NYTimes Pitchbot: After a stronger-than-expected midterm showing, Democratic officials fear overconfidence will doom the party in 2024
I must say, the Twitter user by the name of @DougJBalloon is giving me great blog fodder. I'm going to take a pitch and turn it into a real article.
Last week's surprise victories of the Democratic Party at the polls was nothing short of a miracle to Democrats who expected that the party would suffer significant losses at the polls. Granted, there were some tough losses, but overall the party held its own considering the environment: a referendum on the Presidency that the midterms generally are, President Biden's unpopularity, the economy and COVID fatigue.
Howerver, unnamed Democratic party operatives are worried that despite the party's success last week, that the party will falter come 2024. Signs of this are showing in New York, where the party lost several House seats and almost lost the Governor's race due to a strong showing from Republican congressman Lee Zeldin, and are a state party in disarray. And what should have been a slam dunk Senate race in Ohio came up short as Tim Ryan lost.
However, presidents have had mixed results in years that they had done well in midterms. In the 1990 midterms, the Republican Party fared pretty well, but according to NPR's Ron Elving:
Two decades later, President George H.W. Bush had his only midterm election in 1990 and was hoping to build on gains the GOP had made recently in the South. His party did pick up a few seats here and there but lost a net of seven in the House overall, a distinct disappointment. Bush was at least able to limit the Democrats' gains in the Senate to just one added seat. But there was no sign in that year that the first President Bush would struggle in the primaries in 1992 and then lose his bid for reelection to Bill Clinton.
And that's where the worry comes in - a major political crisis that further affects Biden's approval rating. It's very likely that Biden's approval rating will pick up as the economic situation improves and we come further out of the COVID pandemic and the supply chain issues resolve. That said, the world is a very unstable place, and presidents have lost their jobs in part due to that instability.
For the Democrats to win in 2024, they need to count their blessings in that they had some spectacular candidates this cycle, be thankful that Democrats were afraid of a theoretical fall of democracy and that turnout was surprisingly well this cycle. They need to examine what went wrong and focus on the economy and rural America. In the United States, land votes, not people. We still haven't moved past the eighteenth century.