By Elliott Brack | Who was the big winner in the 2022 midterm elections?
It was President Joe Biden, no doubt about it.
President Bill Clinton and Barack Obama lost heavily in their midterms. (The Democrats lost 63 House seats in Barack Obama’s first midterm, and 52 in Bill Clinton’s.) The change this year will be a far smaller loss for the Democrats. The election mainly gave the Democrats a majority in the Senate.
Our United States will therefore end up with perhaps its best form of government, a divided Congress. That means that both parties must work together to move our country forward in any way.
Biden, though himself not on the ballot, found the country accepting of his programs through their choices of candidates. He surprised a lot of people by Democrats not losing as badly as the pollsters had predicted. While the Democrats have lost the House, it was as one source said: “The red wave never materialized, Trump’s handpicked candidates underperformed, some new faces emerged—but the country appears as evenly divided as ever.”
And though Donald Trump will never admit or understand it, he probably lost more than anyone else in the midterms. His cachet is no longer automatically a winning one for Republicans, as voters in many areas rejected his divisive politics.
And Trump’s anticipated announcement that he might be a candidate in the 2024 presidential campaign ought to cause the more clear-thinking Republicans to wonder: Do we really want more of his antics? It could damage his running again.
For now, more people seem content to rely upon “Uncle Joe Biden” to guide them through living in modern day America.
Prior to election day, the pollsters were saying that inflation was the key issue. There appears to have been another overwhelming factor in this election: the right of a woman to have control over her body. It turned out that, indeed, abortion was much more deep-seated as an issue.
In four states, Michigan, California, Vermont and in Kentucky, the right to an abortion won the day, much like it showed earlier this year in Kansas.
Republican-controlled state legislatures may try to push through more abortion limitations. But the nation’s people seem to line up as pro-abortion. The legislatures that try to limit abortions will do so at their peril.
The New Yorker summed up Election Day in this way: “By limiting their losses in the House to less than the average for such elections, and likely keeping the Senate as well, the Democrats scored an against-the-odds political upset that suggests that the country remains deeply skeptical of handing too much national power to the Trumpified Republican Party.”
Veteran Georgia journalist Elliott Brack is editor and publisher of GwinnettForum.com. Have a comment? Send to feedback@statehousereport.com.
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