Op-Ed: Midterms Will Be a Democrat Disaster - And Even COVID Won't Save Them
As we race toward this fall’s midterm elections, it is obvious to even cursory observers of our political landscape that Democrats are in for a shellacking.
As of this writing, both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have job approval ratings that are underwater by double-digit margins. Even more ominous, the RealClearPolitics polling average reveals that Americans, by an astonishing 37.5 percent margin, believe the country is on the “wrong track.”
Put simply, voters can’t stand Biden, hate Harris even more and think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Also auguring poorly for Democrats is the near-ironclad rule of American politics that a sitting president’s political party will lose seats in the first post-inauguration midterm election. Seeing the writing on the wall, 21 sitting House Democrats have announced that they do not intend to run for re-election — compared to only six House Republicans.
The only real question is whether Republicans up and down the ballot this fall will prevail at rates that exceed the Tea Party wave of the 2010 midterm elections.
In a desperate attempt to stave off, or at least mitigate, a veritable electoral bloodbath, Democrats have conveniently decided that now is the time to finally stop obsessing over COVID-19. Yes, now — right as polling shows a majority of Americans want to end or seriously lessen coronavirus-induced lifestyle restrictions.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul just announced an end to the Empire State’s statewide masking requirement for businesses, although a mask mandate regrettably remains in place at schools and health care facilities. What’s more, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Oregon and California — all of which, like New York, are Democrat-governed — announced this week their own plans to lift indoor mask mandates either later in February or in March.
Democratic leaders have invariably pointed to receding caseloads, and perhaps “the science,” more generally, to justify their obviously coordinated reversals on mask mandates. To be sure, mask mandates (for ineffective masks) and vaccine mandates (for vaccines that do not stop transmission) are bad public policy. So good for Democrats for finally catching up. Welcome to the party, guys; some of us have been here for a while already.
But Democrats cannot plausibly pretend that “the science” has changed in any meaningful way. All that has changed is their ever-plummeting polling and ever-shrinking chances this fall.
Hochul and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have not had some sort of grand epiphany. There will be no mea culpa, no acknowledgment that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had it right on COVID-19 all along. There will be no apologies for the ways that pointless mandates harmed our social fabric and undermined the common good. If Democrats could still politically get away with imposing their will, they would do so. It just turns out they can’t.
Fortunately for Republicans, Democrats’ risible volte-face on coronavirus hysteria will not spare them the American people’s wrath at the ballot box this fall. For starters, most blue state parents still face the indignity of seeing their children masked in school, and thus subject to all the attendant pedagogical and developmental harms wrought by forcing youngsters to cover up in face diapers.
Voters also have a long enough memory to recall Biden’s imperious vaccinate-or-test workplace mandate, which was thankfully enjoined by the Supreme Court but which still amounted to a more brazen act of administrative overreach than anything even former President Barack Obama ever attempted.
But Democrats’ impending electoral rebuke is far more encompassing. Just this week, the consumer price index — the most widely used and cited measure of inflation — hit a 40-year high, reaching 7.5 percent. Inflation is regressive insofar as it disproportionately harms poorer consumers, but it hurts everyone. Over the past year, used car prices have shot up 40.5 percent, gasoline prices have skyrocketed 40 percent and the price of eggs at the supermarket has increased by 13 percent. Those numbers are simply staggering and suggest a comeuppance is due.
The Biden-Harris track record in any number of other core governance areas is also appalling.
Customs and Border Protection data for 2021 reveal that an astonishing 2 million aliens were apprehended or turned themselves in — leaving aside, of course, those who were successfully able to infiltrate the country. The yearlong border crisis, viscerally seared in many Americans’ memories by the images that emerged last fall out of besieged Del Rio, Texas, was exacerbated by deliberate Biden-Harris decisions. The administration’s rescission of the highly effective Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy comes to mind.
On the foreign policy front, Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, though overdue and correct in theory, was so botched and humiliating in execution that it was worthy of impeachment. Meanwhile, thugs Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who have Taiwan and Ukraine squarely in their respective crosshairs, scoff at the U.S. and openly propose a new world order. At the same time, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of jihad, inches ever closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon.
The American people historically punish political incompetence, and the doddering dolt who is our commander in chief is a Harvard Business School-worthy case study in gross incompetence.
Republicans are on track to win big this fall, and at this point there is nothing Democrats can do to prevent it.
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