How bad will the midterms be for the Democrats?

Towards the end of the summer, almost in a spirit of contrarianism, well-informed Americans started talking about President Joe Biden and the Democrats winning again. It had been a bad year, these pundits conceded, but Biden was suddenly on a ‘hot streak’ and, as the November midterms approached, the Democratic party finally had some political momentum.

The President had passed the Inflation Reduction Act, they said, which addressed the most pressing issue facing voters. He’d also launched a bold initiative to forgive student debt for low- to middle-income earners. The Republicans, meanwhile, had frightened moderates with their pro-life extremism following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs Wade. And Donald Trump had reared his off-putting head by reminding the world that he almost certainly will be running for the White House in 2024. The long-anticipated ‘red wave’ of 2022 against Biden would now be countered by a blue wave of energised Democrats.

That wasn’t all wishful thinking. Biden’s approval polls have, on average, recovered from a low of 37 per cent to around 43 per cent today, which is about the same level of support that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton enjoyed at similar stages in their presidencies. And after Roe, Democrats did indeed benefit from a surge in fund-raising and activist enthusiasm.

Yet Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker, probably went a bit far when two weeks ago she went on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and promised: ‘We will hold the House.’ Unless the polls are wildly off, the Republicans will take back the House of Representatives. The debate is whether or not the midterms on 8 November will go down as a humiliating ‘shellacking’ of the incumbent party.

Senior Democrats tend to forget that most Americans don’t hate Trump or love abortion as much as they do. Voters care more about the cost-of-living and crime. Under Biden, inner-city violence has rocketed. So have food and gas (petrol) prices. The Inflation Reduction Act may turn out to be one of the worst-named pieces of legislation in recent history. It did little or nothing to reduce prices and in fact introduced yet another vast bout of inflationary government spending in the short-term, while promising higher tax revenues (the hard part) down the line. Bidenomics is no saner than Trussonomics, when you think about it, although the American economy is of course much more powerful than Britain’s. Biden seems to have taken a gamble that inflation will come down to a non-frightening level in time for the midterms. That hasn’t paid off.

Biden and his administration have been tone-deaf on the issue of surging prices. ‘The economy is strong as hell,’ said the President last weekend, as he sank his dentures into yet another expensive ice cream in Portland, Oregon. The White House media team clearly believes that the American people like nothing more than to watch Joe, the child-at-heart grandpop, treating himself to scoops of chocolate--chip deliciousness. The problems come when he starts talking.

The Democrats’ more realistic hopes lie in keeping the Senate. Some polls suggest they may just do that – though the seven most closely contested states (Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) could easily break either way in the coming days.

The midterms may end up being remembered less for the results, more for the sheer craziness of the Senate races. In trying to move away from unloved established politics, both parties have nominated some bonkers candidates. The Democrats had a good chance of winning back Wisconsin, for instance, facing as they do the controversial and very Trumpist incumbent senator Ron Johnson. Yet instead of appealing to moderates and blue-collar independents, they picked Mandela Barnes, a highly woke man who describes the founding of America as ‘awful’ and has been a vocal supporter of Defund the Police. He will probably lose.

In Pennsylvania, the Democrats chose John Fetterman, who wears hoodies and has tattoos and is therefore the New York Times’s idea of a working man – never mind that he holds a Master’s from Harvard and a set of ultra-progressive opinions which make him sound like a sociology professor.

In May, Fetterman had a stroke and he has not fully recovered. He still has auditory processing issues. Earlier this month, in a TV interview, he used a screen to read and answer questions. Yet anybody who asks if he is up to the job is quickly attacked as an ‘ableist’ hater of the handicapped. Americans love a fighter, and the polls suggest that Fetterman may even have won over voters following all the unpleasant scrutiny over his health. It helps that his opponent is a preposterous celebrity TV doctor called Mehmet Oz, who only just clinched his party’s nomination because he had Trump’s support.

Republican politics in the age of Trump is full of wacky candidates who are picked for their televisual appeal. One big Trumpy story of the midterms has been Herschel Walker, a legendary American football running back, who is standing to be senator for his home state of Georgia. Walker is a fervent pro-life Christian who has faced charges of hypocrisy after one of his ex-girlfriends alleged that he paid her $700 to abort their child. It didn’t help Herschel that his son, an online influencer, took to social media to demand that his father stopped lying. Still, Walker said he loved his boy, denied the woman’s claims and is within a polling-error margin of victory against his opponent.

An equally colourful character on the Trumpist right is Kari Lake, the former TV presenter and natural attention attracter who is running to be governor of Arizona. Sometimes called ‘Donald Trump in heels’, Lake is now being talked about as a potential vice-presidential nominee for 2024. One of her recent highlights was a speech in which she said that America’s two leading Republican men, Ron De Santis and Trump, had ‘BDE’, which stands for ‘Big Dick Energy’. She’s narrowly ahead in the most recent statewide polls. One to watch, as they say.