United States | The Democrats’ Obstacle Course

For Democrats, 2022 is like a children’s game of running with an egg in a spoon without dropping it: they will have to overcome several political obstacles, without dropping voters along the way, since the midterm elections are on the finish line.

Julie-Pier Nadeau
Researcher at the Observatory on the United States of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair in Strategic and Diplomatic Studies*

Political strategists will tell you that it is often easier to mobilize public opinion against something. The public is more likely to criticize what is wrong than to applaud good moves. The US midterm elections are a perfect illustration of this phenomenon.

Indeed, the midterms are often perceived as a referendum on the performance of the president and tend to mobilize his critics more than his sympathizers, to the detriment of the elected members of his party in Congress. As proof, since the end of the Second World War, only two midterm elections have not led to losses in Congress for the party of the president: those of 1998 and 2002. In both cases, the president ( respectively Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) enjoyed a high approval rating, which is far from being the case today. However, the situation is no longer limited to midterms. A poll from NBC News/WSJ demonstrated that the majority of people who intended to support a candidate, whether Joe Biden in 2020 or Donald Trump in 2016, did not vote so much for the latter, but rather against his opponent. In a society as divided as the United States, this fact is not very surprising, but nevertheless complicates the task of the democrats who try to convert their successes into support. The lack of change in public opinion following the adoption of the hard-negotiated infrastructure plan last fall demonstrates this well: the president’s approval rating has remained below 50% since the late last summer.

Still, if he wishes to avoid a defeat for his party in November, as Clinton and Bush did, Biden will have to find a way to boost his approval ratings.

While keeping election concerns in the background, Democratic lawmakers must therefore find a way to better demonstrate how their work will positively impact the lives of Americans. However, in an attempt to salvage elements of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, Democrats are focusing on what has more consensus within the caucus: the fight against climate change. An issue that is certainly a priority for many Americans, but which has little influence on their daily lives, unlike other measures very popular with voters such as the child tax credit, the improvement of public health programs and the introduction of parental leave.

By setting aside, for lack of support in the Senate, the measures that have the greatest potential to have a direct effect on the lives of Americans, the Democrats thus leave room for the Republicans to criticize the current inertia and try to draw take advantage of people’s economic concerns, including inflation.

In addition, the Senate’s legislative agenda was disrupted by the announcement of the resignation of Justice Stephen G. Breyer. Indeed, the process of confirming her successor risks occupying an important place in the work of the upper house over the coming weeks, without bringing any real political benefit to the Democratic senators.

The appointment of a judge of the same ideological allegiance as her predecessor does not arouse as much enthusiasm as an appointment that would change the balance of the Supreme Court. For their part, the troops of Mitch McConnell will not fail to remind their voters of the importance of electing a Republican majority in the Senate to block the next appointments, in the case, for example, of the death of the next Dean of the Supreme Court. , curator Clarence Thomas.

In foreign policy, the management of the Ukrainian crisis could quickly become a slippery slope.

While Americans are currently in favor of their country supporting Kiev in the face-off with Moscow, the Biden administration should keep in mind the recent example of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has demonstrated that a measure initially popular, but badly executed, can quickly weigh down public support.

The chances of stumbling before the finish line are therefore plentiful for the Democrats. However, a glimmer persists for the president’s party: electoral mobilization. Although several new laws have been passed in at least 19 states to restrict access to the right to vote, it has been shown that, rather than decreasing participation, these measures have in the past caused a backlash and further motivated voters to go to the polls. Democrats can also take inspiration from Georgia’s success in the 2020 election and hope that again this year, various initiatives to register and mobilize voters will be enough to thwart the thinly veiled strategy of Republican legislatures.

* The author is also a doctoral candidate in political science at UQAM.