(Dobbs) The Midterms: Completely Unpredictable
Maybe that's wishful thinking for Democrats. But maybe Republicans have squandered their leads.
Although many Americans will vote by mail well before election day itself, we are exactly two months from the culmination of November’s midterm elections. With razor-thin margins in both houses of Congress— and for some state offices too— the outcome will be consequential, no matter which side you’re on.
So what’s going to happen?
People who know I’ve spent a fair part of my career covering politics sometimes ask me that very question. My answer to one and all is the same: “I’ve never been in the prediction business.”
But today, no one should be. In state after state, contest after contest, the midterms are too close to call. For Democrats and Republicans alike, seats that once seemed safe, if you can believe the polls, aren’t any more. The funding arms of both political parties are shifting their support in some cases from one state to another, depending on where they see wins on the horizon and where they’re losing hope.
Then throw in the traditional decline in the fortunes of the party in power, the Democrats, and the unfavorable ratings for President Biden’s performance, but counterbalance those with a long list of lasting legislation by the Democrats that should make our lives better. New roads and bridges, an attack against climate change, home-grown microchips, lower prices for prescription drugs, enhanced background checks for guns, and an economy that is strengthening and inflation (including gas prices) coming down.
It’s worth noting— and I can only hope that voters do make note of it— that when the bill came up a month ago for President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which lowers health care costs and attacks climate change and restores some equity to the tax system, all Democrats in the House and the Senate voted yes. All Republicans (who didn’t abstain) voted no. All of them. As commentator Farah Stockman recently wrote, "Some politicians seem to prefer seeing the country fail than helping the opposite party succeed.”
On top of that, polling almost across the board shows most Americans unhappy with the Republican-led Supreme Court’s ban on abortion and its equally conservative expansion of gun rights. Americans want gun control. Americans want abortion rights. Not to mention how each party has handled Covid. The New York Times just published a poll that asked Americans, have the Democrats or the Republicans handled Covid better? 45% said Democrats, 32% said Republicans. Of course after a president who told us maybe we should inject bleach in our bodies to stave off the virus, that’s not a very high bar.
Overseas, notwithstanding the messy albeit successful exit from Afghanistan, President Biden has a strong record too. He has resolutely rebuffed Russian aggression in Ukraine. After the Trump years, NATO is stronger again. And not just incidentally, Biden was the driving force behind the successful assassination of the al-Qaeda leader who helped Osama bin Laden plan the 9/11 massacres.
So where are we now? The Democrats have a lot to brag about, if only they can get the message through. Meantime, no matter how much its leaders might want to make us think about something else, the Republican Party cannot escape the anti-democratic disruptions, the never-ending lies, and the inexplicable grip on spineless politicians and incurious citizens of Donald Trump.
Longtime Associated Press special correspondent Mort Rosenblum put it all together in this week’s Mort Report: “Leaders are judged by their moment in time,” he wrote. “Considering what Joe Biden inherited and what he has managed to do so far at this perilous juncture in history, it is hard to recall a more effective American president. Yet a lot of voters want him gone.”
Then he issued a dire warning about Republicans who “choose to finish Donald Trump’s mission to turn America into a selfish one-party kleptocracy run by ideologues and plutocrats.”
Two months from today, that is what’s at stake.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
"Some politicians seem to prefer seeing the country fail than helping the opposite party succeed.”
No truer words ever spoken. Todays GQP only want one thing, their loony cronies in power. Nothing more. From there, no bar too low......
Very good piece, thanks. But nearly half of American voters receive only right wing info....and lies. Ive wondered for a few years at least whether a Walter Cronkite could have a universally respected platform today.