Midterm Election Incoherences, Misadventures, and Paradoxes
By Victor Davis Hanson
2022 vs. 2026
In June 2022, the price of gasoline topped $5 a gallon and stayed around $4 a gallon through October, on the eve of the midterms. It is currently about $4.30.
The inflation rate in 2022 hit a 40-year high of 9.1 percent—and would average 5.1 percent over Joe Biden’s four-year tenure. The 2026 inflation rate is estimated to be about 3.5 percent and, over the first two years of the second Trump administration, will likely average around 3 percent. GDP for the third quarter of 2026 is higher than it was in the same quarter of 2022. The poverty rate is now lower and the annual family income higher than in November 2022.
Yet we are told that gas prices and inflation are at record levels and will doom the Republicans—even though similar economic data did not harm Democrats all that much in the 2022 midterms.
In the 2022 midterms, Democrats picked up a Senate seat, keeping their majority, and lost only nine House seats, barely losing control of the chamber—defying all expectations. The 2022 midterm results were then celebrated by the media as a great achievement—given that Biden was then polling at 42 percent (NPR/PBS), or about where Trump is now at 40 percent (NPR/PBS).
Many pundits, remember, had predicted a red-wave wipeout, given inflation, gas prices, Biden’s increasing debility, and the Afghanistan and Ukraine messes.
People were certainly seething that in 2021 the United States had left tens of billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure and weaponry for the terrorist Taliban in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating American retreat in modern memory. (Indeed, the $47 billion spent so far on the Iran war may be less than the final cost of the abandoned bases, new embassy, weapons, and other infrastructure and equipment left for the Taliban.)
And in 2022, a new theater-wide conflict had started raging in Ukraine on NATO’s doorstep, with Russia’s February 24 invasion and failed assault on Kyiv. Moreover, most observers believed that Putin’s risky gambit was precipitated by Joe Biden’s catastrophic skedaddle from Afghanistan just six months earlier, which had destroyed American deterrence in Russia’s sphere of influence.
The Russians were even more confident because Biden had placed a hold in June 2021 on some $100 million worth of weapons shipments to Ukraine. And Biden’s nonsensical pre-invasion remark that the American-led NATO response to a possible Russian attack on Ukraine would hinge on whether it proved to be a “minor incursion” certainly did not convey to Putin that he should fear invading.
The point?
In 2026, the media have lectured us for months that the impending blue wave is the inevitable electoral payback for Trump’s crippling inflation, soaring gas prices, and war abroad—despite the fact that similar conditions did relatively little electoral damage to Democrats in 2022.
Red Checkmates Blue, and Blue Checkmates Red?
We are also told that flipping a Texas Senate seat to the Democrats, with a possible James Talarico victory, will be a landmark turning point, given that a Democrat has not held such a seat in 33 years. Perhaps.
But why, then, in a “blue-wave year,” do few point out that Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers is running neck-and-neck with Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in a race that could give Michigan its first Republican senator in a quarter-century? And it seems strange that, in a supposedly blue-wave midterm, blue-purple states like Michigan and Oregon are seeing hotly contested Senate or gubernatorial races.
We are also apprised that this inevitable blue wave reflects a nationwide disgust with Trump that will doom the last two years of his presidency. Perhaps again.
But if that prediction of presidential paralysis after a midterm loss were guaranteed, it would certainly have been applicable to Clinton’s catastrophic 1994 midterm loss of 54 House seats and to Obama’s even greater 2010 midterm disaster of losing 63 House seats. (Note that Clinton also lost the Senate for the rest of his presidency in that same 1994 wipeout, as did Obama in his second-term 2014 midterms, when he lost another 13 House seats.)
Both Clinton and Obama began their presidencies with near-historic margins in Congress. Clinton started his first term with 57 Democratic senators and 258 Democratic House seats. In 2009, Obama enjoyed perhaps an even stronger Democratic Congress, with 60 Democratic and pro-Obama independent senators and 257 House Democrats. Yet both presidents spent their final years in office with solid Republican majorities in both houses of Congress after squandering huge inaugural congressional advantages.
The Imperial Presidency Is Still Imperial
Still, such radical turnarounds did not necessarily hamper either president all that much.
In his last two years in office, Bill Clinton was easily acquitted after being impeached by the House. Despite (or because of) a Republican Congress, Clinton managed to continue his historic balanced budgets (1998–2001). Clinton also led the NATO bombing effort against Serbia and held an Israeli-Palestinian summit and simply ignored occasional Republican criticism, anger, and demands to seek congressional authorization.
