said: “It’s only a matter of time until there is a high-level political assassination in the United States given the tinder box that we have right now and that’s a really unfortunate situation. We live in a country now that is not used to political assassinations and that is a luxury that is not afforded to citizens of other countries. But there is a real changing dynamic and undercurrent there.”
Many election deniers will get into office, Hudak predicted. “What happens when they begin coordinating with each other? That coordinated assault by elected officials on American democracy to me is scarier than simply their arrival into office.
“Their ability to communicate and coordinate through official platforms, whether it’s associations of secretaries of state et cetera, or through quieter platforms, individual communication, presents extreme risks to what the vote count will look like and how elections are administered in the future.”
But there is little sign that fears over democracy are cutting through with Republican voters. The midterms campaign has often felt like a split screen with Democrats and Republicans are largely talking past each other.
John Zogby, an author and pollster, told a state department Foreign Press Centers briefing: “In every election in the past, there is a common set of issues that everybody agrees on, and one party says, this is how we will attack these issues, and the other party says, no, this is how we will attack these issues. The difference today: two different parties, two different sets of issues, two different realities, two different sets of facts to support those realities. It is like two planets revolving around the sun and on separate orbits.”
Whatever the outcome, speculation over the 2024 presidential race is likely to begin even before the last vote is cast in 2022. If Democrats suffer heavy losses, Biden might face calls, especially from the left, to announce that he is not running again. He turns 80 on 20 November and is already the oldest president in American history.
Trump, himself 76, appears likely to announce his candidacy sooner rather than later, even if his anointed candidates have a bad night. At a rally on Thursday night supporting Republican candidates in Iowa, he declared: “Get ready that’s all I’m telling you – very soon. Get ready.”
