Hard as it may be to believe, we’re coming up on two years since Joe Biden soundly defeated Donald Trump for the White House, ushering in an impossibly narrow Democratic Senate majority in the process. In that time, Biden has enjoyed a decidedly mixed bag of results from his slim control of Congress, with a handful of self-absorbed, grandstanding members of his own party preventing him from fully leveraging the Democrats’ congressional majority.
Biden’s circumstances are set to become considerably more difficult after November. Democrats are largely — but not exclusively — expected to lose control of one if not both chambers of Congress, thanks to an ugly nexus of bad election year circumstances and a suite of tough races for Democrats. And perhaps nowhere are the stakes for the midterm races felt more acutely than in Pennsylvania, a frustratingly purple state that could well end up the fulcrum for which party will control the upper chamber come 2023. Both Democrats and Republicans are gearing up for a messy set of primary races to determine who will replace retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey — and in each case, the race is a distillation of broader intra-party schisms.
