On the morning of November 10th 2023, as Israeli bombs fall on Gaza and pro-Palestinian protesters fill the streets and offices and voicemails of Democratic electeds, President Joe Biden has sunk to an average approval rating of 38.7 on fivethirtyeight.com, which purports to adjust often partisan polling to create a more objective measure of the temperature of the American electorate. On November 6th, the day before crucial elections in Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, the well-respected NYT/Sienna polling firm presented a truly dire view of the president’s re-election odds, showing Biden trailing the presumptive Republican nominee, his 2020 opponent, four–times indicted insurrectionist rapist fraudster Donald J Trump, in six of seven swing states that Biden won three years ago.
According to historical precedent, often cited by data-driven pundits such as Nate Silver and Dave Wasserman, these conditions should be utterly disastrous for the President’s party. Even a popular president, which Biden is apparently not, faces historical headwinds in midterms and off-year elections. In the summer before the 2022 Midterm elections, a strange discrepancy between Biden’s approval rating of around 38 percent and the average 1 point lead for Democrats in the Generic Ballot polling was explained as a temporary phenomenon. And indeed, while Biden’s approval rating lingered well below 50 percent despite a late surge that brought his average back into the 40s, the generic ballot swung to the right later that year, as did the polls for a number of crucial contested Senate races, where Democrats had to defend vulnerable incumbents in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and New Hampshire. At the same time, they had to challenge for an open seat in Pennsylvania vacated by the retiring Pat Toomey, and there was close race in the Biden-won state of Wisconsin against unpopular Republican incumbent Ron Johnson, as well as a longer-shot attempt by Tim Ryan to become Ohio’s junior senator at the expense of venture capitalist Appalachia Whisperer J.D. Vance.
Meanwhile, Democratic governors elected during the height of anti-Trump partisanship in Kansas, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine, Colorado, and Connecticut were on the ballot, with open races in Pennsylvania, Oregon, Arizona, and Maryland. GOP-held governor’s mansions in Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Ohio were on table but seemed like distant dreams. Indeed, what was predicted in Biden’s first midterm was more along the lines of the 2010 wipeout that obliterated the gains of then-DNC chair Howard Dean’s ’50 State Strategy’ and marked the beginning for the end of Democratic governance in the South and the Plains states – and for some years the Midwest as well. A reprise of 2010 could have put Republicans in a commanding position in Biden-voting states just in time for challenges to 2020 redistricting and an epidemic of anti-trans, anti-voting rights, and anti-abortion legislation. Worse still, most of the states had crucial races for the position of Secretary of State, which oversees most election processes, featuring multiple Republican candidates who actively and explicitly doubted the results of the 2020 election that delivered their state’s votes to President Trump’s challenger, and implicitly or explicitly threatened to steal the next election if they didn’t like the outcome.
Despite the aftermath of the public congressional investigation into the January 6th insurrection and the involvement of President Trump and his closest allies, an appeal to preserving the small-d democratic integrity of America’s institutions highlighted by a primetime address where the wash of one of the colors of the American flag projected against the White House drew more attention from pundits than the contents of Biden’s speech, and the 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson which reversed the precedent of Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood and started an avalanche of pre-existing ‘trigger laws’ restricting or virtually eliminating legal abortion in multiple states, polling averages and particularly internal polls pointed to an outcome for the President’s party more like 2010 than 2002.
In their panic and anticipation of electoral carnage, the DCCC and DNC triaged multiple Biden-voting districts, leaving both incumbents and Democratic challengers short of funds at a crucial moment. Among the casualties of this tactical withdrawal was Wisconsin’s Mandela Barnes, who faced a blitz of negative advertising almost completely unanswered in the Democrats’ single most promising pickup opportunity in the Senate (besides the proverbial money pit of Florida, where Val Demings ran a well-funded but unsuccessful conservative-leaning campaign against Marco Rubio). Instead Democrats tried to limit the damage they saw coming, redirecting resources to marginal Democrat-held seats, including that of the DCCC chairman himself, Sean Patrick Maloney. Buoyed by late polls that showed unexpectedly close Senate races in the reliably blue states of Washington and Colorado, Republican strategists, pundits and Election Twitter weirdos alike allowed themselves to dream of a truly transformative result that would lock Democrats out of Senate control for the foreseeable future, with a truly dismal map for Democratic incumbents giving them the chance to build a filibuster-proof majority as soon as 2024.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Washington D.C. The Red Wave never arrived.
