Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report newsletter, told the National Beer Wholesalers Association‘s legislative conferance that the 2022 election is goi said American politics is more divided that at any time since the Civil War and Reconstruction. “This is an unusually important election because the country is divided, politics is divided and the policy consequences of changes in control are much greater than before.”
Cook noted that in the 2016 election, which brough Donald Trump to Washington, results in six states were divided by just 1.5 percent, and 78,000 votes in those six states put Trump in the White House. President Joe Biden’s margin in 2020 was less than 120,000 votes across six states. As for the Senate, this is only the second time since the country began the direct election of senators that the Senate has been split 50-50, Cook said. “Politics used to be stable,” he said. Not any longer. Now politics is very volatile.
There is a huge gap between the parties, he added. It used to be that conservative Democrats were the ballast that kept the Democrats from going off the rails, and the same thing was true for liberal Republicans from the Northeast. Now, conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans are almost oxymorons and the two parties are virtual silos. One more indication of how “siloed” politics has become: 2016 was the first election in which every U.S. Senate race was won by the same party that won that state’s Presidential race.
Turning to the 2020 midterm election, Cook said the deciding factor will be which side is more motivated to turn out. Truly independent voters or represent about 10% of the electorate, and they tend to get “buyer’s remorse” and vote against the party that won the White House. For independents, the two major mid-term election issues are (1) competence and (2) overreach. “In 36 of the 39 elections since the Civil War, the party in the White House loses seats in the House,” Cook said, adding that he expects Democrats to lose their majority in the House and are likely to give up several seats in the Senate.
Cook made an interesting observation when he discussed unemployment and inflation. If the normal unemployment rate is 4% and joblessness surges to 8%, that means 4% of the country is affected by unemployment. But, he added, 100% of the country is affected by inflation, and President Biden’s approval rating on inflation is only 43%.
Cook said he thinks Biden and the Democrats are in big trouble and he traces that back to the four challenges he faced when he took office:
- The first was Covid, and Biden gets reasonably good marks is that department.
- The second was illegal immigration which is surging.
- The third was the departure from Afghanistan. On Afghanistan, which is hurting Biden and the Democrats is not the fact the U.S. left but how it left. By comparison, Cook said, the U.S. departure from Saigon was almost quaint.
- The fourth challenge was his legislative agenda.
On the legislative agenda, it was a good thing the infrastructure bill passed. That was good for the country and good for beer wholesalers. But the “Build Back Better” bill was a big mistake. “It wasn’t going to get GOP support,” Cook said.
So why did Biden stick with. Early in his presidency he met with a group of presidential historians who talked about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. But FDR’s Democrats held 59 of 96 U.S. Senate seats (Alaska and Hawaii hadn’t been admitted as states yet), and LBJ had 68 of 100 U.S. Senators. Biden has an evenly divided Senate.
“If you want to do big, historically transformational things,” Cook said, “you have to win big. Biden doesn’t have a mandate.”