Three Wild Cards to Watch for the Midterms
Normally, such contests are determined by the president’s popularity. This time could be different.
Looming large.
Photographer: Anna Moneymaker/Getty
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We’re closing in on off-year elections; voting has already started in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, which will get the bulk of the media’s attention. The winner there (and in state legislative races) is important if you happen to live in Virginia, but don’t fall for the idea that it will tell us anything about the midterm elections in November 2022. What will likely be most important next fall is President Joe Biden’s popularity, which in turn will be determined by things such as economic growth, the pandemic and other large-scale events. More often than not, presidents tend to be unpopular at the midterms and their parties lose ground. Sometimes badly.
But one of the recurring features here is to note potential wild cards to watch for in each election cycle. Some of these dynamics may not matter in the end. But they’re potentially disruptive enough that we really can’t predict what effects they’ll have. All of these are basically downside risks on the Republican side, and it may come as no surprise that they’re all at least somewhat connected to former President Donald Trump.
Democrats certainly shouldn’t count on any of this helping them. Most likely, their chances will rise or fall with Biden’s popularity. It’s just that elections are never perfectly predictable.
1. Julia S. Jordan-Zachery at the Monkey Cage on missing white women and the visibility of Black women.
2. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tyler Cowen on the IMF.
3. Kaleigh Rogers on vaccine mandates for children.
4. Catherine Rampell on one of the most predictable public-opinion effects in U.S. politics: thermostatic reactions, in which people tend to turn liberal when Republicans are in the White House and more conservative when Democrats are.
5. And Bloomberg’s Katia Dmitrieva and Jill R Shah on U.S. workers who have removed themselves from the labor force.
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