Republicans took the House of Representatives, but instead of flipping 20 or 30 seats (or 40, as Democrats managed in their 2018 midterm rout) they netted nine (an outcome made even more underwhelming in that it was not entirely clear the House had flipped until days after the election, after the ‘blue shift’ from late-arriving mail ballots didn’t move the needle in enough races). DCCC Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney went down himself along with a number of New York and California Democrats hamstrung by lackluster statewide campaigns by Kathy Hochul and Gavin Newsom in states whose residents were unthreatened by the Dobbs decision. But dozens of endangered Democratic incumbents elsewhere survived, some even in Trump-leaning districts, with a particularly robust Democratic performance in the Rust Belt without aberrant turnout for the President’s party.
In the other chamber, Republicans actually lost ground in the Senate, with Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman besting Trump-endorsed celebrity television host and puppy killer Mehmet Oz by a five-point margin. Every single Senate Democrat won re-election, some in outright blowouts, even if Republican Adam Laxalt came within a point of taking down Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada in a heavily R-leaning electorate. The same state saw the only loss by an incumbent Democratic governor, as the unpopular Steve Sisolak succumbed to former Sheriff Joe Lombardo (though Democrats retained control of the state legislature). The Senate race in Georgia went to a run-off, not unexpectedly, though somewhat surprisingly considering just how badly Stacey Abrams lost her rematch with Brian Kemp. But, incredibly, when ballots from Clark County were finally tabulated, Democrats had, against all odds and predictions, retained Senate control. In December, Rev. Raphael Warnock triumphed over the deflated campaign of former football star and CTE-ridden cosplay law enforcement official Herschel Walker. When the dust cleared, Chuck Schumer’s Senate majority had somehow increased by one.
There has been a lot of discussion of how the polls and pundits got things so wrong, from belated recognition of a deluge of partisan polling, the Dobbs effect, the dismal quality of Republican candidates in key races, and the strength of a number of Democratic incumbents. The Dobbs effect, where voters were suddenly confronted that Republicans actually meant what they had been telling the base all these years, with further implications for extreme rhetoric on birth control and LGBT rights, was one of the more convincing explanations, but even so many doubted its durability by comparison to worries about inflation and Biden’s advanced age.
A year later, on Tuesday November 7th 2023, voters went to the polls again. If anything, things had gotten worse for Democrats and their beleaguered President. His approval rating had barely budged, stuck in the high 30s by most measures. The left flank of the party was enraged by what they saw as Biden’s complicity in the ongoing devastation of Gaza by bear-hugging inadvisable ally and reactionary crook Benjamin Netanyahu in response to the attacks into Israel along the Gazan border by Hamas on October 7th that killed around 1200 people, mostly Jews, at least two-thirds of them civilians, in the worst single day for the ethnic/religious group since the Shoah.
Activists and even an elected representative leveled charges of genocide with over 10,000 dead between Gaza and the West Bank, nearly all of them civilians even by the IDF’s reckoning, complete with the hashtag #GenocideJoe. This was not helped by Biden publicly doubting the figures provided by the Hamas-affiliated Gaza Ministry of Health, despite the fact that those numbers have been treated as reliable in the past. Polls showed cratering support from Arab-Americans and Muslim voters, who make up a key marginal demographic in the Dem coalition in Michigan.
Meanwhile, the President’s legislative agenda had been stopped dead by the election of a Republican majority in the House, with his greatest triumph being barely avoiding default on the country’s debt that summer. His signature attempt to appeal to younger and more progressive voters, forgiveness of $10,000 to $20,000 against their federal student loan debt, had been stymied by the Supreme Court. Biden was perceived as old, out of touch, and polled well below the mythical Generic Democrat. Majorities of Democratic voters didn’t even want him to run again, though a replacement was and is a hypothetical.
On the ballot last Tuesday were the governor’s races in blood red Mississippi and Kentucky, legislative races in unexpectedly competitive Virginia, where Governor Glenn Youngkin had ridden backlash to Biden’s election to an upset victory in 2021, legislative races in New Jersey, and critical judicial races in Pennsylvania. Ohio was also attempting to enshrine the right to abortion and to buy and use marijuana recreationally by ballot referenda. Despite a remarkable trend of overperformances in special elections held since the 2022 midterms, many anticipated that Biden’s poor approval rating would finally come back to bite Democrats, who were polling about as badly as they have in recent history with an American public more inclined to trust the out-of-power Republicans on many key issues.
