Charles Lane may be a regular Fox News personality, but his Washington Post commentary is worth noting:
The United States is booming, with the Federal Reserve forecasting 7 percent growth this year and 3.3 percent next year. Unemployment should be almost back to pre-pandemic levels in 18 months.
Buoyed by a $1.9 trillion economic package and a possible bipartisan infrastructure bill, with social and environmental legislation to come, President Biden enjoys a 53 percent approval rating in the RealClearPolitics polling average, while 41.9 percent feel the country is heading in the right direction — the most since 2009.
Meanwhile, Republicans remain tainted by former president Donald Trump’s wild campaign to discredit the 2020 election, which inflames their extremist base — but turns off suburban voters by the millions.
The stage is set, in other words, for a Democratic wipeout in the 2022 elections, writes Lane — one larger than a presidential party's nearly habitual losses in midterms.
He compares the potential of 2022 to the Democratic disaster of 1966, when they "lost a net three seats in the Senate and an astonishing 47 in the House." That, despite a booming economy, in addition to 1965's passage of "Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education, a landmark voting rights law, and a new immigration law."
Johnson's deeper U.S. involvement in Vietnam was an unlikely factor in Democrats' bruising, since in '66 less than a third of Americans saw it as "a mistake." Continues Lane: "What probably rattled the middle class more were a surge of inflation, which nearly doubled from 1.6 percent in 1965 to 3.0 percent in 1966 — and a sense that previously low levels of crime were creeping upward dangerously…. The 1966 election results also reflected backlash against the racial-justice achievements of the Johnson administration by White voters who often blamed the civil rights movement for urban uprisings in Watts in 1965 and Cleveland in 1966."
Paradoxically, "racial-justice achievements" may have been the most prominent factor in Democrats' massive congressional failures. Indeed, I consulted Jules Whitcover's magnificent The Party of the People: A History of the Democrats, and there lay corroboration. He noted that Johnson's Great Society was "increasingly seen as … for the special constituencies of poor and minority Americans" only. Alongside the president's social programs were race riots and the emergence of "Black Power," suggesting to many white, middle-class voters that "the society that Johnson so strove to perfect was being torn apart from within."
In short, dark cultural perceptions trump hard-fought sociopolitical and even economic successes. President Biden and some congressional Democrats understand this, which is why they're emphasizing their political efforts as beneficial to poor and middle-class whites as well as minorities. Countervailing race-based propaganda from the right, however, is clouding the brains of older white Americans, typically the largest voting contingent in midterm elections.
To offset that negative influence, my advice to Democrats is not to double-down on their brand-based appeals, but to jack 'em up tenfold — to make such appeals the absolute centrality of 2022 campaigns. Well, almost absolute, since corresponding negative campaigning about the democracy-dismantling opposition will also be a necessary strategy.