This is an outstanding autopsy of the 2022 midterms and how the Biden team successfully made the election one about preserving democracy, fighting off the extremism of MAGA Republicans, and restoring reproductive rights.
How Biden team helped Dems avert midterm disaster
Rather than trying to push back about inflation and the economy, as they were scolded to do by the punditocracy (including liberal-leaning outlets) and huge portions of the Democratic caucus, the Biden team showed message discipline as it avoided making the election a referendum on Biden’s first term.
Ultimately, they were successful sticking the MAGA brand on Republican candidates in swing districts across the nation as they harnessed unprecedented voter energy about the Dobbs decision.
As Democrats, we are used to whining and crying about how the Dems can’t message. Fortunately for democracy, the Biden team got it done this year on the messaging front.
Never was the disconnect between Biden and other Democrats — congressional candidates, consultants, pundits — more apparent than on the Wednesday before Election Day, when he delivered a speech on democracy from D.C.’s Union Station, whose decrepit interior has hardly been a beacon of inspiration since the start of the pandemic. Biden spoke of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, only a short walk away, and of the previous week’s attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in San Francisco, which advisers say deeply rattled him.
He had been espousing his faith in democracy from the moment he announced his run for the presidency in 2019; now, with his party possibly on the cusp of a major setback and his own political fortunes plummeting, he wanted to celebrate democracy and democratic institutions one more time before polling sites opened.
As he had been doing for months, he denounced the so-called MAGA Republicans — the acronym, for Make America Great Again, is from Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run — who, he said, were endangering abortion rights and electoral integrity.
“The fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America, lies where it always does — with the people, in your hands, in your heart, in your ballot,” Biden said.
Pundits were not impressed. “Issues of democracy are hugely important at this moment and in next week's election,” the Democratic strategist David Axelrod, architect of Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential run, wrote on Twitter before the speech. “Totally appropriate for @POTUS to address them. Still, as a matter of practical politics, I doubt many Ds in marginal races are eager for him to be on TV tonight.”