It didn’t.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear actually improved his margin of victory over 2019 with Trump in the White House. Republicans not only failed to take the Virginia State Senate, but lost their majority in the House of Delegates, and Democratic candidates swept to victory in the Keystone state, including the vital State Supreme Court seat. Most astonishingly of all, public utilities commissioner Brandon Presley did something no Democrat was able to do in a statewide election in Mississippi during the Trump administration, breaking 47 percent of the vote in the infamously polarized state, and drawing within 1.5 points of forcing Republican Governor Tate Reeves into a runoff. Reeves’ final margin of victory (4.4) in a Trump+16 state was actually narrower than that of Governor Beshear (5.0) in a state that Biden lost by nearly 26 points. (EDIT 11/25: after the belated counting of ballots in several counties, Reeves’ margin of victory fell to a stunningly slim 3.2 percent, just 0.9 percent from being forced into a runoff).
The question on everyone’s minds has to be: what the hell is going on?
There are a lot of theories. Some of them are utterly delusional, blaming Democratic victories on barely—legal strategies such as ‘ballot harvesting,’ despite the fact that the electorate in 2022 was actually Republican leaning, R+1.6 accounting for uncontested races. Others tried to use the available data from self-reported partisanship and polling crosstabs to suggest that a large number of Trump voters had either sat out 2022 and 2023 or that persuasion gains by Democrats would be neutralized with the unpopular Biden on the ballot, despite his, again, four-times indicted insurrectionist rapist presumptive opponent. The other prevailing theory is that due to education polarization resulting from the realignment of the Trump era, Democrats were now advantaged in low-turnout elections, an advantage that would disappear in the general election of 2024.
There is a problem with this, of course. An electorate more favorable to Trump and Republicans in 2024 than those that showed up in 2022 and 2023 would almost certainly have to result in something that has not happened since 2004 – a Republican win in the popular vote for president. To say this is unlikely is frankly an understatement – if Biden is unpopular, Trump is even more unpopular, as well as facing four different criminal trials. This makes the kind of persuasion gains – or turnout differential – that would be required to create this scenario essentially unprecedented.
That’s a kind way of saying these theories are completely insane, and based more on vibes and notoriously unreliable polling crosstabs than any kind of convincing evidence.
There’s another reason a Republican recovery from their post-Dobbs slump is unlikely – the party is witnessing a breakdown in its electoral apparatus at every level, and not merely failing to learn the lessons of the rejection of Republican extremism on abortion, trans rights, and election denial in 2022, they are doubling down on it, albeit with some small adjustments (lies) about how they only favor 15-week abortion bans, neglecting to mention that this is a ceiling, not a floor, and Alabama will not be required to offer the same abortion access as New York. Transphobia again played a major role in Republic advertising and messaging strategies, with Andy Beshear accused of supporting gender-affirming surgery for minors and men competing in women’s sports (featuring the country’s worst sore loser other than President Trump, swimmer Riley Gaines) by the leading light of American transphobia, the American Principles Project. This despite year after year of evidence that transphobia is an electoral loser, none of which has apparently made the slightest difference in how Republicans chose to spend their time and money. Republicans are no longer trusted to be ‘reasonable’ about their restrictions on abortions even in states as red as Montana and Kansas, and the former swing state of Ohio voted to enshrine the right to abortion access by eleven points earlier this week. Buoyed by these successes, Democrats have stepped up efforts to get abortion on even more ballots in time for the 2024 general election, though substantial obstacles still exist.
The Republican triumph in the House of Representatives has turned sour. The deal with the devil that secured Kevin McCarthy the Speakership last year, which included a provision for a single member to trigger a leadership challenge, was at last utilized by trolling MAGA-favorite Florida Republican Matt Gaetz. Democrats, under new, younger leadership, declined to bail out McCarthy, who had offered them exactly nothing in exchange. In a humiliation for the pride of Bakersfield, McCarthy became the first Speaker of the House to ever lose a leadership vote on the floor. For weeks, the House had no Speaker, as the divided Republican caucus cycled through options including Steve Scalise, a self-described ‘David Duke without the baggage,’ election denying, Ohio State University wrestling sexual abuse ignoring, sleeve-hating Jim Jordan, and the utterly forgettable Tom Emmer, who drew the ire of the former President and saw his own bid fall apart before it reached the floor.
