Biden’s optimism collides with political challenges
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. The assessments, delivered in speeches, fundraisers and conversations with friends and allies, seem at odds with a country that he acknowledged this week was “really, really down,” burdened by a pandemic, surging gas prices and spiking inflation.
Biden’s hopeful outlook tracks 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.” In a lengthy Oval Office interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, Biden said part of his job as president is to “be confident.”
“Because I am confident,” he said. “We are better positioned than any country in the world to own the second quarter of the 21st century. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact.”
While presidents often try to emphasize the positive, there is a risk in this moment 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 half-dozen 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, with Biden unable to offer much help.
The seeming disconnect between Biden’s view and the political reality 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 well instead, 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.
After years in which Democrats have operated in political silos, there is a greater focus on marshaling resources. 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. Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman who cochaired Biden’s 2020 campaign and was one of his closest White House advisers, left for a job with the DNC in April. He characterized the move as underscoring the administration’s full grasp of the importance of the midterms.
“We understand that you cannot govern if you can’t win,” Richmond said in an interview. “We are treating it with that sense of urgency.”
The president’s political message is being honed by Mike Donilon, a longtime Biden aide who is a protector of Biden’s public image, and veteran party strategist Anita Dunn, who is returning to the White House for a second stint.
Richmond praised Dunn’s political instincts and said he believes she will team with O’Malley Dillion, White House chief of staff Ron Klain and others to promote messaging that many in their own party may underestimate.
“If I had a penny for every time Democrats counted Joe Biden or Kamala Harris out, I’d be independently wealthy,” Richmond said.
Biden turned to Dunn during an especially low political moment in February 2020, giving her broad control of his thencash strapped presidential campaign as it appeared on the brink of collapse after a disastrous fourth-place showing in the Iowa caucus.
Barely a week later, Biden left New Hampshire before its primary polls had even closed, ultimately finishing fifth. But he took second in Nevada, won South Carolina handily and saw the Democratic establishment rally around him at breakneck speed in mere days after that. O’Malley Dillon then joined the campaign and oversaw Biden’s general election victory.
A similar reversal of political fortune may be necessary now.
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. Instead, they have pushed the president to be more open about his own frustrations — particularly on inflation — to show voters that he shares their concerns and to cast Republicans and their policies as obstacles to addressing these issues.
Though he has increasingly expressed anger about inflation, Biden has publicly 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 a recent gathering of donors 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. Some aides admit that assessment is too optimistic. They say the president is simply seeking to fire up his base with such predictions. One openly 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. Still, Tim Persico, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is charged with defending the party’s narrow majority, said Biden remains an asset.
“We love when the president is speaking to the country,” Persico said. “There’ll always be frustrations. I totally get that. But I think he’s his own best messenger.”
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. During a trip to Democratic Rep. Cindy Axne’s Iowa swing district, the president declared, “My name is Joe Biden. I work for Congresswoman Axne.”
But Bernie Sanders, the last challenger eliminated as Biden clinched the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is making his own Iowa trip this weekend to rally striking workers at construction and agriculture equipment plants.
The 80-year-old Vermont senator has not ruled out a third presidential bid in 2024 should Biden not seek reelection. That has revived questions about whether Biden, 79, might opt not to run — speculation that has persisted despite the White House political operation gearing up for the midterms and beyond.