2022 Midterm Elections: What do the results in the Senate and House of Representatives mean for Biden?
The expected Red wave of Republican victories has not materialised and the Democrats may narrowly retain control of the Upper House.
In the build-up to the 2022 midterm elections most pollsters were predicting that a Red wave of Republican votes would flip one or even both Houses of Congress and make life very difficult for President Biden for the next two years.
But early data suggests that the Democrats have fared much better than expected and are still in play for both the House and the Senate.
Control of the Senate may, as was the case in 2020, go down to a Senate runoff election in the state of Georgia. Neither incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock nor his Republican challenger Herschel Walker look likely to clinched a majority, so there may be a runoff race on 6 December.
Some pollsters had predicted a 30-seat majority for the Republicans in the House of Representatives but that Red wave has not materialised. The Democrats have even managed to pick up a few seats as the early votes were tallied. The Republicans are still likely to secure the 218 seats required to take control of the House but they may only secure a narrow winning margin.
Why does this matter? The Republican membership in the House is extremely diverse, ranging from the more traditional conservative to the right-wing MAGA Republicans. Keeping that disparate caucus together may prove difficult without a healthy majority.
Three takeaways for Biden from the 2022 midterm results
The Democrats have clearly over-performed expectations and that will be a relief for Biden, who may have expected a kicking off the back of negative economic trends over the past 12 months. Incumbent presidents often suffer in the midterms but he looks set to lose far fewer seats than Donald Trump and Barack Obama did in office.
Election analysts are already crediting the Democrats’ over-performance to the renewed debate on abortion rights in the United States. In June the Supreme Court overturned the decades-old Roe v Wade ruling which had enshrined constitutional protection for abortion.
Abortion was made a key campaign issue for Democratic candidates across the country and it may empower Biden to push for new abortion rights legislation. California and Vermont also passed constitutional amendments on the ballots in the midterms which enshrine abortion rights in their states.
In the longer-term, Biden will have been interested to see what influence former President Trump holds with voters. Trump had been vocal in endorsing MAGA-aligned candidates across the country but a number of them failed in the bids for election. One of the most widely-followed races in the country, the Pennsylvania Senate election between John Fetterman and Trump-endorsed Dr. Oz, ended in defeat for Trump’s hand-picked candidate.
Also notably, Trump’s expected challenger for the Republican nomination in 2024, Ron DeSantis, comfortably won re-election as Florida governor. DeSantis’ commanding victory suggests that he stands a real chance of beating the former President to stand for the GOP in the next presidential election.