The Impossibility of the Political Environment for Democrat Candidates after the Super-Skyrmion Experiment: A Critical Reassessment

The impossibility of the political environment for Democrats was laid bare in a CNN/SSRS poll released last week. Some 51% of likely voters said the economy was the key issue in determining their vote. Only 15% named abortion – a finding that explains how the election battleground has tilted toward the GOP. The economy is the top concern for a majority of voters who will vote Republican in their House district. It is likely that Biden will be rejected by voters if he tries to stress the economy is in a recession.

Nonetheless, the midterms make clear that Biden is a much stronger president than he is often given credit for. He has been underestimated and criticized even though he has had a great first two years. Republicans should be nervous as they think about the future. After two years of speculation about whether Biden should run for a second term, the outcome should also give Democrats reason to believe that a two-term, transformative presidency is already underway.

It’s reasonable to say that voters chose Democrats as the first option given that a majority of respondents said the procedure should be legal in most cases.

Noble says Kelly is benefiting from campaign fundamentals: the Democrat has significantly outspent, and also more successfully occupied the center, than his Republican rival. But Noble also believes that Kelly is surmounting disenchantment with Biden in part because some voters are already looking past the president as they assess the parties. The president’s job approval is not having an effect, for whatever reason. You are not seeing a direct connection to the Senate vote if people pat Joe Biden on the head.

It is not a big deal if public polls do not show Biden at half of the votes in any of the states with the most closely fought Senate races, and less so if he is somewhere between 45% and 40%. Biden has an approval rating of 45% in Pennsylvania, 43% in Wisconsin, and 42% in Nevada and Arizona, according to recent CNN polls. Biden received less than ideal approval in states where he won, like North Carolina, Ohio and Colorado, according to recent polls. New York Times/Siena College polls released Monday likewise showed Biden’s approval rating below 40% in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia and only slightly above that threshold in Pennsylvania.

The sheer intractability of our political divisions has left fewer voters willing to shift their loyalties no matter how unhappy they are with current conditions. Particularly in Senate races, including the contests in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, Republicans have also been hurt by nominating Trump-aligned candidates that many voters view as unqualified, extreme or both.

The latest snapshot of the divergence was offered last week in the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll. Asked what issue they considered most important in 2022, Republicans overwhelmingly chose inflation (52%) and immigration (18%). A comparable share of Democrats picked preserving democracy (32%), abortion (21%) and health care (15%). Independents split exactly in half between the priorities of the two parties: inflation and immigration on the one side, and democracy, abortion and health care on the other. Voters with at least a four-year college degree leaned relatively more toward democracy and abortion; those without degrees (including Latinos) tended to stress inflation. The survey did not include crime, but it has provoked the most concern from Republicans and non-college educated voters.

Given these disparities, Democrats everywhere are stressing issues relating to rights and values, particularly abortion, but also warning about the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his movement. Since June, as CNN recently reported, Democratic candidates have spent over $130 million on abortion-themed ads, vastly more than Republicans.

Building a Sea Wall against Economic Discontent: Congressman Joe Biden’s 2020 State of the State Addressed at Union Hall in Portland, Or

There is an argument that the incentives for domestic production embedded in the three central Biden legislative accomplishments will produce a boom in US employment in the long run.

But those plant openings are mostly still in the future and only a few Democrats (such as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Arizona Sen. Kelly, and Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan) are emphasizing those possibilities this year.

More commonly, Democrats are stressing legislation the party has passed that offers families some relief on specific costs, especially the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. Democratic pollster Geoff Garin says that highlighting such specific initiatives can allow individual candidates to overcome the negative overall judgment on Biden’s economic management. His main concern is that too many Democrats are sublimating any economic message while focusing preponderantly on abortion.

Piece by piece with these arguments – the coming manufacturing boom, the cost-saving provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the case that they are offering struggling families opportunities to better their condition – Democrats are trying to build a sea wall against the swelling currents of economic discontent. The final weeks of the campaign will show if that current goes above the defense of the party.

President Biden showed up at a Union Hall in Portland, Ore., with a pink and white box of doughnuts, after volunteers with the state’s Democratic Party sat shoulder to shoulder at long tables.

As the midterm elections draw closer, Biden has been spending more time on the road, trying to help Democratic candidates in tough races. The Western swing began in Colorado and ended in Southern California.