Obama likewise should have been neutered after he lost the Senate in 2014. But he surely did not end up feeling confined by the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. In fact, in his last year, Obama continued his mad solo bomber routine—as the United States dropped more than 26,000 bombs on seven nations (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Libya), all without congressional approval. He kept up his characteristic targeted assassination strikes (well over 500 in total for his two terms), again without congressional authority and without much worry about the nearly 800 civilians and six U.S. citizens who were killed as “collateral damage.” He assumed rightly that his “antiwar” party would either keep mum or cheer him on, and the Republicans would make no move to cut off funds.
Moreover, in some ways Obama became even more radical—and more emboldened—once he lost Congress. He became defiant, acted unilaterally, and committed to the Paris Agreement, the Iran deal, and normalization of relations with Cuba. The constitutional lawyer Obama routinely blew off Congress, cementing both the Iran deal and the Paris Agreement as if they were not treaties and thus needed no Senate approval.
The point of these comparisons is not to show that losing Congress does no harm to a president’s administration. It often means no more Senate confirmations of appointees. It stymies legislation and forces presidents to rely on executive orders that can be easily overturned by a successor from the opposing party.
Yet presidents have found ways of working around Congress—even if these are often constitutionally dubious, as in the case of a defiant Obama, who openly bragged of his “pen and phone” executive-order powers.
And a midterm loss, especially in the second term, can sometimes even boost a president’s popularity. Indeed, in 1998, Clinton reached the highest approval level of his presidency at 73 percent and would leave office in January 2001 with an approval rating of 66 percent.
Obama left office, according to a Gallup poll, with a 59 percent approval rating. Both Clinton and Obama had once polled dismally below 40 percent.
But somehow, when a president loses Congress, strange things often follow. The opposition lets its success go to its head. Firebrands go overboard both rhetorically and in obstructing the president—thereby generating sympathy for the White House, which is seen as standing up to extremist outliers in Congress.
Moreover, as the next presidential campaigns heat up during a lame-duck president’s last years, the public gets turned off by the back-and-forth hits and vitriol. Voters sometimes begin to appreciate the quieter president as “above the fray,” or at least not so much in the headlines. In the case of Obama, the more he stayed out of sight on the golf links, the more people began to prefer the abstract idea of Barack Obama to the once-familiar reality.
And we should not forget late-campaign surprises whose effects few can anticipate—like Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded 2012 dismissal of 47 percent of the electorate as dependent on government, which hurt him, or the 2016 Access Hollywood IED that did not destroy Donald Trump as anticipated. The antisemitic ad supporting El-Sayed and the pathetic caper involving Sullivan in Alaska may or may not prove critical in close elections—and perhaps even beyond Alaska and Michigan.
Waves, Polls, and Lame Ducks: Conventional Wisdom or Ignorance?
In sum, we should remember a few things about the upcoming midterms.
First, the blue wave may not materialize, just as the red wave did not materialize in 2022, despite public unhappiness with the Ukraine war, inflation, and gas prices.
Consider how the anti-Netanyahu surge that was supposed to drive him out of office was recently stymied in the Israeli elections. Before and on election night, the domestic and global anti-Netanyahu media and polls were ecstatic that his Likud party surely could no longer forge a parliamentary majority. They preened that Netanyahu was finally gone for good. A few hours later, last-minute returns dashed that “sure thing” consensus, as Netanyahu’s Likud won more seats than any other party. Netanyahu may be able to remain in office by creating new coalitions and calling for new elections.
When and how do these predicted electoral waves not overwhelm the status quo?
Often, they deflate because voters vent their frustrations with an incumbent during the campaign season, but when they finally cast their ballots in private, they start to consider the alternative. The voters begrudgingly decide that the incumbent or the incumbent party’s candidates are at least the lesser of two evils, in the spirit of “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”
In 2026, the rise of openly Islamist-socialist candidates and the proliferation of venomous antisemitic tropes and ads may have made the midterms, for many voters, less a conventional contest between Democrats and Republicans than a choice between importing Europe’s troubles and preserving normality at home.
Second, given our unique system of constitutional government, even if the blue wave does happen, presidents on occasion can become more popular after losing Congress. They can also, even without majorities in Congress, use executive orders to do a lot of things domestically and almost anything they wish abroad—as long as they keep ironclad support among their own sizable congressional minority and thus prevent veto-proof congressional action.
The bottom line is that these midterms may not go quite as predicted. And even if they do, this much-predicted blue wave may have far less impact than most think—given the ever-growing powers of a president and his executive branch and the unsavory nature of many of his new would-be opponents.
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