2022 Midterms - The Aftermath

There are many takeaways from the 2022 midterms, which surprised me by how they turned out - and did not turn out:

Red Puddle: The red wave I and many others feared didn't materialize.  Democrats have so far preserved most of their caucus in the House and may yet keep the majority, but Republicans are closer to grabbing it.

Roe, Roe Roe the Vote: Abortion turned out to be as big a deal as it was originally expected to be.  That's because the polls didn't take first-time voters into account, and they didn't factor into prognostications of the midterms because they hadn't voted before and therefore hadn't been part of past voting trends.  Abortion, however, wasn't strong enough to flip Republican seats in the Senate to the Democrats . . . except for one.   

Fettermania!  John Fetterman (below) defeated Dr. Mehmet Oz for returning Republican Senator Pat Toomey's U.S. Senate seat.  The same pundits who doubted Fetterman's strategy and his post-stroke viability and spoke embarrassingly of his debate performance now say the Fetterman ran a great campaign by speaking plainly and honestly on the issues, being comfortable in his own skin (and his own sweatpants), and connecting with working-class voters.  Fetterman is the first Democrat to win this Senate seat since 1962, when Richard Nixon held his famous "Last Press Conference" after being rejected in a gubernatorial election in California.  Fetterman did have to make one sacrifice; now that he's going to be a U.S. Senator, he needs a suit and a tailor.

Money Talks, But It Can't Sing and Dance: And it can't buy you love, either.  After all of the big bucks spent on the 2022 midterms - the most expensive misterm election campaign ever (at least until 2026, most likely) - the results have left Congress pretty much the same way as it was before.     

WOLVERINES!: The Democrats flipped the Michigan state legislature while holding on to the governorship, the Attorney General's office and the secretary of state's office.  Michigan turned so blue that when you see it on a political map, you won't know where the state ends and where the Great Lakes begin.

RIP Florida Democrats:  How does a state Democratic Party get as their opponents in the 2022 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections a pair of scumbags like Marco Rubio, who proposes repealing the prescription drug-price control law, and Ron DeSantis, who spends half of his time trying to censor teachers and deny the existence of gays - and then blow both elections? Six-letter word for Florida Democratic Party leadership, rhymes with "Cupid" . . .

Crist Crossed Out: The attempts of Democrats at winning back the governorship of Florida go like this - nominate a Democratic rising star, lose to the Republican candidate, blackball the former rising star; nominate Charlie Crist four years later, lose to the incumbent Republican; nominate another Democratic rising star, lose to the Republican candidate, blackball the former rising star; nominate Charlie Crist four years later, lose to the incumbent Republican . . . I have a feeling that the Democrats in Florida may change their strategy by forfeiting 2026 so they can lose the Florida governorship in 2030.  Just don't expect a third Charlie Crist Democratic gubernatorial candidacy - he lost to DeSantis by twenty points.  Even Florida Democrats aren't that crazy! It would be like repeatedly sending Debbie Wasserman Schultz back to the House after she screwed up the 2016 presidential election . . . 

Okay, bad example!

Democracy Is Safe . . .  For now, anyway.  The high voter turnout was inspiring at a time when many people thought Americans no longer cares about saving democracy, but some election deniers won their own elections - and Kari Lake may yet win the governorship of Arizona.

They'll be back.

And so will I, to focus on a couple of other elections and related issues more closely.              

Quality Matters

It looks like Mitch McConnell has been having heartburn.

You'd have heartburn too, if you saw the latest news and poll numbers involving Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate in the 2022 midterms, who McConnell has to count on to win back a Republican majority.

In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman is ahead of noted New Jersey resident Dr. Mehmet Oz by ten to fifteen points, and Oz undistinguished himself by complaining about the rising prices of exotic vegetables in a supermarket whose name he couldn't get right.  Mandela Barnes - whose biggest asset is that he is not Russ Feingold - is ahead of incumbent Republican Senator and crackpot conspiracy theorist Ron Johnson in Wisconsin by eight points, while incumbent Democratic senator Mark Kelly holds a similar lead over Republican challenger and 2020 election denier Blake Masters in Arizona.  In Georgia, incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock is ahead by four points over Republican challenger Herschel Walker, the noted spousal abuser and climate-change non-expert who says China can get rid of its bad air by letting the winds blow our good air over the ocean to them.  Uh, you think someone should tell him that the jet stream flows from west to east and not the other way around? 

