It's going to get ugly for Democrats in 2022. It's why you're going to see some very interesting things in the coming weeks to boost the economy that's undergone a state of anemia—much like Joe Biden's physical condition.
I'm sure you saw that we're lifting the international travel ban to boost the economy. The 2021 elections delivered an uppercut to the Democratic Party—everywhere. If it weren't for a few wealthy suburban enclaves barely clinging onto the Biden brand—New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy would have been given a pink slip as well. The hatred of rural voters, coupled with the loss of suburban voters, spells electoral death for Democrats come November 2022—and even Democratic operatives are admitting that the party is screwed.
On some level, the operative class knew this was going to happen. Former President George W. Bush was the wild card in the trend, with the GOP gaining seats in the 2002 midterms. This was the post-9/11 effect, but you all know the party in power usually suffers humiliation come midterm season. This cycle is expected to be no different (via Politico):
Ever since Biden’s election, Democrats recognized they were headed for an election buzzsaw — with the party in power traditionally suffering losses in a new president’s first midterm. And last week laid bare the potential extent of the catastrophe. Yet about the only thing Democrats could agree on was that Congress needs to pass legislation to sell to voters and, more nebulously, that Democrats need to do a better job talking about it.
[…]
Even optimistic Democrats aren’t convinced it will work.
Danny Barefoot, a Democratic strategist who is assembling a focus group of suburban women in Virginia who voted for Biden last year and Republican Glenn Youngkin last week, said that even if “the environment improves considerably” for Democrats, “it’s still a loss of the House and probably a loss of the Senate … If you’re defining ‘screwed’ as losing our majorities, yeah, I think there’s not much that’s going to stop that.”
One veteran consultant in Washington said that after last week, he is advising early-career strategists to work on ballot measures or other non-candidate campaigns next year.
“We’re just going to get crushed,” he said, doubting Democrats would take any lessons from their beating.
[…]
“Democrats are losing the messaging war,” said Kelly Dietrich, a former Democratic fundraiser and founder of the National Democratic Training Committee, which trains candidates across the country. “We talked about this in ‘20. We promised to solve problems, and rather than talk and brag and point out the fact that government is working the way it should — making sausage is messy — we’re bogged down in process, and in the meantime, the other side is capitalizing on issues that really matter to the day-to-day lives of voters.”
He said, “It’s got to get fixed in like eight to 10 months, and the prospects for ’22, it’s a year away, I don’t know … Honestly, I don’t know. We need some radical change within the Democratic ecosphere.”
None of this is new. Following Democrats’ losses in Virginia and New Jersey in the gubernatorial elections in 2009, Barack Obama’s White House downplayed the significance of the off-year contests, while prominent Democrats on the sidelines feverishly tried to make sense of why independents defected from the party, casting it as a “wake-up call.” It didn’t make a difference. The party sleep-walked all the way into the midterms the following year, when Democrats lost more than 60 House seats in what Obama described as a “shellacking.”
The landscape for Democrats today is even bleaker. Not only do Democrats hold a slimmer majority in Congress, but Biden’s low-40s approval rating — a metric closely correlated with a party’s performance in midterm elections — is much worse than Obama’s was at this point in his presidency.
They're screwed for a simple reason: they're not going to change.
The data will say don't go "woke." The post-mortems will say "wokeism" is a cancer. The focus groups will say the Democratic Party is too extreme. And the Democrats will take all of this in and come to the very predictable conclusion: "We're not out of touch. It's just that everyone else is wrong."
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Actually, that's not right anymore. It's "I'm not out of touch; it's that everyone else is a white supremacist." That's what the liberal media elite took from the 2021 elections. You know they wanted to tout a low voter turnout as a reason for a GOP win. Nope. Turnout in Virginia was sky high—and Democrats lost every statewide office race and saw their majority in the House of Delegates dissolve. How did this happen? Well, it's that everyone else is a racist.
That line doesn't work with normal people. It doesn't. Only the most ideologically rigid and insane take comfort in that fake narrative. Those people, as you know, are white college-educated liberals who are so hardcore, so aggressive, and so vicious that they're pushing nonwhite voters into the GOP camp. "Defund the Police" has been a massive in-kind contribution in helping sway these voters, centerpieces of the Democratic base, to begin splitting their ticket in some cases.
It's why congressional Democrats passed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. They needed something, so they leaned on the GOP for help—and got it. Yeah, typical of congressional Republicans to help get a Biden agenda item passed just after voters rejected his policies wholesale on election night. Still, with just a four-seat majority in the House, Democrats are bound to lose the majority. There have been 14 Democratic retirements as well—and the wave of retirements has yet to stop there.
It's just the arrogance that kills me. They think this will blow over. It won't. Inflation will remain. Job creation will be volatile. And the border is still a mess. We have a president who simply does not know what's going on—and voters have had it with him. I think we're looking at a 2010 midterm situation. Biden is looking at becoming more of a caretaker president, chopped down at the knees. Maybe he'd notice, but I doubt it. He didn't notice that he ripped ass in front of a British Royal last week.
It's about to be a very long, nasty year for Democrats. What a difference a year does make.
Let's go Brandon.
