Posted on 10/18/21
| News Source: The Hill
Democrats are grappling with the increasingly dire political reality facing them in next year’s midterm elections as warning signs pile up for the party ahead of 2022.
Once hopeful that they could defy the typical midterm shellacking dealt to the party in power, a series of foreboding developments has rocked that sense of optimism. President Biden’s approval ratings are in free fall, his top legislative priorities have stalled and, just this week, Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) announced that he would retire, making him the first senior House Democrat to bow out ahead of the midterms.
In conversations with The Hill in recent days, several Democratic strategists and operatives expressed a growing sense of pessimism about 2022. Each one said that the party’s recent decline is reversible. Still, most offered a sober assessment of Democrats’ position heading into the final stretch of 2021.
“To be blunt, I’m not feeling good about where we are,” one senior Democratic congressional aide said. “Look, it was never going to be easy or anything. It was always kind of contingent on what got done. I just think we’re starting to see how fragile this is.”
Democrats have virtually no room for error in 2022. Republicans need to flip only five seats in the House to recapture control of the lower chamber, and they stand to benefit right off the bat from redistricting in key states and the historical maxim that the party of a new president tends to lose ground in midterm elections.