PUTTING ASIDE President Joe Biden's bluster about the midterm election results being 'a victory for democracy', they still largely represented a repudiation of the Republican agenda. It expected to sweep through both the House and the Senate but it looks like it has ended up with a small majority in the House while the Senate remains up for the grabs. Little wonder that some of the Fox News pundits looked increasingly sour as the results started to roll in.
While the Democratic Party didn't exactly grasp victory from the jaws of defeat, it still escaped being devoured by a Trump-owned Republican Party. With Biden polling poorly, the economy tanking and with the midterm elections nearly always going against the sitting President, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party elite will consider the results to be more than satisfactory damage limitation.
As an added bonus, the results could also spell the end of Donald Trump's further presidential ambitions. Already some Republican's are expressing doubts about Trump's electoral viability. Retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey has voiced the opinion of many Republicans: 'There is a high correlation between MAGA candidates and big losses.'
The political momentum now seems to be swinging towards Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and away from Donald Trump. DeSantis is viewed as being more the traditional Republican and a much more viable presidential candidate than Trump.
While the Democratic Party might have found solace in a limited defeat, its continued cautious centrism let the Republican Party off the hook. The fact that the left wing of the party had a good election night should not be ignored by the Biden administration. There were a string of victories for socialist and progressive candidates and four new members have joined the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez- led 'Squad' in the House.
The success of the left roundly contradicted the view of Democratic Party centrists that pitching 'radical' policies to a 'conservative electorate' is a vote loser. The midterm elections highlighted that, far from being conservative, the American voter holds progressive views on a range of issues including taxing the rich, expanding Medicaid and implementing the Green New Deal. And California, Michigan and Vermont all enshrined abortion rights in their state constitutions while Kentucky and Montana voters rejected attempts to ban abortion at a state level.
Will the Democratic Party elite take heed of the left's success or will they continue to smear proposed progressive policies as 'unrealistic' and 'extreme'?
AOC, who easily won re-election to New York's 14th Congressional District, has pointed out that young voters overwhelming supported Democrats in the midterm elections. Indeed. One exit poll showed that 63 percent of Gen Z and millennial voters, aged 18 to 29, voted for Democrats, while 35 percent voted for Republicans. People aged 30 to 44, largely millennials, favoured Democrats by a 6-point margin, with 51 percent saying they voted for Democrats and 45 percent saying they voted Republican.
Other research has shown that America's young voters lean far more to the left than older voters and are much more receptive to socialist ideas. A NBC New poll taken some two months ago found that two-thirds of young Democratic voters said they wanted a candidate 'who proposes larger-scale policies that cost more and might be hard to pass into law, but could bring major change - rather than someone who fiddles around the margin.'
AOC has emphasised that youth turnout was a major factor in Democrats’ ability to fend off the Republican so-called 'red wave,' and that younger voters represented a 'generational shift' that was ushering in a new era of American politics. Will the Democratic Party recognise the shift or will it allow its continued centrist politics to further disengage it from the very people it claims to represent?
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