“The history books show that an incumbent president is not a boost to their party in their midterms. If Jesus Christ himself were an incumbent president, members of his political party would probably stiff-arm him in a midterm election,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist.

But Oregon is a very blue state that Biden carried handily in the 2020 presidential election. Biden told the volunteers that it was nice to win by 16 points.

Two years later, Democrats are nervous about the tough three-way race for governor. There’s a former Democrat who could peel off the votes of the other Democrats in order to get the first Republican governor of Oregon in more than a generation.

Biden’s victory at Baskin-Robbins, the next door to running for reelection: A personal story about Bennet and Camp Hale

The Biden’s stopped at a Baskin-Robbins for some ice cream on the way to a grassroots event the next day. There, as he waited for his double scoop of chocolate chip in a waffle cone, Biden said he was confident Kotek would win.

The shift is a departure from his predecessors, former Presidents Obama and Trump, who held more traditional rallies in their first terms.

“Biden has held many official events with campaign undertones. Other presidents did this too, but for Biden, it’s his principal mode of campaigning in the leadup to the midterms,” Doherty said.

And by raising money for party committees rather than individual congressional candidates, Biden is helping candidates without being directly tied to them.

Some Democratic candidates have claimed scheduling conflicts when Biden comes to town. Republicans have roundly mocked Biden and his party for this. But Democratic strategist Lis Smith, author of campaign memoir Any Given Tuesday, said Biden and Democrats are just being smart.

As a result of the election being red wave, there will be much more public concern about Biden’s age and strength as a candidate. He has spared that for now.

There are places in which Biden can help the Democrats, where Democrats have an advantage in voter registration. In Colorado, Biden designated an important World War II training site, Camp Hale, as a new national monument. And at the picture-perfect site, he made sure to give a little extra love to Sen. Michael Bennet, who is running for reelection in a tougher than expected race.

“I want Michael to come back up here a second,” Biden said before regaling the crowd with a story about Bennet’s hard sell to get Biden to designate the monument.

What arose after the Biden left on Air Force One? Getting the word out about the progress of the First-term Democratic Party

In Los Angeles, local officials waited on the tarmac for the president after he descended the stairs of Air Force One. Karen Bass received a well-known hug with the blue plane behind her while running for LA mayor.

The next day, Biden touted the infrastructure law at a construction site for a new metro line, calling Bass the “soon-to-be Ms. Mayor” in a speech where he delivered the core of his midterm message.

“We’re always getting incoming requests,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters traveling with the president on Air Force One. “Of course.” Of course. There are a lot of good things to talk about.

Democrats had a great summer. There was a surge of voter registration after the Dobbs decision. Voters handed Democrats a string of sweet victories in unlikely places — Alaska and Kansas, and good news in upstate New York.

Over the past month or so, there’s been a rumbling across the land, and the news is not good for Team Blue. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican for Congress, and 45 percent said they planned to vote for a Democrat. Democrats led by one point last month.

But it’s also a window into a view Biden and his top aides hold that there is a path to buck decades of electoral routs for a first-term president’s party – if only a few things can break Democrats’ way.

The political narrative has swung from a looming Republican wave to a Democratic momentum in the last few months, and according to Biden, it’s back again.

Last week, Biden said, it had been back and forth with them ahead and us ahead. I believe that we are going to see a shift back to our side in the closing days.

It was a candid acknowledgement of a moment that sees Democrats once more scrambling to zero in on a message to blunt GOP momentum, a reality exacerbated by differing views inside the party of where that message should actually land.

One party official said that Biden’s comments reflect the view that Democrats are still in the game two weeks after votes are counted.

In a home stretch of undecided voters where the party currently in power usually loses, the question is whether that will hold.

“We’ve managed to suck ourselves back into our own circular firing squad,” one Democratic campaign official said. “It was never as good as people seemed to think it was (at the end of the summer), and it’s not as bad as some are acting now. If we don’t pull it together it could be.

The weight of that history, not to mention the acute headwind created by economic unease that continues to rank first in voter concerns in all polls, are not lost on Biden or his advisers.

Biden reflected on the mission handed to him in his speech. It was highly politically charged that themidterm elections, which feature scores of pro-Trump candidates spouting his election nonsense, are only five days away. And it came days after the latest shocking example of political violence – the attack on the 82-year-old husband of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And since Biden launched his 2020 campaign as a quest to save America’s soul from what he sees as the aspiring autocracy of Trump, it was a statement of a mission unaccomplished – as well as a potential opening volley of a possible 2024 showdown for the White House between the 45th and 46th presidents.

