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The 2022 Midterms in Review
Democrats over-perform expectations driven by record youth turnout and popular progressive policies in a clear rejection of Republican Party extremism.
Republican dreams of a widespread backlash against the Biden Administration’s modest and mostly uncompleted center-left policy set were dashed shortly after polls closed on Election Night. While the mainstream conservative reasoning predicting a Republican Congressional takeover was flawed (no, Ilhan Omar is not forcefully transitioning schoolchildren by feeding them fentanyl-laced Skittles), the expectation of the House of Representatives and/or Senate to flip from blue to red was not unfounded.
The party of the incumbent President tends to lose ground in Congress during midterm elections. Since World War II, the President’s party has lost an average of 26 U.S. House seats and 4 U.S. Senate seats, which is often enough to lose control of Congress for the party in power. In the case of the 2022 midterm elections, the Democratic Party over-performed expectations — while the slim Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives appears likely to have been lost to an even slimmer Republican majority, the U.S. Senate will remain in Democratic control, with the potential for a net gain of one seat if Democratic Senator Rafael Warnock can prevail in his December 6th runoff election against Herschel Walker.
For the Democratic Party, this is not far from a best-case scenario of the expectations going into the election. Nearly all legislative action in the U.S. House passed by simple majority must see a companion bill passed by the U.S. Senate before being sent to the President’s desk, most of the time with a significant, filibuster-proof majority of 60 out of 100 votes in the Senate. However, the Senate is able to act on some very critical matters with a simple majority. The confirmation of federal judicial appointments and the passing of an annual piece of legislation through budget reconciliation are two critical examples of this. President Biden’s most significant legislative accomplishments thus far, the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, were passed through budget reconciliation. Due to the current partisan divide of federal politics and the inherently…
