In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger argues that the biggest issue in the midterm election is chaos:
What, exactly, are these midterm elections about? The 500-pound bear in the room is inflation. Still, I don’t recall another recent midterm when so many discrete issues were filtering through voters’ minds. Crime, abortion, recession, energy prices, the border, schools, Ukraine and, not least, Joe Biden.
We live in chaotic times. The RealClearPolitics polling average has the country’s right-direction number bouncing along the bottom at 26.7%.
The plausible default theory of the election is that inflation running above 8%—raising consumer prices and eroding wage gains—pushes everything else into second-tier voting concerns.
Perhaps, but midterms under a new president are inevitably a Rorschach blot on the nation’s life during his first two years. While Mr. Biden’s approval rating has ticked up in recent polls, it has been awful, falling below 40%. My view is that some portion of his bad approval is discomfort over Mr. Biden’s mental state. But people aren’t going to vote for Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance or anyone else because of Mr. Biden’s teleprompter gaffes.
I keep wondering what voters make today of the 2020 presidential election. Not the contested result. Mr. Biden won. But one reason Mr. Biden narrowly won is that he pulled over independents and disaffected Republicans by running as a moderate alternative to his party’s progressives—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Mr. Biden’s moderate, “normal†presidency didn’t last past Inauguration Day. His switcheroo to progressive standard-bearer for the Sanders-Warren-Pelosi policy goals was startling. A lot of voters who decide close elections have to be wondering about the difference between what they wanted and what they got.
What’s left? Abortion was hot after the Supreme Court’s June 24 Dobbs decision but looks to have moved off the front burner. I’m hard put to see any toss-up election being decided by playing the Trump/MAGA card, though Mr. Trump could still produce a Halloween surprise for GOP candidates.
As for Mr. Biden, by attaching his presidency so wholeheartedly to his party’s political left, he has elevated the midterm importance of issues like crime and the border.
Progressive criminal-justice theories are running side by side with a crime surge in cities and suburbs. Virtually no new-generation prosecutor has been willing to make a midcourse correction. Democrats own it.
I’m not sure that Americans are worried about chaos so much as that many of us long for things to return to normal whatever that means. We’re looking for transformation less than not so much drama. I was reminded of this:
America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
That quote is from a speech given in 1920 by Warren G. Harding. That would make it a century old. Recovering from a pandemic? Check. Economic upheaval? Check. Concerns about war? Check. It seems we have come full circle.