The Ups and Downs of the House: When Mr. Biden is coming to the end of the legislative session and what the rest of the Senate wants to do

That will start to change in the days ahead, advisers say, with continued insistence that he will hit the road for bigger campaign events after weeks of intentionally smaller scale official events designed to highlight legislative accomplishments.

They point to two factors specifically on that front: gas prices, which have been on a steady downward trajectory for the last two weeks, and the third quarter GDP report, which analysts expect to show robust growth after two quarters of contraction.

Officials acknowledge that despite legislative achievements and a historically fast recovery from the downturn, the deficit won’t flip over 14 days.

But given the close correlation between gas prices and the Democrats’ electoral prospects, they see an opportunity to at least make some gains or fight to a draw with undecided voters in the final days.

It is one that has been laid bare by Republicans in a particularly acute way lately, whether on abortion, popular programs, like Social Security and Medicare, or proposals to remove the individual provisions enacted by Biden that polls in favor of the Democrats.

Biden has been trying to highlight individual issues that are important to base voters, such as the cancellation of student loans or abortion rights, in order to counter Republican enthusiasm.

The burst of optimism among Democrats after a late summer string of major legislative wins and energy driven by the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe vs. Wade was viewed by many inside the West Wing as overly optimistic.

Democrats are playing defense in blue-state strongholds like New York, Washington and Oregon and are waging a longshot struggle to cling to the House of Representatives. A net gain of five seats by the Republicans is necessary to win back control. The Senate currently splits evenly between Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, but a number of swing state showdowns will determine the fate of the Senate. There has been renewed interest in the race between a Democratic senator and an ex-serviceman. Democrats brand a pro-Trump candidate as an election-denying Extremist.

In battleground Senate races, Democrats are polling with close leads or very close to each other. If Democrats choose to break away from them, there is still a way to keep the Senate.

In Arizona, independent pollster Mike Noble sees more opportunities for Democrats to separate themselves from the president. According to Noble’s firm, OH Predictive Insights, Kelly narrowly led Masters despite the fact that a clear majority of Arizona likely voters had a negative view of Biden. One reason for Kelly’s lead, Noble said, is that the poll found almost one-fifth of voters who were unfavorable toward Biden also expressed negative views about Masters. Noble claimed that many voters were siding with Kelly over Masters.

Democratic hopes over the summer that Biden’s approval rating would steadily rise through Election Day, lifting their candidates in the process, have been dashed largely because of the persistence of the highest inflation in 40 years.

According to a political scientist from an Atlanta University, the big problem for the Democrats is that things haven’t gotten better for people even though they have passed legislation. “If inflation had come down from where it has been, they would be in better shape. But you can’t convince people that things are going better when their own experience tells them that it’s not.”

There is a long-term trend for people’s attitudes about the sitting president to change in Senate races, often overshadowing their views of the candidates. Senate and House races have become more like contests in a parliamentary system, where fewer people consider the merits of the two candidates and instead decide by which party they want to control Congress – a decision shaped heavily by their choice.

The Democrats did well in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Many of the election deniers who were running lost. Even in states where Democrats were walloped, such as in New York, there were bright spots, including Gov. Kathy Hochul’s victory over the Trump-endorsed Republican Lee Zeldin.

The CNN mid-October polls raised that possibility by showing Cortez Masto and Barnes still narrowly trailing even though they were attracting double-digit support among voters who disapprove of Biden. Gene Ulm, a Republican pollster, says he believes the final electorate will tilt even more toward Republican voters dissatisfied with Biden than polls now project. The reason, he argues, is that in the end, disenchantment with current conditions and Biden’s performance will turbocharge more turnout from Republicans, and depress turnout more from Democrats, than most models now anticipate. He says that the electorate’s composition will crush everything.

In modern US politics, exceptions have become rare. Because Biden is not a strong candidate to hold the Senate, Democrats will likely need a lot more of them.

Biden, however, has not managed to speak effectively and personally to Americans craving a return to normality after the pandemic or to get across that he fully understands the pain of rising prices in a 40-year-high inflation explosion that his White House once repeatedly branded “transitory.”

The speech Biden delivered blocks from the US Capitol on Wednesday was a strong election-closing argument. But for an election other than the one taking place next week.

