In my Switzer Daily article of 2 August 2021 'Biden’s presidency going well', I made a number of assertions that were seen as controversial, one of which was that Donald Trump “was the fifth worst president” out of 44 past US presidents. Another assertion was that such a historical opinion “would only be revised in the (extremely unlikely) event that Trump were elected to a second term in 2024. I can assure readers that won’t happen.”
I now update my predictions and ask readers to note that I am not retracting any opinion I have expressed in the past. I predict that Donald Trump will not be the Republican candidate in 2024, but if he is he will lose to the Democratic candidate, whoever that may be. Historians will record that Biden either won a second term or had enough sense to retire on his own terms after serving one term only. In the meantime, I notice a recent Gallup Poll. It showed Biden’s approval at 44% in August, up from 38% in July.
The basis for all the above is that I understand the way the mid-term elections are shaping up. They will be held on Tuesday 8 November, that being the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November – one week later than our Melbourne Cup which is held on the first Tuesday in November.
The big negative for the Democrats is the state of the American economy. Although jobs growth is strong, inflation is bad. Normally such inflation would lead to a landslide loss by the party in control of the White House, but the British pound has sunk to a record low against the US dollar suggesting strongly that American Democrats are better at economic management than British Conservatives. There is also another negative for the Democrats, illegal immigration and border control, the perennial problem for centre-left politicians.
Against that, there are a number of positives for the Democrats, chief of which is the US Supreme Court decision in June in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health. It overturned 49 years of women being guaranteed a right to an abortion given by the Court in 1973 in the case of Roe v Wade.
As President Donald Trump stacked the Court with conservative justices and the Dobbs case was seen in the short term as a win for Republicans. It won’t turn out that way. The share of Americans who say they have an unfavourable view of the Court jumped from 29% last year to 48% in August, according to a Pew Research Centre survey. The result is that 77% of Democrats say they are now more likely to vote in November, a disaster for Republicans in an election that is as much about voter turnout by the base as it is about convincing undecideds. Meanwhile, Republican politicians in conservative states have made matters worse by rushing to exercise their state’s right to ban abortion.
Now for my detailed predictions, beginning with the House of Representatives where there are 435 members. The Democrats reached their (recent) peak at the 2018 midterms when they won 235 seats to 200 for Republicans. In the 2020 House election, however, the Democrats suffered a 13-seat net loss to the Republicans, making the numbers 222 Democrats and 213 Republicans.
The Americans fill their casual vacancies by having what they call “special elections” which we call “by-elections”. There have been 12 of these in the present term with results by and large good for Democrats. However, the two gains/losses have cancelled out. In March the 88-year-old Republican member for Alaska, Don Young, died. He was the most senior member of the House having first been elected in 1973. The Democrats won his seat. Also in March, however, the Democratic member for Texas 34, Filemon Vela, resigned to join a law firm. The Republicans won his seat. (The Americans go in for numbering lots of things to which we would give names. In our House of Representatives, Vela would have been called the member for Brownsville, a city at the far south-eastern tip of Texas.)
An unusual feature of this election is the fact of redistricting, following the 2020 census. Texas is the big gainer, increasing its seat number from 36 to 38, but Florida also gains a seat, going from 27 to 28 seats. Another Republican state to gain a seat is Montana with a population of 1,085,407 at the 2020 census. It has been divided into two, so each Montana congressional district will have a population of about 540,000, compared with an average of about 700,000 for the US as a whole.
By and large, losing states are Democratic. For example, California goes from 53 to 52 members while Illinois goes from 18 to 17, Michigan from 14 to 13 and New York from 27 to 26. The importance of this is that state legislatures do the redistricting and they do it in a partisan way. The effect will be helpful for the Republicans.
My prediction is that the Republicans will gain 20 seats from the Democrats, producing a House of 233 Republicans and 202 Democrats. That would mean Nancy Pelosi, Democratic member for California 12 (San Francisco), would lose her prestigious position of Speaker to Kevin McCarthy, 57 years of age, from rural California. He would become the de facto leader of the Republican Party.
To lose only 20 seats would be seen as a good result for Biden. Of the 20 mid-term elections for the US House of Representatives in my lifetime, only two (1998 under Clinton and 2002 under Bush junior) have seen a strengthening of the position of the party in the White House. The average loss by the party in control of the presidency has been 23 seats.
Due to the rotation of senators, it happens more often that the party of the presidency gains seats in the Senate. Of the 20 mid-term elections in my lifetime four have seen that happen, 1962 under Kennedy, 1970 under Nixon, 1982 under Reagan and 2002 under Bush junior.
I predict that will happen again in November 2022, with the 50-50 Senate becoming one in which there are 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans. The reason is that 2016 was a reasonably good result for Republicans. That means at this election there are 35 senators needing re-election of which 21 are Republicans and 14 are Democrats.
There are five key states, Arizona, Georgia and New Hampshire, where Democrats are defending incumbency, and Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Republicans are defending incumbency. I have no difficulty in predicting the three Democratic states will stay Democratic and I am inclined to the view that Ohio will remain Republican, notwithstanding that the senator in question, Rob Portman, is retiring.
That leaves Pennsylvania where Republican Senator Pat Toomey is retiring. The Republican candidate is 62-year-old Mehmet Oz, a doctor of Turkish extraction who shot to national fame thanks to regular appearances on the Oprah Winfrey show. A Trump devotee and election denier I predict he will lose to the Democratic candidate John Fetterman, the Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania.
So overall it should be quite a good result for Biden and one man he could thank is Trump himself. Trump has had great success in getting his supporters chosen as candidates. With most of them election deniers they will lose the middle ground, proving that Trump made a great mistake in putting his name (de facto) on the ballot. He has made a mess of his party which will finish up blaming him for the fact that the Democrats had a (reasonably) good year in 2022.