Biden’s optimism faces challenges
Predictions appear at odds with burdens people in the US feel
WASHINGTON — Democrats are going to hold onto the House after November’s midterm elections. They will pick up as many as four seats in the Senate, expanding their majority and overcoming internal dissent that has helped stifle their agenda.
As the challenges confronting President Joe Biden intensify, his predictions of a rosy political future for the Democratic Party are growing bolder, but seem at odds with a country that he acknowledged last week was “really, really down,” burdened by a pandemic, surging gas prices and spiking inflation.
Biden’s hopeful outlook is in line with a sense of optimism that has coursed through his nearly five-decade career and was at the center of his 2020 presidential campaign, which he said was built around restoring the “soul of America.” While presidents often try to emphasize the positive, there is a risk that Biden contributes to a dissonance between Washington and people across the country who are confronting genuine and growing economic pain.
Few of Biden’s closest political advisers are as bullish about the party’s prospects as the president. In interviews with a halfdozen people in and close to the White House, there is a broad sense that Democrats will lose control of Congress, and that many of the party’s leading candidates in down-ballot races and contests for governor will be defeated in an election Biden himself can do little to help.
The seeming disconnect has some in the party worried the White House has not fully grasped just how bad this election year may be for Democrats.
“I don’t expect any president to go out and say, ‘You know what, we’re going to lose the next election,’ ” said Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, which is in regular contact with the White House’s policy team. What might serve Biden better, Marshall said, would be “a sober sense of, ‘Look, we’re probably in for a rough night in November, and our strategy should be to remind the country what’s at stake.’ ”
The White House is hardly ignoring the problem.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s 2020 campaign manager who now serves as one of his deputy chiefs of staff, runs the political team from the West Wing along with Emmy Ruiz, a longtime Texas-based Democratic political consultant. O’Malley Dillon coordinates strategy among the White House, the Democratic National Committee and an array of outside party groups.
Returning to the White House is veteran strategist Anita Dunn. Biden turned to her in February 2020, giving her broad control of his then-cash strapped presidential campaign as it appeared on the brink of collapse after a disastrous fourth-place showing in the Iowa caucus.
But where White House officials last year harbored hopes that voters could be convinced of Biden’s accomplishments and reverse their dismal outlook on the national direction, aides now acknowledge that such an uphill battle is no longer worth fighting. They have pushed the president to be more open about his own frustrations — particularly on inflation — to show voters he shares their concerns, and to cast Republicans and their policies as obstacles to addressing these issues.
In public, Biden has betrayed few concerns about his party’s fortunes this fall, opting instead for relentlessly positivity.
“I think there are at least four seats that are up for grabs that we could pick up in the Senate,” the president told donors recently in Maryland. “And we’re going to keep the House.”
Biden meant Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with potential longer shots in North Carolina or Florida possibly representing No. 4. Aides say the president is looking to fire up his base with such predictions. But one laughed when asked if it was possible that Democrats could pick up four Senate seats.
The party’s chances of maintaining House control may be bleaker.
Biden has traveled more since last fall, promoting a $1 trillion public works package that became law in November, including visiting competitive territory in Minnesota, Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Hampshire.
Bernie Sanders, the 80-year-old Vermont senator who was the last challenger eliminated in 2020, has not ruled out running should Biden not seek reelection. That has revived questions about whether Biden, 79, might opt not to run.
The more immediate question of Biden’s midterm appeal could be trickier. He campaigned for Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia last November, after winning the state easily in 2020. McAuliffe lost by 2 percentage points, a potentially bad omen for the 16 governorships Democrats are defending this fall.
“We know there are going to be national headwinds, there always are,” Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia, said recently. She also said she’d be happy to campaign with Biden or top members of his administration.
But Democrat Beto O’Rourke, running for governor in Texas, told reporters, “I’m not interested in any national politician — anyone outside of Texas — coming into this state to help decide the outcome of this race.”