“Democracy is literally on the ballot. This is a critical moment in the nation’s history. And we all must speak with one voice regardless of our party. Biden said that there was no place for political violence in America.

Biden told voters that the fate of the soul of America lies with them.

Elections should be about more than one thing. Voters are able to chew gum at the same time. But the harsh truth is this: In Washington, where just a glimpse of the towering Capitol dome reminds politicians and their media chroniclers of the January 6 horror, the threat to democracy feels visceral.

The concept of self-government is not new in the heartlands of Pennsylvania and Arizona, but the issue of gut check is. It is one of the basics of feeding a family. This election is about the price of a cart full of groceries, or the cost of a gallon of gasoline over America’s founding truths.

The price of everything was better during Trump, and what can it teach us about the future of our democracy? An ABC News interview with Tami Luhby

As Scottsdale, Arizona, retiree Patricia Strong told CNN’s Tami Luhby: “The price of everything was better during Trump,” adding, “We were looking forward to retirement because everything was good.”

A gusher of news on job losses just before polls opened, including in the tech industry, worsened jitters about a slowdown that could destroy one of the bright spots of the Biden economy – historically low unemployment. Americans are already struggling with higher prices for food and gasoline and now must cope with the Federal Reserve hikes in interest rates that not only make credit card debt, buying a home and rent more expensive, but could tip the economy into a recession.

Biden’s argument is implicitly that while inflation will fall, and economic damage can be repaired, the current election – and its legions of anti-democratic Republican candidates – could cause political wreckage that is beyond mending.

“This year, I hope you’ll make the future of our democracy an important part of your decision to vote, and how you vote,” he said. Will the person accept the outcome of the election? he added, at the end of a campaign in which several GOP nominees have not guaranteed they would accept voters’ will.

It’s not that Biden hasn’t been also talking about high prices. His pitch is that the billions of dollars of spending in his domestic agenda will lower the cost of health care, lift up working families and create millions of jobs. That may be the case, but things that could happen in the future can’t ease the pain being felt now.

High inflation has also always been a toxic force that brews political extremism and tempts some voters to be drawn to demagogues and radicals whose political creed is based on stoking resentment and stigmatizing outsiders.

The MAGA Democrat-Republican Conflict: The Trump-Biden Fails to Compete with the Bidens in 2020 Elections

The president also renewed his call for national unity that he delivered in his inaugural address in front of a still violence-scarred Capitol in 2021. He explained that American democracy was primarily under attack because “the defeated former president of the United States refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election.”

“He has abused his power and put the loyalty to himself before loyalty to the Constitution. And he’s made the Big Lie an article of faith in the MAGA Republican Party – a minority of that party,” Biden said, being careful not to insult every GOP voter as he did when referring to “semi-fascism” earlier this year.

The president said Trump’s threat was bigger than it was in 2020. “As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America: for governor, Congress, for attorney general, for secretary of state who won’t commit – who will not commit to accepting the results of the elections they’re running in,” the president warned.

Biden also hinted at a lack of understanding of Trump’s MAGA supporters, who have embraced his anti-democratic, populist, nationalist appeal to mainly White voters, which grew out of a backlash to the first Black presidency of Barack Obama. In recent days, the 44th president has defended democracy and repudiated Trump on the election trail.

Democrats close their midterm election campaign Monday facing the nightmare scenario they always feared – with Republicans staging a gleeful referendum on Joe Biden’s struggling presidency and failure to tame inflation.

It’s too early for postmortems. More than 40 million Americans have already voted. There is uncertainty baked into modern polling that no one can say with certainty if a red wave is coming. Even if the House falls, Democrats could hold on to the Senate.

On election eve, both sides are talking about the same topics, which allows Democrats to see a clear picture of GOP strength.

While that continuum is the essence of democracy, the run-up to these midterms has also highlighted the depth of the nation’s self-estrangement in a political era in which both sides seem to think victory for the other is tantamount to losing their country.

The chair of the Republican National Committee said on “State of the Union” on Sunday that the Democrats were deniers of inflation, crime and education.

“I’m a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy. I just think that we are – we did not listen to voters in this election. And I think we’re going to have a bad night,” Rosen told CNN’s Dana Bash.

It’s a message that resonates strongly in Washington, DC, where the scars of the US Capitol insurrection are keenly felt. And it is undeniably important because the survival of the world’s most important democracy is at stake. After all, Trump incited an insurrection that tried to thwart the unbroken tradition of peaceful transfers of power between presidents.

