Matt Slocum/AP Photo
President Biden speaks outside Independence Hall, September 1, 2022, in Philadelphia.
Building on the surprising success of the Inflation Reduction Act, the run of good news continues for Biden and the Democrats. Trump’s explanations for his document heist keep crumbling, and more Republican legislative candidates are awkwardly trying to distance themselves from him. The backlash against restrictions on reproductive health keeps intensifying.
In the upset special-election win for Alaska’s House seat, Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin to flip the seat and become the first indigenous Alaskan to represent her state in Congress. According to FiveThirtyEight, “Alaska is 15 percentage points redder than the nation as a whole. That means going by the results in the final round, Peltola’s 3-point victory was an 18-point overperformance for Democrats.”
In the four special elections since June before Alaska there was an average swing of more than five points to the Democrats relative to 2020. Alaska increases that average to seven or eight points. Translated nationally in November, that means a lot of House seats saved.
My friend Mike Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, likes to say that there are few swing voters but lots of swing districts. How can that be? The key variable is turnout. If the Democratic turnout in November is more like that of 2018, when Democrats gained a net 41 seats, Democrats could actually beat the midterm jinx—and hold the House.
What’s increasingly clear is that the MAGA Republicans are losing public support and can take power only by defying the will of the citizenry. Biden’s speech last night displayed a confident president, who deftly connected unpopular Republican assaults on rights with their assault on democracy itself.
Republicans, he said, “are determined to take this country backwards—backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love. They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”
Biden got more good news with today’s release of the August jobs report. The economy added 315,000 jobs in August, down from 526,000 in July. The unemployment rate rose slightly, to 3.7 percent. So the rate of job creation is slowing, even without additional Fed efforts to engineer a recession. At the same time, the rate of labor force participation increased by 0.3 percent, meaning that more people are looking for work.
Nothing succeeds like success. The media lives by pack instincts and clichés, and the new morning line is that maybe Biden and the Democrats are not dead after all.
Last spring, I went out on a limb in my book Going Big, predicting that Democrats could hold Congress in 2022 and that we might even save democracy. We are not out of the woods, but things are looking a lot more hopeful.
