Two recent articles, one from the Left and the other from the Right, predict a “wipeout” is coming for the Democratic Party in November.
Michael Bloomberg, the failed Democrat presidential candidate who spent nearly a billion dollars in 2020 and got almost nothing in return, wrote on Tuesday for his own mouthpiece Bloomberg News that his “party is headed for a wipeout in November, up and down the ballot.”
Editors of The Spectator, the conservative British weekly magazine, wrote on Sunday that “either the [Biden] administration faces reality and addresses real concerns — or it faces a wipeout in November.”
Bloomberg likened the 3:1 drubbing three school-board members took a week ago in San Francisco to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that cost 3,000 people their lives and destroyed 80 percent of the city:
The political earthquake that just occurred in San Francisco should be a dire warning to the national Democratic Party, because the same fault line stretches across the country and the tremors are only increasing.
That fault line stretches all the way from New Jersey and Virginia to California, wrote Bloomberg:
Three months after Republicans scored major election upsets in Virginia and New Jersey, largely because of the frustration parents felt with Democratic officials who catered to teachers’ unions and culture warriors at the expense of children, voters in San Francisco recalled three school board members by margins of nearly three to one.
Coming from America’s most liberal city, those results should translate into a 7 to 8 on the Richter scale.
Disgusted with the school board’s removal of iconic names from 44 schools under their control instead of working to reopen those schools, parents took the three board members to the woodshed. Parents of students at Lowell High School, one of the highest-ranked public schools in the nation, were particularly incensed at the board’s move to change its admission policy based on grades and test scores to a public lottery. As Bloomberg accurately noted, “Lowering standards in the name of fairness only exacerbates injustice and inequality.”
Swing voters are leaving the Democrat Party as a result, added Bloomberg:
Swing voters will decide the 2022 midterm elections, and right now, polls show they are swinging away from Democrats. The earthquake that shook San Francisco needs to shake up our party, before voters do it themselves in November.
Editors at The Spectator agreed but took a different approach: They called out Joe Biden’s “failure to fill the office,” calling it “painful to see.” They wrote:
He boasts of the fastest rate of job creation and the lowest unemployment rate in American history. He claims credit for the rise of the Dow Jones index, the rollout of the vaccine and the revival of the economy….
President Biden is now touting his own good news but convincing no one.
To wit, they summarize the extraordinary collapse in his poll numbers:
In his first year, Biden’s poll numbers have collapsed more spectacularly than any president’s since Jimmy Carter — and then some.
The US economy grew by 5.7 percent in 2021 — the best gains, on paper, since 1984. Yet in January 2022, a Pew Research survey found that 78 percent of American were “dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today.”
The percentage of Democrats who liked how things were going fell from 47 percent to 29 percent over the course of Biden’s first year in office.
The editors lay the blame at the feet of the Biden administration:
There is nothing normal, let alone acceptable, about an administration that is both deaf to the voters’ needs and unable to contrive an alternative fix.
This administration is exquisitely sensitive on cosmic issues like the future of the planet — so sensitive that it has chosen to undo the US’s energy independence without creating a serious alternative — yet it is resolutely tin-eared about the everyday basics such as the prices of gasoline and beef or the notion, radical in some quarters, that education should be conducted in person.
No wonder the public doesn’t share in the president’s joy.
A quick perusal of polling at RealClear Politics confirms the extent of voter unhappiness. The latest RCP reading on Biden’s job approval shows a negative spread of 11.5 points (52.9 percent disapproving versus just 41.4 percent approving). That’s actually better than it was just two weeks ago, when the negative spread hit an appalling 14.6 points.
As for Congress, RCP’s reporting on the 2022 “generic” congressional vote shows Republicans leading Democrats, based on the five most recent polls, by 6.2 percent.
Just how bad could the predicted “wipeout” be in November? American voters revolted against ObamaCare being crammed down their throats in 2010 by turning out 63 Democrats from the House of Representatives.
American voters in 2022 have even more reason to revolt, including the invasion occurring on the nation’s southern border, high gas prices thanks to the administration’s move away from fossil fuels, and inflation due to government spending far beyond its means.
Barring an extraordinary (and unlikely) turn away from present policies by the Biden administration before the midterms, the “wipeout” of the Democratic Party in November predicted by both Bloomberg and The Spectator could in fact be epic.