The premise of his domestic presidency and his political career has been to restore the balance of the economy and security for working and middle class Americans. His legislative successes could bring down the cost of health care for seniors and create a diversified green economy that shields Americans from future high energy prices amid global turmoil. But the benefits from such measures will take years to arrive. And millions of voters are hurting now and haven’t heard a viable plan from the president to quickly ease prices in the short-term.

There is no guarantee that the GOP plans to extend tax cuts would have an impact on the inflation crisis. A stalemate between two economic visions is likely when the government is divided. But the election has turned into a vehicle for voters to stress their frustration, with no imminent hope that things will get better soon.

But the president warned in a speech in Pittsburgh on Saturday night alongside Obama that Republican concern over the economy was a ruse and claimed that the GOP would cut Social Security and Medicare if they won majorities.

And in practice, there is not much a president can do to quickly lower inflation on their own. The Federal Reserve is in the lead and the central bank’s strategy of rising interest rates could trigger a recession that could further haunt Biden’s presidency.

The Republican Party also got what it wanted, as Trump has delayed his expected campaign announcement until after the elections, meaning that Biden will not have a chance to shape this election as he did in 2020 by clashing with an unpopular predecessor. The president may have been able to win over voters who still dislike the former president with a confrontation of his own.

A GOP majority would expose scores of candidates in the same boat as Trump, so that they can be weaponized against the president before a possible second chance with him in 2024. Biden wanted to balance out the judiciary after four years of Trump appointing conservative judges.

Republicans predict they will win the House of Representatives on Tuesday – a victory that, if it materializes, would give them the power to throttle President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda and clamp an investigative vise on his White House. The Senate is, meanwhile, on a knife edge with a handful of races in states like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania likely to decide who wins the majority.

Kevin McCarthy, the likely next speaker of the House, blamed Democrats for getting into heated political rhetoric, as he laid out an aggressive agenda, targeting border security and relentless investigations in an exclusive interview with CNN. He did not rule out impeaching Biden, a step radical members of his conference are already demanding.

An Address to the Economic Anxiety of the 2016 Midterm Primary: Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Marco Rubio Reveals a MAGA Soldier

In a sign of the critical stakes and the growing angst among Democrats, four presidents – Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton – all took to the campaign trail over the weekend.

The candidate who used to show his enduring magnetism to the grassroots of Republicans, President Donald Trump, will end the campaign on Monday with a rally for the Democratic nominee in Ohio. In a speech that concluded in pouring rain for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio on Sunday, Trump predicted voters would “elect an incredible slate of true MAGA warriors to Congress.”

Biden, who spent Saturday getting out the vote in the critical Pennsylvania Senate race with Obama, warned that the nation’s core values are in peril from Republicans who denied the truth about the US Capitol insurrection and following the brutal attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul.

The president will end his effort to stave off a rebuke from voters at a Democratic event in Maryland. He’s in a liberal stronghold, which indicates that he’s compromised in the election and not trying to boost an old friend in the race.

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel predicted on CNN that her party would win both the House and the Senate and accused Biden of being oblivious to the economic anxiety among Americans with his warnings about democracy.

The wealthier are getting wealthy. The wealthier people are staying rich. The middle class gets stiffed. The poor get poorer under their policy,” Biden said.

Donald Trump and the First Two Years: A Brief History of Elections in Florida, Nevada, and New York (after Trump, Clinton, and Hochul)

But the final hours of this midterm campaign laid bare the polarized electoral environment, the specter of political violence and the possibility of disputed races – all of which have raised the stakes of the first nationwide vote since former President Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election and have augured an acrimonious two years to come.

In another development on Sunday, a staffer at the headquarters of Kari Lake, the pro-Trump nominee in the Arizona gubernatorial contest, opened a letter containing suspicious white powder. Lake’s opponent, current Arizona Secretary of State, apologized for the incident which she called “incredibly concerning”.

On a frenetic final weekend of campaigning, Biden and Obama tried to push Democratic nominee John Fetterman over the line in a Pennsylvania Senate race that represents the party’s best chance to pick up a GOP-held Senate seat. In states like Arizona and Nevada Democrats are under intense pressure to switch to the GOP. Republicans need a single seat gain to win the majority.

