Democrats learning the wrong lesson from 2022 midterms led to 2024 drubbing: journalist

08 November 2024

One prominent journalist is attributing Republicans' lopsided win this week to the Democratic Party learning the wrong lesson from the 2022 midterms.

In a recent post to NBC News' "From the Politics Desk," chief political analyst Chuck Todd posited that Democrats failed to adequately prepare for the 2024 presidential election due to the "red wave" of 2022 never materializing. He wrote that President-elect Donald Trump catching Democrats off-guard was due to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris overestimating their popularity after Republicans failed to retake the U.S. Senate two years ago.

"Biden and the party as a whole took the Democrats’ 'better than expected' performance in the 2022 midterms, when they still lost the House but gained a Senate seat, as a sign that they were on to something and that they didn’t need to course-correct as much as polling was actually telling them to," Todd wrote. "Democrats did well in the 2022 midterms despite Biden, not because of him or his pro-democracy messaging."

Todd contrasted Biden and Harris' post-midterm approach to the subsequent presidential election with the approach taken by former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Each of them experienced crushing losses in their respective first-term midterm elections in 1994 and 2010, respectively, but both ended up winning another four years in the White House after making adjustments to their campaign strategies.

Todd theorized that Republicans' mild success in 2022 would have been much greater were it not for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade that summer with its Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision and igniting a wave of anger from millions of voters. Todd also wrote that Republicans ran poor candidates in states with major Senate races on the line like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.

"Had either Dobbs not happened or the GOP nominated more electable candidates, Republicans most likely would have won both House and Senate control in 2022, simply because of backlash to post-Covid inflation and a belief that Biden’s policies extended the issue, as well as a negative feeling about the overall job Biden was doing," Todd argued.

According to Todd, a "shellacking" akin to 1994 and 2010 "would most likely have either forced a reckoning about whether Biden should run again" in 2024 or at least resulted in a more competitive primary process. He noted that if Biden lost both chambers of Congress, it also could have made him "course-correct more, and more forcefully, on economic and border security sooner."

"But that isn’t what happened. In fact, the resurrection of Trump as the GOP front-runner for 2024 — which began in earnest in late 2022 — only hardened this (mis)belief among Democrats that anti-Trumpism, coupled with Dobbs backlash, would linger and become the easiest and safest path to re-election," he wrote. "Obviously, hindsight indicates this was a giant miscalculation."

Click here to read Todd's post in its entirety.

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