The midterm US election results have been remarkably better than expected for Joe Biden. Yet again he has been underestimated—as he has been throughout his 52-year political career, which took him from local councillor in tiny Delaware to the White House, with 36 years in the Senate and eight as Obama’s vice president in between. He could yet be good for a second term in the White House, despite the pundit consensus this summer and autumn that he was (politically at least) gaga and comatose.
Even in the announcement of the results, there was a tendency to discount Biden’s personal role. The lack of a strong red wave was generally attributed to Donald Trump and Republican failures alone. But midterm Congressional elections are largely a referendum on the occupant of the White House, and on the basis of last night’s results, if his health holds up, Biden will be running again and has the capacity to beat Trump—again.
Biden’s skill has been to keep the Democrats united, centrist and dynamic, focused relentlessly on solutions to the economic crisis, while making Trump’s extremist election denial and the partisan right-wing overreach of the Supreme Court key dividing lines with Republicans. He has been broadly competent, if understated, at home and abroad. Even his one generally asserted failure—last summer’s withdrawal from Afghanistan—lay more in the way it was done than in the policy itself. There was no viable strategy for the US remaining in Kabul. And imagine Trump handling Putin and Ukraine.
Without Biden’s impressive legislative record over the past two years, this election would have been about the president’s economic failure above all else. Biden has spent two years painstakingly striking political deal after deal to carry a string of FDR-style measures through Congress. The bills have focused on fiscal support for the American middle class and big industrial and infrastructure investment and social programmes, including highly popular expansions of Obamacare and cancelling student debt.
Without this, not only would Biden have lacked a response to economic alarm about inflation, wages and growth, but the Democrats would probably have split, with the left, led by Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, gunning for Biden and campaigning for a change of direction.
Instead, Democrat candidates for the House and Senate united proudly around Biden’s achievements—however reluctant some of them were to have the 79-year-old himself appear on the stump—and turned their fire on Trump and the Supreme Court. The court’s straightforwardly partisan decision to end constitutional protection for abortion was a gift to the Democrats, but it would have been crowded out if the Democrats had had a weak and failed economic narrative.
Biden achieved all this with a small majority in the House and only the vice president’s casting vote in the Senate. It bodes well for how he may exploit a small Republican majority in the House, and maybe another 50/50 split in the Senate.
Trump is gearing up to create yet more mayhem as he launches a comeback. Assuming he declares his candidacy next week, his first mission will doubtless be a “search and destroy” on Ron DeSantis—“Ron De-Sanctimonious” in Trump’s typically brutal style—and anyone else who gets in the way. All this will make Biden a solid figure of consensus and reassurance on the Democrat side, provided that he has the energy to keep going into his eighties.
Maybe the results for the Republicans are so bad, and DeSantis’s momentum from his landslide re-election in Florida so great, that Trump can ultimately be dissuaded from standing or even be defeated in a primary. Maybe one of his several pending legal actions will strike. Maybe the grim reaper will come for him rather than the guy in the White House.
Whatever happens, don’t underestimate Biden. He doesn’t look finished yet.
This article is from Andrew Adonis’s weekly newsletter for Prospect—The Insider. Get The Insider straight to your inbox every week by signing up here