The first major clashes of the 2024 GOP nominating contest, meanwhile, broke out in Florida with Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holding dueling rallies Sunday night. The ex-president, who is expected to launch a third White House bid within days, coined a new nickname Saturday for the man who could prove to be his toughest primary opponent: “Ron DeSanctimonious.”

The governor called his opponent a donkey and called Biden a racist, but didn’t engage in any debates, instead opting to voice his displeasure on the vice president.

As he rallied for Rubio, who is seeking reelection, Trump didn’t repeat his mockery of DeSantis on Sunday but again teased the likelihood of a presidential run. Arkansas senator, Tom Cotton, decided not to join the Republican primary, a sign the next presidential race is stirring.

Former President Bill Clinton was also called into action on Saturday, stumping for New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in Brooklyn. The Empire state should be safe territory for the Democrats, but Hochul’s close race against Zeldin shows that they do not have easy times.

The average election rally is only about voting for someone but your life is on the line. For young people in the audience, your life is on the line,” Clinton said.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/politics/election-eve-campaigning/index.html

Biden’s Legacy: The Case for Fixing America’s Spontaneously-Destructed Left-Right Campaign

If Republicans win back the House they can use their power to impose a vise on the legislative program of Biden, setting up a series of political battles on spending and debt-ceiling. They are promising a long investigation into the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the surge in migrants across the southern border, and the death of Biden’s son, Hunter.

The election that will be held Tuesday is likely to cement the nation’s divides, despite the fact that it is a chance to promote unity.

It is not uncommon for elections to set the country on a new path powered by people choosing their leaders and those leaders accepting the results.

Above all, the midterm campaign turned on the cost of living crisis, with polls showing the economy by far the most important issue for voters, who are still waiting for the restoration of normality after a once-in-a-century pandemic that Biden had promised in 2020.

If they lose on Tuesday, Democrats have to regroup and try again in 2 years to convince the nation that their policies will lead out of crises. And Republicans, if they take majorities in Congress, will be able to argue voters have given them a mandate to fix things where Biden has failed. After repeated elections in which disgruntled voters have punished the party with the most power, the GOP can find itself on the ballot in two years.

“I think it’s going to be tough,” Biden told reporters. “I think we’ll win the Senate and I think the House is tougher,” he said, admitting life would become “more difficult” for him if the GOP takes control of Congress.

He didn’t want to overshadow the Republican candidates and made it all about himself, but that’s what he did on the eve of the election. At a rally for a Senate candidate in Ohio, Trump made many false claims about what will happen in the US’s future. He wants to make sure that if he gets indicted in criminal probes for his conduct, that he is the victim of totalitarian state-style persecution.

Trump also vowed to make “a very big announcement” at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on November 15, which appears to be the worst kept secret in politics – that he will seek another term in the White House. The fact that a twice-impeached President who left office in disgrace after legitimatizing violence as a form of political expression has a good chance of winning shows the turbulence of our time.

Nancy Pelosi recalled the trauma she felt when police told her that her husband Paul had been attacked with a hammer as she looked at the shadow of violence that has hung over American policies since Trump incited the Capitol insurrection. In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she also condemned certain Republicans for joking about it.

There is one party in the election that believes the result will be different than the one that won it. That has to stop,” Pelosi said.

McCarthy told Melanie that impeachment would not be used for political purposes. “That doesn’t mean that something wouldn’t be used at a later time.”

Ron Johnson said he would use the power he was granted if he were elected to chair the permanent subcommittee on investigations if Republicans win the Senate.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/08/politics/midterm-fractious-political-environment-analysis/index.html

Biden, DeSantis, and the Ugly Poverty of the Post-Newtonian Era: In Search of a Solution to the Problem of Presidential Elections

There is something really special about democratic elections, when there are different ideas presented to the people. Until now, the expectation was that both sides would abide by the verdict of the people.

CNN political analyst and professor of history and public affairs at the college, Julian Zelizer is an Editor’s Note. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including the one on the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are of his own. View more opinion on CNN.

President Joe Biden has been consistently underestimated. Democrats performed exceptionally well by historical standards on Tuesday and Biden walks away having fared better than any other President in his first midterm since George W. Bush in 2002. The president declared that Wednesday was a good day for democracy.

The outcome was a surprise to both parties. The party of the president has lost more than one seat in the House and Senate in each of the first two years of a new administration. Under former President Donald Trump, Republicans lost 40 seats in the House in 2018. Democrats lost 63 in the House in 2010 under Barack Obama, and 52 in 1994 under Bill Clinton.

