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From a Raffles hotel in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, Joe Biden broke from the business of a regional summit to hail the Senate victory that maintained his party’s hold on the US upper chamber of Congress.
“I feel good, and I’m looking forward to the next couple of years,” the US president said on Sunday.
“We’re going to try to get as much done as we can to continue to fulfil the agenda.”
For Biden, the outcome of the midterm elections – with Democrats avoiding sweeping defeats in the House of Representatives while saving their edge in the Senate – brought a mix of relief and confidence in his own political instincts.
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Most importantly, it could cement his status both domestically and internationally as an effective political shield against Donald Trump and a Republican Party still captive to the former president’s brand of hard-right radicalism.
“[Biden] was obviously contending with some pretty dire prognoses about what this election would mean personally for him and for the party,” says Evan Osnos, a Biden biographer.
“Instead Biden gets to show up as the guy who has beaten Donald Trump twice, in effect.”
[ Democrats maintain control of US Senate ]
Governing will still be complicated for Biden, given that Congress is set to be evenly divided. Maintaining control of the Senate is a huge boon because it will allow him to proceed with the confirmation of federal judicial appointments – a priority considering the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court – and give him more flexibility to secure confirmation of other executive appointments.
In the House of Representatives, Republicans are expected to recapture control by a handful of seats which will still be enough to block any attempts by Biden to secure additional legislative achievements on everything from voting rights to childcare subsidies and higher taxes on the wealthy.
Biden’s Republican political opponents will, however, be wounded after the midterm elections, with Kevin McCarthy’s elevation to speaker not even guaranteed. It is far from clear whether this mood will make compromises easier or harder on must-pass legislation to fund the government, pass any additional Ukraine aid and raise the debt limit to avoid a default – but White House officials hope they will be less hostile.
“The American people didn’t vote for Congress being used to conduct political vendettas over the next two years. They voted for working together to make progress on the issues they care about,” Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser, told CBS on Sunday.
“We would hope that the Republicans, who’ve just suffered a substantial defeat in terms of both their expectations and what historically midterm elections tend to do, would also listen to the American people, focus on the priorities of the American people.”
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Biden has emerged from the midterms in a stronger position when it comes to deciding whether to launch a 2024 campaign later this year or early next. The results are bound to quieten voices within the Democratic Party who had been calling for fresh leadership and faulting him for poor messaging, while shoring up support across the left.
“Donald Trump, with his preening and his selection of truly awful candidates, didn’t do his party any favours,” Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democratic senator, told NBC.
“But this victory belongs to Joe Biden. It belongs to Joe Biden and the Democrats who got out there and fought for working people.”
The most encouraging political takeaway for Biden is that his bet on hammering away at the importance of preserving democracy from Trumpist election deniers and protecting abortion rights from rightwing ideologues paid off. Republicans and even some Democrats thought inflation and crime would be the only battlegrounds.
“He assessed the political moment more effectively than his critics did,” says Osnos. “His whole sense of himself has always been closely wrapped around his feelings of being slightly underestimated.”
Geographically, heading into 2024, Democrats appear to have shored up crucial parts of the “blue wall” – especially Pennsylvania and Michigan where they won key governor’s races in addition to John Fetterman’s victory in the Pennsylvania Senate election.
In Georgia and Arizona, where Democrats recently gained ground, the party had more mixed results but still protected a Senate seat held by Mark Kelly, with a good chance of doing the same for Raphael Warnock in Georgia during a run-off contest set for early December.
“The credit Biden deserves isn’t necessarily as the political field general but that he governed well,” says Simon Rosenberg, founder of the New Democrat Network, a liberal think-tank in Washington.
“People wanted to get back to normal life and Joe Biden got us back to normal life”.
Exit polls from the midterms still showed that most voters still disapprove of Biden’s job performance, and roughly two-thirds do not want him to seek re-election – suggesting the political winds have not swung decisively in the Democrats’ favour. There is no guarantee that the better-than-expected midterms will translate into an automatic advantage for 2024.
“Democrats shouldn’t over-read the lesson of the election. Fundamentally it’s an almost evenly divided country and some elections are just very tight,” says Kenneth Baer, a former Obama administration official and chief executive at Crosscut Strategies, a consultancy.
“You have to go in thinking it’s at best even and you have to work hard for every single vote.”
Yet there is little doubt that Biden can move into the second act of his first term as president with some much-needed verve, at home and abroad.
“The big story for the world is that extremism was rejected here and democracy lived to fight another day,” says Rosenberg.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022