In some ways, the midterm elections might have been the worst of all possible worlds for Democrats: They came away believing they needed no major adjustments for 2024 and that they had the playbook for beating Trump but still lost control of the House anyway.

That was President Joe Biden’s take when he held a press conference at the White House the day after the 2022 elections.

Noting that polls showed 75% saying the country was headed in the wrong direction, a reporter asked, “What in the next two years do you intend to do differently to change people’s opinion of the direction of the country, particularly as you contemplate a run for president in 2024?”

WHAT HAPPENS NOW THAT TRUMP IS PRESIDENT-ELECT

“Nothing, because they’re just finding out what we’re doing,” Biden replied. “The more they know about what we’re doing, the more support there is.”

This answer foreshadowed the Democrats’ defeat as surely as Vice President Kamala Harris’s inability to differentiate herself from Biden when asked to do so by Sunny Hostin on The View. The central Democratic conceit was there was nothing wrong — not inflation, the border, or global instability — that couldn’t be resolved by greater public awareness of their legislative wins under Biden.

Losing the House, however, ensured Democrats could no longer pass legislation along party lines for the rest of Biden’s term. Even the net gain of one seat in the Senate only marginally improved the Democrats’ functional control of that chamber because most legislation requires 60 votes to clear a filibuster, a rule they lacked the votes to abolish or reform, and reconciliation was a dead end without a Democratic House.

Republicans won the popular vote for the House in 2022. Their problem was that it wasn’t distributed efficiently enough to maximize their number of seats. Questionable candidate quality cost the GOP the Senate, as happened during the Tea Party era, but they still won three of the seven most competitive races and forced a fourth to a runoff. 

Polls showed fissures in the Democratic coalition, with minority and younger members of the parties especially disillusioned. Biden’s job approval rating was low, especially on issues such as the economy, inflation, and immigration. There was deep dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. Young Democrats, especially, were worried about Biden’s age and wanted other options. 

Democrats tried to ignore the age concerns until Biden’s June 27 debate against Trump made that untenable. Harris was less defensive of the Biden economic record, conceding high prices were a problem and proposing anti-gouging measures to help alleviate them. But she leaned even more heavily on celebrity endorsements and appeals to college-educated white voters than Biden did, worsening the Democratic ticket’s prospects elsewhere. 

Republicans were not able to capitalize on the opportunities Biden created for them in 2022. By 2024, with Trump, Biden, and then eventually Harris on the ballot once again, the Trump-led GOP was able to break through. 

Previous Democratic presidents had bad midterm elections but won a second term. Democrats lost 54 House seats and their majority in the chamber for the first time in 40 years under President Bill Clinton in 1994. Republicans also took the Senate that year. In 2010, Democrats lost 63 House seats and their majority in what then-President Barack Obama described as a midterm “shellacking.”

Clinton course-corrected, tacking to the center. Obama fine-tuned his messaging. Both men ran against the perceived excesses of the new Republican congressional majorities. And both were reelected, in Clinton’s case fairly easily. 

For Biden and later Harris, the midterm elections weren’t seen as an electoral rebuke. That led Democrats to believe that whatever rightward shift was going on would remain confined to blue states the GOP would not be able to flip and red states where Republicans were already heavily favored anyway. The battleground states would remain impervious to any red wave, forming a real protective blue wall.

Instead, the country was two years further removed from the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision on abortion and two years deeper into a spike in consumer prices, with Trump turning out his lower-propensity voters and Harris on the ballot as an incumbent. Consequently, the blue wall fell.

The extra two years Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) got to be majority leader rather than minority leader will be cold comfort when Democrats watch Trump and Republican majorities get sworn into office in January.