Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
This article appears in the April 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
American presidents routinely encounter crises they didn’t anticipate. Barack Obama hoped to pull back from foreign-policy adventures and heal America’s racial divides; he ended up getting bogged down in the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression and entangled in new foreign-policy messes. LBJ was going to complete FDR’s New Deal and redeem Lincoln’s emancipation; he blew it all in Vietnam. Woodrow Wilson got elected on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” hoping instead to complete his progressive domestic agenda; he ended up winning the war, losing the peace, and ushering in a decade of Republican rule.
Yet it feels like Joe Biden is setting the record for the most simultaneous unexpected crises. He sought to return the country to a competent, normal chief executive who did not govern by fabrications and tweets, one who would repair democracy and support an activist government countervailing predatory capitalism. Instead, Biden got two more waves of COVID, an economic boom hobbled by supply-shock inflation, faithless members of his own party blocking much of his agenda, and the gravest wartime emergency since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. One thinks of a line attributed to Emerson: “Events are in the saddle and ride mankind.”
It’s easy to forget amid that run, but from spring 2020 to summer 2021 Biden was the luckiest politician in living memory. He went from a moribund presidential campaign in February to becoming the certain nominee in March, thanks to the South Carolina primary and Jim Clyburn. Given the immense stakes of defeating Trump, he benefited from rare party unity. Progressive also-rans Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders traded loyalty for influence, and ended up substantially shaping both Biden’s surprisingly progressive program and his personnel.
After Biden took office, he was able to unite Democrats on the far-reaching $1.9 trillion ARPA relief law, and catch a wave of emerging economic recovery and subsiding COVID cases. His approval ratings were far from stratospheric but more than serviceable, with a positive spread of 10 to 15 points up until last summer.
But Lady Luck deserted Biden. COVID resurged with the delta variant. A supply shock not of Biden’s making exploded on his watch, spiking inflation. He made unforced errors in the long-overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan, despite getting the policy directionally right. As Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked major elements of his program, Biden looked like a leader who couldn’t govern. By the new year, Biden’s approval ratings were negative by more than 20 points. All of this portended disaster for the November midterms and the survival of democracy itself.
THEN VLADIMIR PUTIN DECIDED to invade Ukraine, and we got to see Biden at his best. The president issued early warnings of Putin’s designs, using the unorthodox tactic of making public raw intelligence reports. This wrong-footed Putin—not enough to dissuade him from invading, but exposing his deceptions. Biden got credit for reviving and unifying the Western alliance, and organizing a program of damaging economic sanctions. All this knocked the Republicans off their usual game, isolated Putin apologists, and produced more bipartisan unity than anything seen in Biden’s presidency.
This was not the work of a foreign-policy establishment reverting to Cold War autopilot. These successes reflected Biden’s own foreign-policy leadership, in extensive conversations with allied leaders, congressional figures in both parties, and Ukraine’s heroic Volodymyr Zelensky. Biden’s leadership and Zelensky’s courage have drawn strength from each other.
It also drove a rapid resurgence in the polls. According to the Marist Poll done for NPR and PBS, public approval for Biden’s handling of the Ukraine war rose from 34 percent in late February to 52 percent on March 3. This spilled over into increased approval for Biden generally and for his performance on other issues, thanks in part to the waning of omicron. Some 55 percent approved his handling of COVID, up from 47 percent, and his overall approval rating bounced back to 47 percent, the best margin since early fall. Even on the economy, Biden’s approval recovered to 45 percent from a previous 36 percent. (More recent polls show about ten points negative overall.)
A Russian occupation of Ukraine could drag on inconclusively, with the disruptions to the global economy further spiking energy prices and inflation. Putin could stumble into the first ground war between Russia and NATO, bringing the world closer to nuclear conflagration.
Yet Biden’s unexpected wartime leadership to date has caused skeptical voters to give him a second look and maybe a second chance. The Russia-Ukraine war may also have spillovers that are good for progressives. It shows that global capitalism can and should be regulated in the national interest after all. The war has also tempered the Fed’s rush to raise interest rates.
Politically, the most consequential spillover is that Putin’s invasion and Biden’s response make Donald Trump even more radioactive. It reminds voters how Putin and Trump are twin thugs, joined at the hip.
THE USUAL PATTERN IS that the first midterm congressional election is a disaster for a new president’s party. However, 2022 will be anything but a normal off-year election. Neither Biden nor Trump will be on the ballot. But Trump, unsavory and unwelcome to Republicans outside hardcore MAGA territory, will be omnipresent.
America today has few swing voters, but dozens of swing districts where turnout will determine the winner. If Democratic voters turn out, Democrats win. With the failure of Congress to enact voting rights legislation, however, the worry is that suppression could offset mobilization. Low Democratic turnout in the elections of November 2021 could portend a midterm with Republicans on the march and Democrats dispirited.
But take a closer look. For starters, most contestable seats are not in the states where Republicans have enacted voter suppression laws. Some 40 House Republicans won election by ten points or less in 2020, and 25 of them are in states that have either made it easier to vote or added no voter suppression measures. Many of these incumbents refused to join Trumpers in voting against certification of Biden’s victory. As of March 1, ten already were facing primary challenges, and that number grows by the week.
