Blog: Biden Blew It. Now The Democrats Are In Deep Trouble

The Biden Presidential pregnancy lasted the full term of nine months and 16 days. It gave birth to a lame duck.

In an off-year election, the Democrats have taken a huge beating, losing both the Governor's mansion in Virginia and probably the Assembly. In New Jersey, the Democrats just managed to win by the slimmest of majorities in the gubernational race. Both these states had elected Joe Biden with double digit margins over Donald Trump. In New York city, a Democrat bastion, Republicans gained as well.

So, in exactly a year, the public in three strong Democratic states have turned against the party, and more specifically Joe Biden.

Biden has to carry the can for this. His approval rating is at 43%, Trump is the only recent president that has worse numbers than Biden.

More significantly, the disapproval rating sits at 53%. That seems to have helped the Republicans bring back voters.

The tragedy for the Democrats and Biden is that that these two Republican resurrections will, in the short and long run, make life extremely difficult for them. For over nine months, they have struggled to try and get some sort of trillion dollar socio economic agenda through Congress. Partly, it is because of the intransigence of the Republicans, who are 50:50 in the Senate and have refused to cooperate in multi-trillion dollar Biden Build Back Better plan. But more importantly, the Democrats have been held to ransom by two of their own - Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona - who, worried about their more conservative constituents, have refused to supported the overly liberal Big Biden Spend.

Tuesday's results are especially important to Senator Manchin, whose state abuts Virginia and will see the huge double digit swing to the Republicans as major danger to his standing in West Virginia. He has already said, "it's unbelievable...what went on Virginia", and questioned the Democrat strategy of trying to push through a social spending bill, saying "you can't unite (a divided country) by just doing it by a one-party system." And without his support, and that of Sinema, the social agenda supported by the left wing of the Democrats is dead.

So after more than 9 months of endless haggling, Biden, who projected himself as a negotiator and conciliator, has no positive legislation to show. And on the Covid front, Republican Governors have challenged his attempts to force vaccination on the private sector or enforce "Covid-appropriate behaviour". More importantly, they have pushed through legislation in more than 19 states, which makes it more difficult for Americans (read Democratic supporters, especially minorities) to vote. Many will use their state assembly majorities to redistrict congressional seats (done after every census) in way that assures Republican majorities. Called gerrymandering, it would, in a state like Texas, where there has been an influx of 'democratic voters', need double digit swings for the Republicans to lose seats.

The history of US Congressional elections in the "off year"( which would be 2022, which doesn't have a Presidential election) is that the party holding the White House loses, sometimes substantially. Biden knows that only too well; the Republicans, having picked up Virginia's Governorship in 2009, swept the Democrats out of the House of Representatives gaining 63 seats in 2010, a majority that they only lost in 2018 (Trump's off-year election). The next 6 years the Obama presidency remained hostage to a Republican House and by 2014, a Republican Senate.

For Biden, the tea leaves are clear. Unless he can find some way to reignite his Presidency very soon, he will spend the next three years trying to rule by executive orders, without any legislative support. The problem that he faces, unlike Trump, is that the conservative majority in the Supreme Court, which had been very amiable to Trump's executive orders, looked less kindly on Biden's; it stopped, for example, his reversal of Trump's Mexican immigration order.

The spectre of a Trump whose control on the Republican party seems undiminished will also haunt the Democrats. With the support of more than 78% of registered Republicans, Trump is the front runner for 2024 if he chooses to and is medically fit to run. The lesson from Virginia is clear - the anti-Trump campaign that the Democrats followed didn't work, and white educated voters went back to being Republican.  While the Republicans played down Trump per se, they gave full vent to his agenda of too much government, especially in school education, where the idea of teaching the Critical Race Theory that discussed slavery and America's evolution is strong on many Democrats' agenda. Given how close 2020 was, and how far the Republican states have moved to control early voting and reduce voting access for monitories, it is unlikely that states like Georgia will go Democrat. And the wafer-thin Democratic majorities of the other tipping states in 2020, especially Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, may not hold with a complete lack of policies from the Democrats.

Biden stopped a second Trump term, but isn't likely to be up for another fight with him. Kamala Harris, the Vice President, doesn't seem to have cut it either. The Left wing of Democrats has been chastened by the results of Tuesday; people don't want an interfering government, seems to be the message. In this somewhat bleak scenario, the Democrats need a quick fix, or they will end up frozen out of the American political system very soon.

(Ishwari Bajpai is Senior Advisor at NDTV.)

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