Republicans Didn’t Underperform in 2022 Because Everyone Loves Joe Biden

You would not know from virtually any American cultural product that Joe Biden is one of the most unpopular presidents in living memory.

What else explains the relative absence from pop culture of the dominant themes in American public life — high consumer prices, the rapidly deteriorating international environment, and a president who is, at most, tolerated — but the assumption among content creators that acknowledging these realities advances goals shared by all the wrong people? If that is the assumption at work, it is a form of corruption.

It’s reasonable to expect that Biden’s political opponents would not participate in that odious project. But they, too, are playing a peculiar game.

In a memo obtained by Axios, Republican State Leadership Committee president Dee Duncan advised the GOP’s candidates in down-ballot races to avoid laying into the widely disliked president. “Steer clear of making the election a singular referendum on Joe Biden,” the document read. “We must learn from the missteps of the 2022 cycle and not solely target Joe Biden in our campaign messaging.”

Simply put, the GOP’s nominees did not err in 2022 because they sought to establish too sharp a contrast between themselves and Biden. To judge from the president’s average job-approval ratings, Biden was about as unpopular in November 2022 as he is today. He was even deeper underwater in the summer of that year.

Ahead of the midterms, voters’ priorities roughly reflected those of the GOP. Republicans were favored on the economy, crime, immigration, and foreign policy. To the extent that the pandemic’s restrictions on social and economic life were still with us, they were resented, and Democrats were perceived to be the architects of those odious encumbrances.

That summer’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs gave Democrats a boost, but it did not remake the political landscape. Abortion remained low on the list of voters’ priorities, and some Republicans won reelection despite their support for more restrictive abortion policies. What seems to correlate directly with Republican losses in winnable races was the extent to which the GOP’s nominees endorsed Donald Trump’s myths around the 2020 election.

“Voters in the six major battlegrounds where Donald Trump tried to reverse his defeat in 2020 rejected election-denying candidates seeking to control their states’ election systems this year,” the Washington Post reported in the wake of the Democratic Party’s unlikely reprieve.

Some pledged to “decertify” the 2020 results, although election law experts said that is not possible. Others promised to decommission electronic voting machines, require hand-counting of ballots or block all mail voting. Their platforms were rooted in Trump’s disproven claims that the 2020 race was rigged, and their bids for public office raised grave concerns about whether the popular will could be subverted, and free and fair elections undermined, in 2024 and beyond.

Given the breadth of support for Trump’s stolen election narrative, it’s not surprising that many Republicans who endorsed that notion went on to win their elections. And yet, as a subsequent Post analysis concluded, “in races rated as competitive, their results have generally been poor.”

It will be impossible for the GOP to jettison this weight around their necks this year with the former president once again gracing the top of the Republican Party’s ticket. But it strains credulity to suggest Republicans failed to hit their targets in 2022 because the electorate just can’t get enough Joe Biden.

Elections are not decided on a single issue. The Republican Party’s woes are multicausal. But the party’s inability to confront one of if not the foremost causes of the party’s recent spate of losses is conspicuous. Maybe the GOP feels like it needs a better narrative to explain its defeat than the glaringly obvious one. After all, it’s not just the president but his campaign’s professionals who are eager to spend another election cycle relitigating the 2020 election: