Joe Biden coughs during his speech on the South Lawn
(Picture: REUTERS)Don’t write off the President or the Democrats just yet. Joe Biden has gone through life flipping between the best and worst luck imaginable. He was a hopeful 29-year-old senator when his wife and baby daughter died in a car crash. He was laughed off the presidential campaign trail when he came fourth in the Iowa caucus but it wasn’t long before he was applauded for beating Donald Trump.
These swings of fortune have come to define his presidency. Last month, sick with Covid, watching Roe v Wade overturned in the Supreme Court, gas prices spiralling, his signature spending bill apparently buried for good, Biden could have been forgiven for thinking he’d finally run out of luck. The President’s popularity had sunk below that of Donald Trump in his worst weeks and his party seemed to be heading for catastrophe in the mid-term elections — in Washington the question the pundits were asking was why Biden had failed.
Now those slings and arrows are behind him. Not only has Biden’s $740bn package tackling climate, the deficit and healthcare— now dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act — been revived, it has, remarkably, sailed through a divided Senate. It follows the passing of bills to protect veterans and dramatically boost the country’s semiconductor industry with the amusingly named Chips Act. Better still, the economy has turned a corner with gas prices falling and record job numbers. That cheered up Wall Street this week. Deep red Kansas rejected banning abortion in a shock referendum result. In Ukraine, HIMARS artillery provided by the US is now ravaging Russian depots and, to top it off, the US military has killed al Qaeda’s leader.
The message is clear: Biden is still in the game. For months, a Democrat wipeout in the midterm elections was almost taken for granted but now polls show Democrats closing the gap with the Republicans, with some polls even showing them ahead. Democrat strategists can see a glimmer of hope as various Trumpist candidates such as Dr Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania falter in the polls and a backlash against the overturning of Roe v Wade mobilises the party base.
It would be a mistake, though, to let the good news hide the bigger picture. It’s very easy to be too pessimistic or too optimistic about the US. Pessimists can point to the Republican denial of the 2020 election result, calls from Democrats to pack the Supreme Court with sympathetic justices and the so-called “decertification movement” seeking to have gerrymandered legislatures in Republican states. All that looks like a crisis of the constitution. A violent, chaotic or anti-democratic outcome in an election in the years ahead is entirely possible. Trump clearly attempted a coup d’etat in 2020.
But the other reality is Biden could pull this challenge off — and the fact that the polls are turning is a reminder of a few essential facts about US politics. The Democrats are today a much better organised party than the Republicans. And while the polls say voters for the midterms or the presidency itself would prefer a generic Republican to a generic Democrat, that generic Republican is having trouble getting on the ballot because so much of the party remains in thrall to Trump.
That was made clear by the number of leading Republicans lining up to defend him after the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago home, just like some of them supporting his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
And this might be Biden’s next piece of good fortune. Polls show any other Republican has a good chance of beating Biden. But in a rematch, he beats Trump. Providing his health — and his luck — hold out, that is.
