If the 2022 Congressional elections were held today it’s safe to say that President Joe Biden’s low popularity would not help Congressional Democrats running for election. Biden’s job approval numbers have trended downward for months now. And based on recent polls and pundits the consensus is that the odds are high for a Republican takeover of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. The question is, is there a silver lining to this scenario, not just for the Democrats, but for the country?

If you’re a long-time Democratic voter this may feel like I’m asking a heretical, devil’s-advocate question. However, since the November results are likely to raise the question anyway, there’s no time like the present to face it now. And if you’re a long-time Republican voter, don’t be too cocky about my assumption that the Republicans will win control of at least one house: just remember that when it comes to predicting election outcomes, we’re a long way away from November and upsets do happen.

But let’s look at past elections where one party had control of the presidency and the Congress but lost congressional control during the mid-term elections. It turns out that, at least in recent history, this is a very common occurrence: since 1969 there has been only one presidency, Jimmy Carter's, where unitary control of the government has lasted beyond one mid-term election. To put it another way, the coattail effect - where a surge of voters supporting a presidential candidate leads to more down-ballot victories for that candidate’s party - may come into play during presidential election years, but even if it does play a role it typically doesn’t last very long.

So when mid-term results come in the President’s party generally loses in significant numbers, and sometimes it gets walloped. Since World War II the mid-terms have led to average losses of 26 seats in the House and 4 seats in the Senate.

In the House, the best outcome for the president’s party was in 2002, a year after 9/11, when George W. Bush’s Republicans gained 8 House seats. On the Senate side John F. Kennedy’s Democrats picked up 4 seats in 1962. The worst results? In 2010 Barack Obama’s Democrats lost 63 House seats in the Tea Party onslaught, and in 1958 Dwight Eisenhower’s Republicans lost 12 seats in the Senate.

Conversely, it’s rare for the president’s party to pick up seats in both houses during a mid-term. It’s happened only twice in the past century and both times were in the midst of national crises: the first was in 1934 when, during the depths of the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats gained 9 seats in both the House and the Senate, and the second happened in, again, 2002, when Bush’s Republicans picked up not only the 8 seats in the House that I mentioned earlier, but 2 seats in the Senate as well.

Given this history and the current poll numbers, it seems to be highly likely that the Democrats will lose control of at least one chamber in 2022. And given that, what’s likely to happen next?

First, if they take control, Senate Republicans will shut down any progress on the Biden/Democratic agenda. Ever since Mitch McConnell has been in the Senate, and especially since he became Senate Republican leader, his major focus has been on blocking whatever the Democrats want to accomplish and making sure Republicans maintain as much control of the government as possible. He’s great at being an obstructionist, and he’s been at it for most of his career in the Senate.

Second, if Republicans take over the House they will also quash any Democratic policy ambitions. But along with that they also appear to be preparing a slate of bills - on issues like energy independence, China, inflation and border security - that they can quickly introduce and pass after the 2022 elections. If the Republicans also take over the Senate they might be tweaked in that chamber before being passed to President Biden for either his signature or a veto.

“It’s going to show a bold conservative agenda,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said in an interview. “It’s not just about Republicans showing the country what we would do if we were given this majority. But it also would create a mandate, then, to go do those things.”

So, if this happens what implications does this have for 2024? At this point, if Republicans take over the House then we may see a war of ideas over the future direction of the country. If we do, the stakes will be high because of the level of polarization and the amount of voter repression that is going on in the U.S., but overall I think such a contest on its own terms would be a good thing. This MIGHT be the silver lining to take from a bad situation.

Of course it’s hard to be optimistic about the odds of an actual war of ideas taking place, given the trends we’ve witnessed over the past few decades: specifically, the dominance of personality-based politics, media distortion of the truth, and a large proportion of the population that increasingly denies the existence of well-established facts. Donald Trump and his supporters, Fox News and OAN have been the apotheosis of those trends. Who knows what these trends will look like three years from now?

That’s it for now. Until next time, take care.

Karl Pearson