Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
President-elect Joe Biden campaigns in Atlanta, January 4, 2021, for Democratic Senate candidates Raphael Warnock, center, and Jon Ossoff, left.
The likely victories in Georgia not only vindicate the strategy of deep, long-term organizing and increase the chances that the Biden administration may actually be able to deliver benefits to suffering citizens. They are also a hopeful harbinger for 2022.
Usually, midterm elections are a disaster for the party of an incoming president. In 1994, Clinton’s first midterm, House Democrats lost 54 seats. That was a modern record until Obama’s first midterm in 2010, when his party lost 63.
An exception to this pattern was 1998, when Democrats picked up five House seats. What happened? Basically, Republicans overreached and made fools of themselves when they sought to remove Clinton from office over the Lewinsky mess.
The 2022 midterm could be more like 1998 than 2010 for three big reasons. First, the kind of long-term organizing that produced the Georgia win will be a model for other states. The on-the-ground work that produced big midterm gains for Democrats in 2018, but was suspended due to the pandemic, will likely resume and redouble by this fall.
Second, Biden is likely to catch a wave as he begins administering the vaccine program far more competently than Trump, and as the pandemic subsides. The related economic recovery will also occur on Biden’s watch.
But the most important resemblance to 1998 is the likelihood that Republicans will make vivid fools of themselves again. We’ve had a rollicking preview of that this week, and it will only continue.
By the fall of 2020, the image of the two parties will be of the Biden administration trying to deliver practical help, and a grumpy and fractious Republican Party blocking everything in sight. That plus a ton of Georgia-style organizing could break the midterm jinx.
