October 15: Biden Is the Early Favorite For Reelection Even If Dems Lost Ground in 2022
After absorbing a lot of Democratic gloom-and-doom about the midterms, I offered some silver lining at New York:
The 2022 midterms don’t look great for Democrats, who will try to buck history by hanging on to super-slim congressional majorities. Thanks to the particular lay of the land, Democrats have a decent chance of maintaining control of the Senate. But the House? Not so much: The two times since the New Deal when the president’s party won net House seats in a midterm (1998 and 2002), the president in question had sky-high job-approval ratings. Even if you believe Joe Biden’s plunge in popularity has been stemmed or even turned around a bit, he’s not going to have 60 percent-plus approval in November 2022 unless really crazy things happen. There’s just too much partisan polarization for that these days.
Thankfully for Democrats, even if they lose their congressional majorities next year, Biden himself won’t be an underdog for reelection in 2024. After all, the last two Democratic presidents were reelected after historically terrible midterms. Democrats lost 54 U.S. House seats in 1994 and 63 in 2010. Yes, they had bigger majorities going into those elections than Democrats have now. But they lost the national House popular vote by an identical 6.8 percent in both midterms, which is pretty bad, particularly since Democrats suffer from a voter-inefficiency problem in House elections (too many voters concentrated in too few districts).
It’s possible for a president’s party to lose a midterm so badly that bouncing back in the next cycle is all but impossible. Consider the man whose unique comeback accomplishment Donald Trump will be emulating if he runs in 2024, Grover Cleveland. The president Cleveland defeated in an 1892 rematch, Benjamin Harrison, was a Republican whose party lost an incredible 93 House seats in the 1890 midterms. This, mind you, was at a time when the House had only 332 members, which means the GOP lost over half their caucus in one cycle (an even worse percentage than in 1894, when Democrats lost a record 125 House seats during the midterm after Cleveland’s comeback triumph). In this era of polarization, nothing like that is going to happen to Democrats in 2022.
Looking more broadly at the power of incumbency, there have been 13 sitting presidents since World War II who were on the general election ballot. Nine of them won. The four losers all faced special circumstances. Gerald Ford had not previously been elected to anything more than the U.S. House; he ascended to the vice-presidency and then the presidency when disgraced predecessors resigned, and he pardoned the president who appointed him, the especially disgraced Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter was caught up in a historical realignment that he had held off four years earlier by carrying his native South, which then resumed a massive Republican trend. George H.W. Bush suffered from a terrible economy but then also a party split (third-party candidate Ross Perot won a lot of previously Republican voters). And we all know about Donald J. Trump, who was impeached twice and seemed determined to offend swing voters.
In retrospect, what’s most remarkable is that Ford and Trump very nearly got reelected despite their handicaps, exhibiting not the weakness but the strength of incumbency. And it’s with that perspective that any early handicapping of a potential 2024 rematch should be considered. Trump benefited from incumbency in 2020, as will Biden in 2024. So the idea that the 45th president has some built-in advantage over the 46th — absent the renewed election coup so many of us fear — doesn’t make a lot of sense.
i agree roy about msnbc panel propping up bush in their post debate discusisons.
even ron brownstein was traingulated into commenting on the “lesbain” comment , only i noticed he tried hard to move off that subject.
as much as that comment has ignited a firestorm, i also belive it was a very calcutated comment from kerry.
could it be that k/e knew that b/c would be consummed with this commnet and spend valueable days arguing a point that dems and swings could care less about? now that would be a work of pure politcal artistry.
Poll reveals world anger at Bush with Eight out of 10 countries favouring Kerry for president
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/viewsofamerica/story/0,15221,1327568,00.html?=rss
Friday October 15, 2004
The poll, conducted by 10 of the world’s leading newspapers, including France’s Le Monde, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, Canada’s La Presse, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian, also shows that on balance world opinion does not believe that the war in Iraq has made a positive contribution to the fight against terror.
The results show that in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Japan, Spain and South Korea a majority of voters share a rejection of the Iraq invasion, contempt for the Bush administration, a growing hostility to the US and a not-too-strong endorsement of Mr Kerry. But they all make a clear distinction between this kind of anti-Americanism and expressing a dislike of American people. On average 68% of those polled say they have a favourable opinion of Americans.
The 10-country poll suggests that rarely has an American administration faced such isolation and lack of public support amongst its closest allies.
The only exceptions to this trend are the Israelis – who back Bush 2-1 over Kerry and see the US as their security umbrella – and the Russians who, despite their traditional anti-Americanism, recorded unexpectedly favourable attitudes towards the US in the survey conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Beslan tragedy.
What impressed me even more was the polls at the MS-NBC site after each debate, which the site kept open for 24 hours following the debate. After every debate, Kerry came out the winner by a 60%-40% or better record. What was also very interesting was that after the first debate, about a million people voted online. After the second debate, about 1.7 million people voted, and after the third debate, some 2.23 million (and still counting) people voted online. What is also very impressive is that this voting has come in the face of the MS-NBC “panel” that (except for Ron Reagan) generally kept propping up Bush as much as they could, while downplaying Kerry. This, to me is very compelling. For the polls after the third debate, see the link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3096434/&&CM=domain&CE=tv
Roy