The Midterm Mirage

Chuck Todd: “The biggest difference between the successes of Clinton and Obama, who got re-elected, and the failure of the Biden-Harris team to win four more years was their midterm experiences. Both Clinton and Obama got clobbered, forcing them to rethink some of their policies and how to sell them.”

“Biden and the party as a whole took the Democrats’ ‘better than expected’ performance in the 2022 midterms, when they still lost the House but gained a Senate seat, as a sign that they were on to something and that they didn’t need to course-correct as much as polling was actually telling them to course-correct.” 

“Democrats did well in the 2022 midterms despite Biden, not because of him or his pro-democracy messaging.”

“The reality is that Democrats did better than expected in the 2022 midterms for two reasons: backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and the GOP’s disastrous collection of candidates in swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.”