For a party reckoning with the electoral consequences of perceived extremism, the solution was far from ideal: Louisiana theocrat Mike Johnson, who like Jordan had been at the forefront of efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and represented a throwback to the kind of social conservatism that had been scarcely allowed out in public by the RNC since the Bush administration, the kind that not only opposes abortion access, but access to contraceptives, the rights of LGBT Americans well beyond marriage equality, and perhaps most jaw-droppingly, no-fault divorce. His and his wife’s activism in anti-LGBT causes and other reactionary endeavors are already drawing scrutiny, underlining why he was not on anyone’s short list to succeed the deposed McCarthy. This is all, of course, assuming Johnson can pass a deal to keep the government open without facing a leadership challenge.
Besides policy preferences that are, to put it mildly, out of step with those of modern America and some serious questions about his lack of a bank account and ‘accountability’ arrangement with his teenage son concerning their consumption of pornography, Johnson presents another issue – unlike McCarthy, who was a prodigious fundraiser, Johnson has no experience in the second most important function of congressional legislative leader, though early returns look promising as Republican donors gear up for the 2024 cycle. (EDIT: 11/25: the early returns were a mirage)
Johnson is not the only growing question mark in terms of Republican congressional leadership. Legendary (or infamous, depending on who you ask) Senate Republican Mitch McConnell has vowed to stay on as Senate Minority Leader and serve out the rest of his term but is now 81 years old with increasingly visible health issues (though doctors insist his glitch-like-freezes in the middle of press conferences are not the result of a stroke or seizure, and might instead be related to a concussion he suffered in March, a different kind of brain injury). McConnell has been an absolute titan of fundraising, and his impending exit from the stage, is particularly concerning after the mismanagement of Rick Scott during his time as head of the NRSC in the disastrous 2022 election cycle, blowing through all but 23.2 million of the 181.5 million dollar haul in the Senate Republican war chest before the last weeks of the utterly dismal Republican senate campaign, after failing to recruit and shepherd through their primaries candidates better than Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, Don Bolduc, and Herschel Walker. The leading challenger for the leadership election that followed the 2022 midterms? Rick Scott, also seen in the summer of 2022 on a yacht in the Italian riviera while fellow Florida Republican Marco Rubio begged for funds to counter the orgy of DSCC spending in his race against Val Demings (ultimately, Marco probably didn’t need them, as Florida Democrats were utterly demolished in 2022, losing to Rubio by 16.4 percent and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis by an eye-watering 19.4 point margin). Scott is up for re-election in 2024, and Democrats have recruited probably the best candidate they could in former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, but he has to be favored to win another six-year term and again position himself as a potential successor to McConnell.
The story for state Republican parties is perhaps even more dire. In May it was reported that the Minnesota GOP, which had held at least one chamber of the state legislature during Governor Tim Walz’s tenure, had a whopping total of $53 on hand with unpaid bills of $335,000, including rent payments for last year’s state party convention. In Colorado, a state that has caromed from a swing state in the Bush years to one Democrats can confidently write in their side of the ledger, the official offices of the state Republican party were shuttered and had no paid members of staff, all while the state party leadership was consumed by infighting. In Michigan, a state won by President Trump in 2016, the party responded to being crushed in statewide elections by a ticket headed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer by choosing as leader the erratic election denier Kristina Karamo, who had just been thumped by Whitmer’s Secretary of State and possible successor, Jocelyn Benson. As one former Michigan Republican strategist put it, “The Michigan Republican Party is ideologically bankrupt, morally bankrupt and financially bankrupt.” The situation has not improved, as the state party, in a state Trump almost certainly has to win, is facing a default on their line of credit. There is even an ongoing attempt to remove Karamo, but the odds of success are unclear.
