Joe Biden Wants to Believe That the Midterms Will Not Be As Favorable to the Republicans As Expected.
The events of the past few weeks have once again made the president audible to Americans.
In mid-September, Joe Biden will host a White House summit “to counter the corrosive effects of hate-motivated violence on our democracy and security.” With two months to go before the Midterm elections, this is probably the American president's biggest regret: not having succeeded in bringing down the temperature of the political cauldron in the United States.
Congress was already bitterly divided, but a conservative Supreme Court has now taken power over whole areas of society - abortion, guns, the environment - and new areas of civil society, such as schools and businesses, have become political battlegrounds.
For months, Joe Biden has been on the receiving end of events, from the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan to runaway inflation. Despite a Democratic-dominated White House and Congress, his first nineteen months in office have often resembled a hostile cohabitation, where getting even a fraction of his campaign promises through has already been a legislative Gymkhana.
Joe Biden becomes audible again
In the last few weeks, however, the Democrats have opened a breach: with the passage of a climate and health care plan (the Inflation Reduction Act), a pause in inflation, and an electorate that is up in arms about abortion restrictions, the glass suddenly appears half full: the White House is once again making itself heard by reminding people of its efforts to rebuild infrastructure, relocate strategic industries or preserve rights.
The Democrats, who have done better than expected in a few recent by-elections, have begun to believe that they can do damage control in November 2022. Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia who resisted mega-spending and was the linchpin of the short Democratic majority for months, may have been the White House's political luckiest man.
By finally releasing a project this summer that is refocused on climate and health, and less costly in budgetary terms (it should even reduce the deficit), the White House has scored a political victory and silenced the Republicans. Their obstruction can even be pointed at: if the right doesn't want to lower the price of drugs or fight for the climate, it's because they are in the hands of the lobbies, the White House says. The attack changed sides for a moment.
Risky duels for the GOP
The Republican Party, at the same time, continues to radicalize. To capitalize on the popularity of Donald Trump, who is still denying the results of the presidential election, new candidates in search of votes (J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, etc.) have rallied around his inflammatory rhetoric, following in the footsteps of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Besides these new “populist intellectuals”, Trump has also supported “atypical” candidates in the Republican primaries (Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania or Herschel Walker in Georgia for the Senate; Dan Cox in Maryland or Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania as governors) who are now considered “at risk” for the upcoming duels against the Democratic candidates.
This may be enough to prevent the Senate from falling into the hands of the Republicans, even their leader, Mitch McConnell, warns. “The quality of the candidates has a lot to do with the outcome,” he said.
The website FiveThirtyEight gave the Republicans three out of four chances to win the House of Representatives but one out of three in the Senate. The Democrats have often seemed unable to respond effectively to Republican “bullying” and their caricatured but effective criticism of inflation or immigration.
This is a weakness that they are trying to correct, but which amounts to pitting Americans against each other, as the White House's student debt forgiveness plan has just shown.
As the Grand Old Party radicalizes, the White House is also trying to drive a wedge in distinguishing “MAGA Republicans” (Make America Great Again, Donald Trump's slogan) from “conservative Republicans.” “To those who love this country - Democrats, independents, traditional Republicans: we have to be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving America than the MAGA Republicans are to destroying America,” Joe Biden said in late August 2022 at a party meeting in Maryland.
For the 2024 presidential election, “classic” Republicans (Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Larry Hogan, Liz Cheney...) seem to want to emancipate themselves and play their card. Their chances of winning would be non-existent if Trump were to run again. But some people already recall 1992, when the Republican Ross Perot had arbitrated the presidential election between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, by running as an independent candidate.
After a low point of 37% satisfied at the end of July 2022, Joe Biden's popularity rating has been recovering for a month, according to RealClearPolitics. And the Democrats' image is less fragile at the local level, with voting intentions neck and neck with the Republicans. When asked to rank the country's challenges for NBC News, Americans also ranked “threats to democracy” as their top concern, ahead of the cost of living.
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This article makes Joe Biden out to be a victim of things like runaway inflation and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. These and most negative realities that Americans have been living with since January 2021 are a direct result of his policies.
The continual printing of Fiat currency to fund the Russia Ukraine War and huge spending bills he and his fellow Democrats have pushed have caused record high inflation and as the FED raises interest rates, many Americans will suffer through a Recession unlikeany have seen in their lifetimes.
Also, Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats bhave added fuel to the fire of the political division that exists. Through his continued speeches about MAGA Republicans being a threat to our Democracy and talking about an illegitimate Supreme Court, he has done all he can to stoke the temperature of the division that exists in the US.