Democrats see new signs of hope ahead of midterms

Democrats are seeing new glimmers of hope for the 2022 midterm elections amid a series of high-profile legislative and political victories that they say could reverse the longtime expectation of a so-called red wave in November.

Senate Democrats struck a deal on a sweeping tax and climate package that had long been a point of bitter contention within their own ranks. Recent polling shows Democrats making gains on the generic ballot, a key measure of voter preference in the midterms. And voters in deep-red Kansas broadly rejected a ballot question stripping abortion rights from the state constitution, emboldening Democrats to further elevate the issue. 

“I think there’s a clear path to holding the majority,” said Tom Perriello, a former Democratic congressman from Virginia who was ousted in 2010 as Republicans made sweeping electoral gains that handed them back control of the House.

“Make the contrast clear,” he advised. “Americans cannot afford the extreme — even authoritarian — Republican Party of today and there’s a choice, there’s an alternative and that’s Democrats who are welcoming bipartisanship and delivering steady, stable progress.” 

“Forget ‘throw the bums out,’ ” he added. “We don’t want to bring the bums back in.”

Even for President Biden, whose approval rating has been deep underwater for months, the past week has been rife with political wins. On Monday, he announced that a CIA drone strike had killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, marking a counterterrorism win for the president after a chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan last year. 

Biden was handed more good news to tout on Friday when the Labor Department announced that U.S. employers added 528,000 jobs in July, offering evidence that the country has not entered a recession despite other worrisome economic indicators.

But it was perhaps the failure of the ballot question in Kansas — the first such measure to go before voters since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June — that offered the biggest dose of optimism for Democrats, who have sought to turn the issue of reproductive rights into a campaign bulwark.  

“It was a bipartisan surge of single-issue voters,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist. “The Republicans have tethered themselves now to something so unpopular and so radicalized. I think this could set up a huge backlash, or at least scramble everything that everyone thought was going to happen in November.”

All that adds up to what Democrats see as at least a somewhat brighter outlook for the midterm elections when voters will decide whether to keep the Democratic majorities in Congress or toss them out of power. 

Republicans need to net just five seats in the House and only one in the Senate to recapture control of both chambers. Those narrow margins, combined with the fact that the party in power tends to lose seats in midterm elections, has led many Democrats to believe that their power in Congress —­ or at least their House majority —­ is as good as gone.

And to be sure, there are still plenty of reasons for Democrats to worry.

Doug Heye, a Republican strategist, said that the events of the past several days are “certainly enough for Democrats to try to change the narrative” around the midterms, conceding that Friday’s jobs report and the failure of the proposed amendment in Kansas on Tuesday, among other things, should give Democrats some reason for optimism. 

But Heye also noted that Democrats are still facing a major problem this year: inflation.

“How do you talk about this economy? You have unemployment at 3.5 percent, 528,000 jobs added in July but you still have runaway inflation. It’s the No. 1 thing I hear people talk about.” 

“Anytime I talk to anybody, I swear the conversation goes to what they just paid for something at the grocery store, what they paid at a restaurant, filling up their gas tank.” 

And even Perriello, the former congressman bullish on his party’s chances in the midterms, acknowledged some challenges for Democrats. Under the new congressional maps put in place this year, Republicans are set to net three or four additional seats thanks to redistricting alone.

At the same time, rising inflation could pose a threat to Democrats if Republicans can effectively weaponize the issue, he said.

“I think that while the maps are better than people feared, it’s still far from a level playing field,” Perriello said. “I think you have the issues of inflation out there, and if the Republicans were actually able to have a coherent economic message and tap into people’s pain, it would be there.” 

There’s also the question of whether Democrats’ recent legislative victories will actually matter to voters come November. While the deal on the climate and tax bill struck by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is a milestone for the party, one Democratic strategist who works on Senate races expressed doubts that it will matter much to voters on Election Day.

“I don’t think there’s going to be anyone who votes on this bill,” the strategist said. “If you’re a partisan Democrat and you’ve been dispirited by the lack of action in Washington, this assuages that a little bit. But there’s no independent voter who can’t decide how they’re going to vote that’s looking at this bill and saying ‘a-ha!’”

For now, however, there’s at least some evidence that the midterm landscape is improving for Democrats. 

A national poll from Monmouth University released on Thursday found that 50 percent of Americans say they prefer that Democrats control Congress, compared to 43 percent who want Republican control. That’s a stark change from the same poll in June, when the two parties were deadlocked at 47 percent on the generic ballot question.

In another sign that the political tides may be turning, the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election handicapper, shifted three House races on Friday in Democrats’ favor, including a Michigan battleground district where Republican voters on Tuesday nominated a pro-Trump election conspiracy theorist in favor of a more moderate incumbent, Rep. Peter Meijer.

Heye also noted that, in some races, Republicans have nominated “candidates that are a real problem,” pointing to John Gibbs, who defeated Meijer in a primary this week, as one such candidate. But whether that’s enough to stop Republicans from winning back the House majority in November remains to be seen, especially given the tough headwinds that Democrats are facing this year.

“The environment still favors Republicans. The math, especially with redistricting, favors Republicans,” Heye said. “Republicans don’t have to have a great night to have a good night.”