McConnell has conceded that the GOP's lack of "quality candidates" is helping Democrats in the polls, and many of them are likely headed to defeat.  But the Republicans could make up for losses in Pennsylvania or Georgia elsewhere.  In Washington State, Republican challenger Tiffany Smiley is giving incumbent Democratic senator Patty Murray - first elected to the Senate when the biggest threat from China was Olympic diver Fu Mingxia - a run for her money, and incumbent Democratic Senator Michael Bennet is facing a tough challenge from Republican challenger Joe O'Dea, who actually says that Trump lost the 2020 election.  A Republican that faces reality head-on - wow, what a concept!

I don't even want to consider the J.D. Vance - Tim Ryan Senate race in Ohio.

And remember, the weaker candidates currently behind - even Herschel Walker - could pull out a victory in November.  If that sounds unthinkable, remember that the insufferable Iowa GOP senator Joni Ernst won re-election to the Senate over a Democratic opponent who knew corn and soybean prices better than she did. Remember also that many a Republican wave has swept some serious chuckleheads into the Senate - remember Dan Quayle? Right now, the Democrats may be gaining some momentum thanks to having passed popular legislation in the past few weeks, but with inflation and public health issues still a problem, the Democrats could end up answering an old riddle on Election Day . . . the riddle of what happens when a force in motion meets an immovable object.  

But quality still matters.

"Gimme That Vaccine, Maxine!"

I'm a poet, and I know it.

Here's something else to wax poetic about: While President Biden fights COVID, the Republican Party is fighting his fight against it by opposing vaccine mandates, testing and PPE requirements, yet they keep blaming him for the rise in COVID cases. 

Why do the Republicans fight policies designed to alleviate and solve problems and then deflect the blame to the Democrats?  Mainly because it works.  Ronald Reagan blamed unemployment and failed foreign-policy initiatives on his watch on Jimmy Carter, Newt Gingrich blamed runaway spending on Bill Clinton despite being a strong proponent of increased military spending, right-wing talk radio hosts blamed 9/11 on Bill Clinton despite George W. Bush's lack of engagement with efforts to stop bin Laden, and John Boehner blamed a sluggish economy on Obama after blocking his efforts to improve it.  And look what happened: Reagan and Bush the Younger were both elected to second terms as President and Gingrich and Boehner became Speaker Of the House.

By blocking Biden from fighting the pandemic and dodging the blame for blocking him and thus not paying a price politically, Republicans think they can win back Congress in the 2022 midterms - especially if they can also keep concentrating on immigration (except that Biden went ahead and kept a Trump policy in place to have Mexico keep migrants bound for America for processing) and inflation (though the economy is still strong and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will likely raise interest rates gradually to reverse it).  If inflation does ease and immigration becomes less of an issue by November 2022, well, a perpetual pandemic is the GOP's magic bullet.

But get this: Thanks to the omicron variant - the omicorona, I call it - vaccination rates in America are spiking now.  More people are taking this seriously.  And Biden has wisely decided not to offer any happy talk about the future like he did when Delta first appeared here.  More and more people on the same page, and it's not one in the GOP's playbook.  Although the Republicans are pandering to their base, the fact is that over 71 percent of Americans 18 and over - that is, Americans of voting age - are fully vaccinated.  Not all vaccinated adults are Democrats, of course, but most unvaccinated adults are Republicans.  If Republicans think they can rely on the unvaccinated to people them to victory in the 2022 midterms while President Biden and the Democrats continue to work diligently at trying to get things done for the American people - with plenty of time for their efforts to bear meaningful fruit before November 2022 - they're going to have to play a better hand than that.

Although, voter suppression remains an ace up their sleeves.          

Try to hang on, Maxine.