WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden and the new Democratic Congress have just taken office, but the clock has already started in the mid-term elections of 2022, when voters will decide whether the president will have more than two years to advance his agenda with a friendly Congress. .
Democrats need to defend a narrow 221-211 majority in the House (218 seats are needed for control) and in the 50-50 Senate, where losing even a single seat will cost the party the camera.
History is not on their side. Americans usually put a brake on power, and the president’s party has lost seats in the House in almost every vote since the 1930s. They typically suffer huge losses in their first half.
“In 2020, House Republicans won 28 of the 29 most competitive districts, highlighting the exact job-elimination policies that Joe Biden enacted during his first week in office,” said Michael McAdams, spokesman for the National Republican Congress Committee, the campaign arm of Casa GOP. “If House Democrats thought 2020 was bad, they are not at all prepared for what the 2022 cycle has in store for us.”
The only recent exception to this historic trend was 2002, when the country rallied around President George W. Bush after the September 11 terrorist attacks and his Republican Party won seats.
Democrats now hope that if Biden manages to fight a different crisis – the Covid-19 pandemic – and Democrats knock on doors again after stopping to face the pandemic, voters will reward them.
“Organize, organize, organize. That’s how we resisted history and won two elections in Georgia,” said new Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison at MSNBC on Friday.
It is still early and there are more questions than answers about the next two years of American politics. Here are the big five:
1. What does Trump do?
In his final public statements as president, Donald Trump said he “would be back in some way”. Even after being accused twice and banned from Twitter, Trump remains extremely popular with Republican voters and only 5 percent said they regretted having voted for him after this month’s insurrectionist uprising on Capitol Hill.
Democrats have done better when they can run against Trump without him on the ballot, as in the midterm elections of 2018 and the second round of the Georgia Senate, and say Republicans will have a hard time washing Trump’s hands after the attack on democracy .
“It makes it impossible for them to go back and recruit the classic Republican banker from the suburban country club to run for Congress,” said Tyler Law, a Democratic operative who works on home disputes. “Many people will have forgotten their rude comments in a few years. Americans will not forget the time when our Capitol was invaded by domestic terrorists dressed in Trump equipment.”
2. What happens to the GOP?
Even if Trump decides to spend his money on the golf course, the Republican Party he left behind is facing an internal reckoning on his influence and his future.
Trump helped increase the participation of the party’s ever-smaller base – they won the popular presidential vote only once in 32 years – but with him out, some want to double the trump card while others want to move on.
“There will be some very competitive, if not brutal, primaries for Senate nominations in places like Georgia, Arizona and others,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist who worked in House disputes.
Still, Republicans found themselves in a similar position after Barack Obama’s election in 2008 and returned to victory mid-term, and Democrats did the same after Trump’s victory in 2016.
3. Everything about the base?
In the past, it was difficult for Democrats to get their base to stand for non-presidential elections, and after four years of protests, donations and near-constant concerns, party voters may be eager for a break from politics.
Meanwhile, Republicans face their own challenge of transforming their base without Trump, and that could be more difficult if it fuels the feeling that Republicans have betrayed him.
They also face some financial hurdles after large corporations said they would cut donations because of the Capitol riot, at least for a while, and with the paralysis or death of some of its biggest funders, such as the National Rifle Association.
“Democrats obviously cultivated their online donor base much better than Republicans, but a lot of that was the kind of furious donation against Trump,” said Jessica Taylor, an analyst at the Cook Political Report who tracks Senate disputes. “I’m not sure that Republicans will make fury donations in the same way, because Biden does not cause division in the same way.”
4. What about Biden?
Both of Biden’s predecessors entered the White House with full control of Washington and faced almost immediate grassroots uprisings that culminated in a “mid-term” turnaround, as Obama put it in a memorable way.
Trump’s inauguration was overshadowed by the Women’s March just a day later. And Obama, despite starting with astronomical approval ratings, saw the first signs of a conservative reaction at the Tea Party rallies organized in February 2009, just over a month after he took office.
Biden, agree strategists on both sides, is less controversial than Obama or Trump. And conservatives have a hard time turning the president into a bogeyman who animates and infuriates his base like, say, Clinton.
Covid-19 restrictions can make it difficult to build popular protests – but the reaction against the ongoing restrictions on social detachment can also provide the spark around which a new movement catches fire.
Can Biden stop the pandemic and rebuild the economy better, as he promised? Will your administration face scandals? Most do.
5. What does the map look like?
States are still redrawing their maps after the census that takes place once a decade, so we still don’t know what electoral districts will look like in 2022. Some states with declining populations, like New York, are likely to lose seats in Congress, while others, like the Texas boom, it is expected to win some.
“I think Republicans are well positioned to retake the House, but the $ 64,000 question is, ‘How is redistricting?'” Asked Gorman, the Republican strategist.
Republicans have the advantage in the states after 2020 has proved to be a disappointing year for Democrats, but it is not as uneven as it was the last time, after 2010.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, the map is set. Democrats have to defend Sens. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., And Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., Who just won special elections, but need to run again to seek a full six-year term. They also have senators running for re-election in New Hampshire and Nevada, which Biden narrowly won.
On the Republican side, Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey is retiring, leaving behind a vacancy in a state that Biden owned. Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, a staunch conservative, is running for reelection in another state in Biden. And the GOP will have to defend seats on the North Carolina and Florida battlefield as well.