For months, Democrats’ prospects in the November midterm elections have looked dire. The party, hamstrung by Joe Biden’s plunging popularity rates, has faced an electorate dealing with soaring grocery bills and gas prices, mounting housing crises and recession fears, as well as anger over the overturning of Roe v Wade by the supreme court.
This seeming dissatisfaction with Democrats, evidenced in various polls, came amid an already unfavorable historical context. Since the second world war, the political party in power in America has lost seats in nearly every midterm election, the New York Times noted.
Republicans, in turn, have wielded inflation as a political weapon, blaming it on Biden and Democrats’ spending habits – and trotting out crime as a bogeyman for an anxious electorate. They also scored several redistricting victories, potentially giving them an edge in some races.
Recent special elections, however, suggest that Democrats might not be quite as politically beleaguered as once believed. Especially as Biden and his party have also hit a winning streak of successes: getting a huge domestic spending bill through the Senate, killing a top terrorist abroad and roaring jobs numbers that have seen employment get back to pre-pandemic levels.
While Republicans still appear poised to take back the House, their potential victory might not be as expansive as some once thought, some experts say.
Three August races – analyzed by the news website Axios – where Democrats and Republicans faced off appear to suggest the party is now outperforming expectations at the ballot box. One was Minnesota’s first district special election, where Republican Brad Finstad bested Democrat Jeff Ettinger by four points.
This margin was only one point greater than the deceased Republican congressman Jim Hagedorn’s three-point win in 2020. Notably, Trump won the district by a 10-point margin that year, Axios reported.
Two races in Washington state also demonstrated a potential slowing political momentum for Republicans. Democrats landed 49.6% of the vote in Washington’s eighth congressional district, over Republicans’ 49.2%, in a contest where candidates from all parties were on the same primary ballot.
The Washington Democratic congresswoman Kim Schrier, won the seat by just a four-point margin in 2020 and so under the conventional wisdom, Republicans should be landing this key swing seat with a healthy margin.
The Washington Senate contest also saw the Democratic senator Patty Murray secure 52.5% of the vote, while Republicans got 41.2%.
“The results show Republicans are making inroads,” Axios reported, “but not nearly enough to unseat the veteran senator in a solid blue state.”
The explanation behind this might stem from several watershed wins for Democrats. On Sunday, they passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a $739bn healthcare and climate bill.
The party has vowed that this bill, if given the green light by Biden, would lower healthcare bills for millions, as it would permit Medicare to begin negotiating the price of some expensive prescriptions. The legislation would also cap Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket prescription drug costs at $2,000 annually.
Recipients of health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace might also see lower premiums. The tax provisions in this legislation to pay for these initiatives – such as a new corporate minimum tax and 1% excise tax on stock buybacks – could also slash the deficit by $300bn.
Some economic indicators have also improved. Gas prices have dropped below $4 for the first time in months, according to AAA and reports.
In July, non-farm payroll employment rose by 528,000, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The unemployment rate dipped to 3.5%, and wages were up 0.5% for July and 5.2% from the same month of 2021, according to CNBC.
Biden also scored a political victory when he revealed that the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in a US drone strike. Zawahiri, who had served as Osama bin Laden’s deputy, helped plan the September 11 attacks.
“There seems to be a glimmer of hope about inflation improving, the gas prices are going down, those are two major concerns,” said Sharon Austin, professor of political science at the University of Florida. Biden’s bipartisan successes, coupled with disappointing Republican candidates in some Senate races and Trump’s mounting legal woes, also help.
Alvin Tillery, founder and director of Northwestern University’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, is among the political experts who do not think that Democrats will suffer dramatic losses. “I was never, one, in the camp with my own poll, my own work, to believe that it was going to be a complete bloodbath,” Tillery said.
Tillery thinks the Republicans would underperform in Senate races, and expects Democrats to not only hold the Senate, but potentially gain a seat or two. However, Tillery does not believe that this is due to pocketbook issues.
Rather, Tillery believes this stems from Republicans’ political missteps, which have been so egregious that they trounce Democrats’ failure to focus on race and income inequality–issues that drove voters of color to the polls.
“I think that the sort of Republicans, particularly the Trumpist Republicans, are way out of step with the mainstream opinion – which is part of the reason they behave the way they do and try to steal power all the time,” Tillery said.
“The Republicans gifted Democrats this thing on Roe. It’s just so bizarre how they would, in an election year, take that decision in Dobbs, and then take that and start talking about things like contraception, and ending the right to privacy, and then overturning [same-sex marriage].”
Like Tillery, Shawn J Donahue, an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo’s department of political science, pointed to Kansans recent vote to protect abortion in the state constitution which handed the abortion rights movement a stunning victory in a socially conservative red state.
“That just really turned out their voters,” Donahue said of Democrats’ voting in the Kansas election.