Biden and The Democrats Should Party Like it’s 1934

President Joe Biden meets with White House staff in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday, June 2, 2021, prior to his meeting with U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-WV. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

The Foul Year of Our Lord 2020 is dead and in the ground. After the insurrection, a double shot of Pfizer’s Miracle Sauce, and the inauguration of Joe “I’m Boring as Fuck, Yo” Biden, it’s tempting to just slide back into the warm bath of “normality.” Maybe I’ll do it too. But just for this year, and just to rest up because 2022 is right around the corner. If history is any guide, it’s going to get hairy again after that.

One of the (wrongly, in my opinion) over-learned lessons of 2016 is that history doesn’t matter anymore. Everything has changed, and anything is possible. Yes and no. Donald Trump and the Republican party have moved the Overton window around what is politically permissible, and activated an ugly, if extant, current in our politics. But history is alive and well. History itself disabused Francis Fukuyama, et al, of any notion to the contrary years ago.

History tells us that Republicans will have a good year in 2022. Scores of elections dating back to the country’s founding almost always produce the same result: The president’s party loses seats, often many, in midterm elections. The conventional wisdom is that people don’t like unified government and see the opposition party as a check on the president and an incentive to compromise on bipartisan solutions. That notion, of course, has little grounding in reality these days, but that’s beside the point. It’s how voters, still to this day, approach Congressional voting.

I say “almost always” because there have been three exceptions to that rule since the Civil War. The rhythms of American politics are predictable, so the starting point of any analysis of next year’s midterms should be an assumption that Republicans will make substantial gains. But examining those exceptions could be useful. Because while history is prologue, it’s still wicked crazy out there, and it’s from the BFD’s of history where exceptions emerge.

The first year the president’s party gained Congressional seats in a midterm after the Civil War was 1934. That was two years after Franklin D. Roosevelt ousted President Herbert Hoover, who was blamed for failing to react to the onset and misery of the Great Depression. Roosevelt took office amid an imploding financial system and mass unemployment. He immediately closed banks to stanch runs, and he and his new Democratic Congress passed a torrent of legislation creating a raft of new federal agencies that promised to right the ship. The efficacy of New Deal programs is up for debate, but voters supported Roosevelts Democrats by padding to their already fat majorities in 1934 for putting in real work to solve the economic crisis.

The next exception waited all the way through to the other end of the century, in 1998. President Bill Clinton was in his second term, bleeding in the water from an Oval Office sex scandal and Republicans were in a frenzy with bloodlust. At the same time, the economy was humming, among the best periods of growth—along with the late-1960s and mid-1980s—since the Depression. The conventional wisdom says not so much that voters rewarded Democrats for anything, but that they punished Republicans’ zealous overreach for dogging a popular president with a scandal many at the time thought didn’t rise to the level of impeachment.

The final exception arrived just a few short years later, in 2002. George W. Bush had won office after a controversial Supreme Court decision halting Florida’s vote recount. He trod carefully at first, making a point of working with Democrats on issues like education reform while still governing as a conservative on social issues. But Sept. 11 changed the national mood, fast. After an invasion of Afghanistan, a declaration of war on terrorism, and a national debate over a second invasion, voters worried about national security rallied around Bush and reelected Republican majorities in Congress.

Are any of these exceptions useful today? The strongest parallel seems to be 1934. Today, we’re emerging from a global pandemic that scrambled the global economy. Sixty percent of the adult American population is fully vaccinated, and many more, vaccinated or not, are ready to go out and live and spend again. Similarly, 60 percent of the public approves of Biden’s handling of the pandemic. The economy is hitching and starting back to life, with solid job gains. (Inflation is high, but I’m emphatically in the Yellen/Powell camp that says the current numbers are aberrations and that the stimulus is a temporary jolt that will have coursed through the economy by the end of the year.) If solid economic growth continues through next year, and especially if Democrats can point to significant legislative accomplishments, such as those embedded in their $3.5 trillion budget proposal, voters may be in a mood to reward Democrats à la 1934.

Republicans are planting the seeds for a potential 1998 meltdown. Their agenda amounts to nothing more than white grievance, culture war and voting restrictions. They have put forward no positive agenda when it comes to the economy, the coronavirus, or even crime. Republican politicians and Conservative Inc. will holler and stomp day and night about Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police and rising homicide rates, but they have no ideas or proposals to deal with rising gun violence. Their actual policy initiatives center on restricting ballot access and permitting political interference with state level vote counting and certification.

But a 1998-style reaction seems less likely to me because voters don’t seem to care about what Republicans are doing to our election infrastructure. Democracy is on the ballot, but at this moment people don’t want to hear about it. It’s a losing campaign issue. Rich Thau, president of research firm Engagious, found that Democrats can’t run on democracy and win. He shared some comments from voters he interviewed recently in The Bulwark. He includes a real kick in the pants. (Whether that kick is in the front or the back rests in the pants of the beholder, I suppose.) When Thau asked his group of voters whether they would vote for a Democrat who campaigns against the Big Lie, Dave, 55, from Dallas echoed most of the others: “If that’s the only thing the Democratic candidate is running on, I’m going to vote against him.”

It also doesn’t look like 2002, thank God. It’s the last thing we ever need, frankly, but a 9/11-type disaster now would shatter us like a dropped box of grandma’s mercury glass teardrop Christmas ornaments. There would be no nationwide rally-round-the-flag. Trumpists and Conservative Inc. would kneecap Biden every chance they got, and possibly would find a way to rationalize and justify the attack. A rhyme of 2002 isn’t possible in our current climate.

The stakes are high in Congress, and all the way down to the state level. Republican control of the House promises chaos in the electoral vote certification process. But state-level Republicans are zealous in their drive to restrict voting access and, more critically, politicize how elections are counted and certified. Changes have been approved in Georgia, are set to be approved in Texas, and are under consideration in Arizona, all key battleground states under Republican control. Democratic governors stand as vetoes over Republican legislatures in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If Republicans capture the governor’s office in those states next year, they will be in a position to interfere in election outcomes in five decisive swing states, excluding Texas, that total 71 electoral votes. A federal law won’t be much help even if passed today because a judge would immediately enjoin its most critical parts, leaving it in limbo for years. So, preventing those state level changes and holding the House of Representatives next year is imperative to minimizing corruption of the 2024 election.

Elections, especially those recently, tend to hinge on fundamentals more than candidates. Candidates and most issues can diminish or augment the outcome, as we saw with whack-a-doodle Republican Congressional candidates in 2010. Those candidates crimped the margin; they didn’t reverse the tide.

The current of history is strong. An issue or event would have to be a BFD to alter the tide. The basic historical fundamentals say that Republicans will do well, both in Congressional and state-level races, such as for governor in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. A “good” economy or high inflation will only soften or bolster, respectively, Republicans’ gains next year.

We could just sit and wish for another historical earthquake that will generate a great blue tsunami that will save us from ourselves. But I grew up in the Appalachians, and we have a saying about how you can weigh your wishes in your hands.

Because the pandemic and economic turmoil it created are an historic-level BFD, the better plan for Democrats to buck history is to be proactive: enact their agenda, demonstrate that they’re taking action to address peoples’ actual concerns, and keep the economy revved up. Caution and timidity are no match for the marching jackboots of history. Roosevelt wasn’t afraid of a bold, paradigm-shifting agenda. Neither was Ronald Reagan. Caution and timidity are not a BFD.

In other words, Democrats should channel their inner Roosevelt and party like it’s 1934. It’s no guarantee. Ask Barack Obama in 2010, after all. But it is their only realistic course of action.