From 2018 to 2022, Pennsylvania Republicans lost control of the state legislature. Michigan and Minnesota now boast productive Democratic trifectas, the gerrymander-powered stranglehold that the Wisconsin GOP has enjoyed for more than a decade may collapse after a devastating loss that flipped the state’s Supreme Court. This will likely lead to a redrawing of legislative maps that could give Democrats a fair chance at control of the statehouse in 2024 to go with the re-elected Governor Tony Evers, and despite Mandela Barnes’s money problems, Ron Johnson came within a point of going down in a GOP-favoring electorate in 2022. In Arizona, things have deteriorated spectacularly: a red trifecta state that surprisingly elected a then-Democratic Senator in 2018 and shockingly voted for Biden and another Democrat for Senator in 2020 and 2022 has a Democratic governor, a shrinking and divided Republican majority in the legislature, and the AZGOP, under increasingly deranged leadership, suffered devastating losses in the Secretary of State and Attorney General races, all in an electorate that should have sent Kari Lake to the governor’s mansion. Despite a new leader, their fundraising attempts for 2024 are off to a very rough start.
The consequences of the crippling of the Republican Party’s superior fundraising apparatus and its Citizens’ United-enabled financial advantage by a combination of donor defection, fundraising strategies almost indistinguishable from phishing scams and pyramid schemes, utterly unpalatable candidates, attrition from the ouroboros of grift that is the modern conservative movement, and the breakout success of Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue compared to the intensely scammy WinRed, along with the Democrats’ ALL-CAPS histrionic Mothership Email formula finding its natural prey – the liberal boomer – have all become inescapable in recent cycles. The ‘Dark Money’ poured into completely opaque SuperPACs has been simply unable to compete with an unprecedented flow of Resistance Bucks, directed by individual donors to high profile and competitive races, rather than relying on the wisdom of the party leadership to determine where the funding will go. Incredibly, Andy Beshear’s campaign spending blew that of his opponent, establishment favorite Daniel Cameron, out of the water. In the crucial judicial election that may undo the Wisconsin supermajority, the kind of off-year election where poorly funded Democrats used to be left high and dry by both the base and party leadership, the campaign to elect Judge Protasiewicz outraised that of extremist conservative Dan Kelly before blowing him out in an April election, exactly the kind so neglected by Democrats before the Trump presidency. These are not isolated instances; once reliant on massive financial advantages, Republicans find themselves not only matched on that front, but short of the kind of enthusiastic and inexpensive volunteers most Democratic campaigns can muster. Attempts to duplicate this kind of grassroots canvassing effort were frustrated by the fact that increasingly those willing to work for a Republican campaign are as venal, selfish, and shameless as the people they are trying to elect. And of course the Republican standard bearer himself is the worst example of self-serving campaign spending, as a substantial percentage of supporter donations and even party funding have been swallowed up by his growing legal expenses.
And while Democrats build benches in states left abandoned in the Obama years, Republican staffers are vindictively outing one another as white supremacists to the media. From its voters to its President, the Republican Party has increasingly become what many centrist scolds unnecessarily warned the Democrats of becoming in the hysteria of the Defund the Police discourse – Extremely Online, trapped in an ideological bubble of their own making, unable or unwilling to talk a language that is not ridden with references to niche grievances, ideological pet projects, and complicated media narratives.
To take a step back, if one or two of these issues were afflicting the Democratic Party, as they memorably did towards the end of the Obama administration and the disastrous loss to Donald Trump in 2016, national and beltway media would be absolutely fixated on the impending and deserved doom awaiting the party, its leadership, and its ideology. The left, resurgent in elections for the first time in almost a century, would be blamed and further marginalized. There would be (even more) demands to throw marginal demographics like trans Americans under the bus to appeal to Real America. Democratic Strategists™ would be having near daily meltdowns in Politico, rather than just bi-weekly.
If all of these things were happening, the media would assume the Democrats were headed the way of the Whigs.
As discussed earlier, that is not at all what is happening. A farce of a primary is playing out in the Republican party presidential race, Republicans are salivating at the chance to destroy the Democrats’ senate majority in 2024 (made all the more likely with the news that Joe Manchin will not be running for re-election), and it is generally accepted that the Presidential election is, at best, a tossup, an outcome at least some of the press seems to be actively rooting for. Rather than looking to the weak state of Republican fundraising and its electoral costs, the Beltway press seems more interested in random NPC Democrat Dean Phillips inexplicably joining the quasi-primary by running to Biden’s right, replacing vaccine skeptic failson Robert Kennedy Jr (who is planning an independent run that may well siphon away some of the low-trust, low-information voters brought into the Republican coalition by Trump) and staff-abusing crystal-hawking born-again progressive Marianne Williamson.
