Former president Barack Obama has emerged as one of the best surrogates for Democrats in the final week of the 2022 midterm elections as the party hopes to hold onto its fragile congressional majorities and even flip seats.
The party that controls the White House typically loses seats in the House and the Senate. Sometimes the party in power even loses one or both chambers of Congress. And Democrats know this year is likely no different.
Over the summer, Democrats hoped that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision that rolled back Roe v Wade would salvage their majorities. But the latest Wall Street Journal poll on Tuesday showed that Republicans lead in the generic ballot, which determines if voters prefer a generic Democratic or Republican candidate to represent them in Congress. Democrats are locked in tight in Senate races in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia, as well as in gubernatorial races.
Enter Mr Obama as the party’s most effective closer.
“President Obama is one of the best closers we have,” Malcolm Kenyatta, a Pennsylvania state legislator who ran against Mr Fetterman and has since endorsed him, told The Independent.
Mr Kenyatta spoke of the former president’s unique political skills.
“When he ran for the first time and throughout his presidency, I think he engaged a whole new wave of people who weren’t interested in politics because they got apathetic about politics,” he said.
Despite the fact that he’s been out of the White House for five years, the former president is relatively young by the standard of former presidents, at only 61, which makes him significantly younger than President Joe Biden.
“I think that he is in the unique position where he is the elder statesman of Democratic politics and yet he’s a young persuasive and vibrant speaker,” Pat Cunnane, a longtime Obama aide, told The Independent. “He knows how valuable his voice is.”
Over the last weekend, the former president has campaigned for Democrats in Michigan, including Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Garlin Gilchrist; in Wisconsin for Senate candidate Mandela Barnes and Governor Tony Evers; and in Georgia for Senator Raphael Warnock and gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams.
On Tuesday, he will travel to Las Vegas to shore up Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and Governor Steve Sisolak, who face tough re-election fights. Similarly, he will campaign for Senator Mark Kelly and Katie Hobbs in Arizona. And on Saturday, Mr Obama will campaign in Philadelphia with President Joe Biden and Pittsburgh, to boost gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro and Senate nominee John Fetterman.
Despite not running for office himself in 10 years, the former president has found ways to generate viral clips from his speeches.
During an event last weekend in Milwaukee for Democrats, Mr Obama excoriated incumbent Republican Senator Ron Johnson’s stance on Social Security in a video that was viewed 14.2m times as of Tuesday after he made the remarks.
“If he understands, given tax breaks for private planes more than he understands, making sure that seniors who've worked all their lives are able to retire with dignity and respect,” Mr Obama said to raucuous applause. “He's not the person who's thinking about you and knows you and sees you and he should not be your Senator from Wisconsin.”
The speech came just as Mr Barnes is down in the polls. Republicans have sought to paint the Democratic lieutenant governor as dangerous on crime, saying he’s “different” and “dangerous” in an ad depicting him with Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.
In his speech, Mr Obama highlighted how Mr Barnes’s father worked as an auto worker and his mother as a public school teacher, while also highlighting the candidate’s public service.
“If that's not a true-blooded in Wisconsin American, I don't know what is,” Mr Obama said.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said that Mr Obama’s campaign appearance on Saturday in Detroit was a “shot in the arm” and that he laid out the stakes in her race, as she faces Kristina Karamo, an acolyte of former president Donald Trump.
“He truly gets what’s at stake in my race and the future of our democracy,” she told The Independent. “So, I was grateful we had just not this great crowd and all the energy but a barn-burner of a speech that very effectively laid out the choice for citizens this year in our state. I have no doubt it will impact the election in the week ahead.”
Ms Benson also said that the former president understands the need for elections to run smoothly, since he helped recruit poll workers with NBA superstar LeBron James.
In addition, plenty of Democrats whom he inspired to get into politics are now on the campaign trail themselves. Mr Barnes has said that Mr Obama’s 2004 keynote adddress at the Democratic National Convention when Mr Obama was a little-known state senator inspired him to get into politics. Ms Benson said that like her, Mr Obama was an election law professor.
“I have framed on my wall a letter that he sent me when he was senator thanking me for an article I wrote on the Voting Rights Act. He has a long deep understanding of how election impacts the way people participate in their democracy.”
Similarly, Mr Kenyatta talked about how when he was a college student, he watched Mr Obama’s inauguration speech.
“I think nobody went to class that day,” he said, adding that he and his friends were in tears. “Because you saw somebody who was speaking to the America that I think we know is possible even in light of the nonsense and the noise that has been amplified by the former president [Donald Trump].”
Mr Obama’s campaign schedule is also a testament to how Democrats have to fight to defend states he took for granted and have opportunities in new ones. Mr Obama handily won Wisconsin and Nevada twice. But a Republican takeover at the state level in Wisconsin paved the way for Mr Trump’s victory in 2016 and growing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party among Latino voters, a group in which Mr Obama dominated both times he ran for president.
Some Republicans have taken exception to Mr Obama’s traversing the country. After Mr Obama mocked the idea of former University of Georgia running back and Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker running for Senate, Mr Walker criticised Mr Obama at a campaign event.
“Why don’t he get back to wherever he’s from and get back in his million-dollar mansion,” Mr Walker said. “Where has he been all this time while people are dying in the streets? Where has he been all this time while these gas prices going up? Where has he been all this time as people – going to our school systems – and our president calling all parents domestic terrorists?”
Similarly, throughout his presidency, Republicans decimated Democrats in down-ballot races, significantly weakening parties’ capacities to win states and expand the Democratic bench of candidates.
But Mr Cunnane told The Independent that the Trump presidency was a wake-up call for Mr Obama.
“After the Trump presidency, it was sort of a paradigm shift for everyone,” he said. “He just happens to have a much bigger stage. He happens to be really good at it.”
Mr Cunnane said that he plans to head to Philadelphia to see Mr Obama’s speech in Philadelphia.
“My hope is he gets everyone over the finish line,” he said.
And many Democrats have also adopted his rhetorical style. At a campaign office event in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the hometown of Mr Obama’s vice president, in September, Mr Shapiro, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, invoked an old line that Mr Obama frequently invoked at campaigns when people jeered.
“Don’t boo, vote,” he said.