So there are at least 25 possible Democratic pickups in the House. Of course, Democrats will also need to defend their own incumbents in closely held seats, of which there are also about 25.
The 2022 election was supposed to cost Democrats several House seats due to gerrymandering. But due to several factors, gerrymandering will either be a wash or will help Democrats gain seats. Some states are being redistricted by genuinely nonpartisan panels. The Supreme Court has refused to overturn a court-ordered redistricting plan in North Carolina that benefits Democrats. The rest are a mix of partisan redistricting by Republicans in some states and by Democrats in others.
The Senate also looks surprisingly promising. The most serious at-risk incumbent is Raphael Warnock of Georgia, because of the degree of that state’s voter suppression. In New Hampshire, however, Sen. Maggie Hassan got lucky when her strongest potential opponent, Gov. Chris Sununu, decided not to make the race. In Arizona and Nevada, both blue-trending states, vulnerable incumbents Mark Kelly and Catherine Cortez Masto could well hold their seats given decent mobilization.
Conversely, several Democratic pickups seem possible, notably the open seat in Pennsylvania, which Biden carried in 2020, as well as in Wisconsin, another Biden state, and where far-right incumbent Ron Johnson is a lightning rod for Democratic turnout. Elsewhere, Republicans face a divisive primary in Ohio, where Democrats have a strong candidate in Tim Ryan. In the open seat in North Carolina, a competitive state with a Democratic governor, Democratic chances depend on the degree of voter suppression. In Missouri, Republican incumbent Roy Blunt barely won the seat in 2016. Blunt is retiring, and the leading contender for the Republican nomination is Eric Greitens, who resigned as governor after accusations of abuse by a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair.
THIS POTENTIAL NARRATIVE-SHIFTING election all comes down to turnout. If Democratic 2022 midterm turnout is more like 2018, it’s possible for Democrats to hold the House. If it’s more like 2014 and 2016, then the predicted Republican takeover will ensue.
The alarm at Trump’s presidency in 2018 produced the largest increase in turnout over the previous midterm in all of American history, most of it reflecting mobilization by Democrats. Turnout increased by 13.6 percent relative to the 2014 midterms. Democratic votes increased by an astonishing 23.8 million. Republicans, by contrast, gained only 11.4 million.
As voters once again grasp the stakes, my wager is that 2022 will be more like 2018. A similar story holds when you compare 2020 with 2016. According to unpublished research by Catalyst, 2020 Biden voters included 18 million Democratic voters who skipped 2016, but did turn out in 2018 and 2020, plus 6.8 million Democrats who cast ballots for the first time.
There is also great potential for live organizing. Democratic mobilization in 2020 compared to 2018 was depressed by COVID, which led to reliance on phones and texts rather than face-to-face contact. In 2022, Democratic organizers will be back on the doors.
The ten-year history of voter mobilization in Georgia led by Stacey Abrams shows what can be done nationally. Plans are being laid for a nationwide Democracy Summer, evoking Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964 and Vietnam Summer 1969. Some of those promoting the idea, such as legendary organizer Heather Booth, former SDS national secretary Lee Webb, and the onetime leader of Massachusetts Fair Share Michael Ansara, are veterans of those earlier student-led struggles. The hope is that today’s students can be mobilized to spearhead voter organizing.
In recent years, Democracy Summer has been a project of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who brings college students to Washington to learn politics for six weeks, and then dispatches them to work in elections. At this writing, Raskin’s Democracy Summer has been adopted as a model by the DCCC and is being expanded to campaigns in at least 50 House districts.
There is also a pre-existing voter mobilization infrastructure of local groups such as Indivisible, which will go into high gear as the election season wears on. Activists hope these will converge with the new Democracy Summer, and citizens will again grasp the stakes as they did in 2018 and 2020. The Prospect will be providing extensive on-the-ground coverage of organizing efforts and which mobilizing strategies work.
Democratic candidates will have no shortage of talking points. They might begin by asking their Republican opponents how they think Donald Trump compares with Joe Biden as a leader facing down Vladimir Putin. They might ask the Republican candidate whether they would vote to make Donald Trump Speaker of the House; and whether they think the January 6 insurrectionists should be pardoned. There will be Democratic ad clips of Trump fulsomely praising Putin even as the war on Ukraine began, congratulating Putin as a genius for seizing some prime real estate.
Like Trump, Biden will not be on the 2022 ballot. But the president could do more to rally voters if he wants genuine enthusiasm. He could stop dithering with temporary student loan moratoria and cancel all student debt up to $50,000. He could take on the drug companies and use existing law to put drugs with exorbitant price tags into the public domain as generics.
We can count on Trump to continue saying dumb quotable things that will split his party and embarrass GOP candidates. All this will intensify the schisms among Republicans, already badly divided by primary battles against incumbents sponsored by Trumpers. If Democracy Summer can reignite popular awareness of the larger stakes as in 2018, the conventional predictions on the Biden presidency and the 2022 midterms can be upended.