In the 1968 election, with the war in Vietnam escalating and much of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition alienated and angry about the Johnson administration’s aggressive expansion of civil rights for Black Americans and the welfare state, Democrats began a steady march into the political wilderness. After eking out a win with the help of the Southern Democrats defecting to follow segregationist George Wallace in 1968, Richard Nixon won a resounding victory in 1972, and the worst scandal in American Presidential history to date only slowed the Democrats’ nosedive, as Jimmy Carter’s trifecta accomplished comparatively little before being run over by the Reagan Revolution. The next Democratic president would come from Arkansas, twelve years later, and his signature legislative accomplishment would be the undoing of parts of Johnson’s Great Society. The years from 1968 to 2008 (generously) represented a repudiation and failure of the social democratic traditions of the Democratic party, one that is only gradually starting to swing back with Biden’s vocal support of unions and signature Child Tax Credit (killed by the aforementioned Joe Manchin).
This is a pattern that should seem familiar. After a razor-thin, SCOTUS-assisted ‘victory’ in 2000, George W. Bush rode a wave of patriotism and cynical ballot initiatives to not only beat challenger John Kerry, but win the popular vote in 2004. The failures of his administration in Iraq and the Great Recession led to the election of Barack Obama, but the coalition of of young voters, minorities and rural ‘ancestral’ Democrats that sent the first Black man to the White House showed cracks during elections where he was not on the ballot, and broke completely in 2016, when Donald Trump rode a wave of Obama defectors in the Rust Belt to a stunning victory and the first Republican trifecta since 2004. But as with Carter and the Democrats, this recovery was short-lived – after a spectacularly failed effort to repeal Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement led to a conventionally dismal showing in the midterms, Trump lost re-election and Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress.
In 2022 and again in 2023, when the Republican party seemed primed to return to power, power that twinned with their stranglehold on the federal judiciary they might not relinquish for a generation, they were stymied by the coalition-splintering aftereffects of Dobbs v. Jackson, a long-awaited triumph for the religious right in the almost exactly the same way – and potentially with the same electoral downsides – that the Civil Rights Era and Great Society had been for the New Deal Democrats. As the post-LBJ Democrats collapsed in the South, suburbs once full of Bush Republicans are hurtling left, and not entirely due to demographic changes. Though exacerbated by Dobbs v. Jackson, this re-alignment (corresponding with a reddening of the less vote-rich but politically-overrepresented exurbs and rurals) has been a feature of the Trump-era Republican Party’s electoral fortunes.
Despite Biden’s dismal approval ratings, the Republican party objectively shows few signs of being able to change course to avoid a clobbering in a more Democratic-leaning electorate in 2024 – perhaps not a defeat on the scale of Reagan’s annihilation of Mondale, but not as far off as might be assumed with the very real possibility that the Republican nominee could be either kneecapped by an unpopular Republican establishment or campaigning from a jail cell after being convicted in one of four separate criminal trials.
For all the appeals to history to argue the winning fortunes of Democrats are short lived, the demise of the New Deal coalition is rarely invoked as a possible outcome for a Republican party showing fundamental cracks and unable to restrain a feral and median voter-repellant Republican primary electorate and their four-times indicted God Emperor slash Jesus Christ stand-in, whose mental faculties have significantly declined from his 2016 heyday. The extremism of the Trump administration and what followed has accelerated the leftward swing of America’s suburbs, once the bastion of the Bush-era Republican coalition, and based on 2022, Democrats may have bottomed out in the rural parts of the country that threatened doom in their 2016 losses.
Of course, it’s possible that Joe Biden and the Democrats will lose the 2024 elections, with disastrous consequences for our republic and its citizens.
But it is also possible, maybe even just as likely if the state of his opponents is honestly taken into account, that Joe Biden, sub-40 approval rating and all, could romp to victory, perhaps even managing the miracle of preserving Democratic Senate control despite a brutal map. It is possible Joe Biden might be in a position to reshape American politics for the next decade, not unlike how the Reagan Revolution wiped away many of the gains of the Kennedy/Johnson years, and forced the Democratic party to the right in order to regain a chance at the White House.
And in the event that happens, many pundits and commentators will wonder how this came about, how they could have possibly missed the signs a year out that Republicans were headed for a massive, party-splintering defeat.
If or when that happens, they should have seen the signs all along.