According to national exit polling, 67% of midterm voters don’t want Biden to run for president in 2024, compared to 30% who want him to run. The current numbers show that, unsurprisingly, 90% of self-identified Republicans who voted in the midterm don’t want to see Biden run again, but 38% of self-identified Democrats also don’t want to see him run again.

Nor is Trump anywhere close to done. We have seen how effective he can be when he starts using his anger in his campaign. He still has access to intense support within the party and has an interest in modern media. Meanwhile, DeSantis comes out of this week looking a bit like George W. Bush in 1998, when he won his gubernatorial reelection bid in a landslide two years before securing the presidency in 2000. Given his ability to appeal to the core of the Republican Party and potentially expand into new constituencies such as Latinos, he could pose a serious threat to Democrats in his ability to pull off a more polished version of Trumpism.

The CNN’s Exit Polls: Why did Biden and Trump Make the Most of the Red Waves in 2016? A Post-election Press Conference

Biden was asked about those sobering exit poll numbers during a post-election press conference on Wednesday. The number of people who do not want him to run will not affect his decision. To those with doubts, Biden only said: “Watch me.”

Biden will turn 80 in nine days’ time and will be 82 years old shortly after the 2024 election. That would make him 86 years old in the second term. By comparison, Ronald Reagan was 77 years old when he left office in 1989.

But Republicans have zeroed in on Biden’s regular verbal gaffes to make the case that he isn’t up to the task of running the country. If he runs for another term, that drumbeat will grow louder.

It remains uncertain which party will control the Senate or the House of Representatives next year, with votes still being counted and key races too early to call. The “red wave” that the Republicans wanted for did not come to pass.

This midterm was unique due to the fact that abortion was what made it unique. Despite high inflation, only 31% of voters in the exit poll said it was the most important issue to their vote. A nearly identical percentage (27%) said abortion, and these voters overwhelmingly chose Democratic candidates for Congress.

What is unusual is that of the 18% who viewed neither Biden nor Trump favorably in the exit polls, 40% of them voted for Democrats. The backlash against one president this year may have been canceled out by the backlash against the other.

Biden was elected in large part thanks to pre- and exit polls, and the lack of success by these GOP candidates is unsurprising.

CNN’s Exit Polls look at the opinions of Election Day voters in person, as well as the views of early and Absentee voters. They were done on behalf of the National Election Pool. Read more here.

What Happened When Presidents of the United States and the GOPs Accessed to Inflation: After the First Midterm, Did President Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush Win?

Democrats have retained the Senate – doing no worse than holding steady at 50 seats and potentially gaining one – and look likely to keep any net losses in the House in the single digits.

Midterms are supposed to be the time for the opposition party to shine. It should be the case when there is once-in-a- generation inflation and the vast majority of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

What happened? It’s pretty clear that general election voters punished Republican candidates they saw as too extreme – on issues such as abortion and/or for being too closely tied to former President Donald Trump.

Democrats’ performance this year has funneled down to the state level as well. We already know, based on projected races, that this will be the first time since 1934 that the president’s party had a net gain of governorships in a president’s first midterm. Ronald Reagan’s GOP had huge losses in the Senate in 1986, even though his party had a net gain of governorships.

We don’t have any polling from 1934, though considering Franklin Roosevelt won two landslide victories on either end of that midterm, he was likely quite popular.

Many of those Republicans were endorsed by Trump and had said (at least at one point) that they believed he had won the 2020 election. As Biden won the election, this is false.

This is seen in gubernatorial elections as well. Republicans nominated 2020 election deniers for governor in a number of blue or swing states. None of them have been projected to win, and only the Republican from Arizona has any chance of winning.

The fact that you have a current president and a former president who are both unpopular isn’t unusual. Both Obama and George W. Bush were unpopular before the 2010 midterm.

The reason for the difference between 2010 and 2022 is pretty obvious. I had pointed out before the election that Trump was getting more Google search traffic than Biden (i.e. the former president was in the minds of voters). The search traffic for Bush in 2010 was very close to that of Obama.

This matches the dynamic we saw in the special House elections following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June. Democrats started doing considerably better than before the Supreme Court ruling.

Republicans lost ground in the closing weeks of the campaign but still ended up in the same position as they were in the spring.