Faced with a divided government for the first time since taking office, President Joe Biden has a choice: to move to the center or hew to the left.
Democrats picked up an additional Senate seat and minimized their House losses in the midterm elections as Biden campaigned against “ultra-MAGA” Republicans. But they still lost control of the House. Republicans will have a majority there and be able to filibuster most legislation in the Senate.
With an eye on the electoral calendar, Brad Bannon predicted Biden would tack to the center as Democrats look toward 2024. The president is expected to make a declaration about his reelection plans early in the new year, and Bannon said Biden would look for opportunities to capture the voters that helped him win the nomination and general election in 2020.
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“He’s a centrist at heart,” Bannon, a Democratic strategist, told the Washington Examiner. “I think he’ll try to find areas of common ground with House Republicans.”
But Biden’s search for common ground won’t be endless. “If they rebuff him, I think he’ll become much more aggressive, which probably means moving left,” he continued.
Bannon said areas of compromise in which the two sides could come together were not immediately obvious.
“House Republicans will rebuff his overtures, and Biden will go into the 2024 campaign saying, ‘Hey, listen, I tried,'” he said. “‘They gave me the cold shoulder. I’m running for reelection. I hope to be reelected, but I need a Democratic Congress to work with me to move the nation forward.’”
In a divided Congress, “there’s not going to be much governing,” said David Ramadan, a former member of the Virginia House and an adjunct professor at the Schar School at George Mason University. “Very little is going to get done in the next two years. There’s going to be quite a bit of campaigning and quite a bit of rhetoric on both sides over the next few years.”
Ramadan was skeptical that Biden and Democrats would reach many compromises after failing to reach an agreement on immigration and other major issues. “There are probably many times over the last two years where the party in the majority could have found ways to bring in enough Republicans to get those issues through,” he said. “That would have required compromise. There was no compromise.”
Asked about the administration’s handling of the border crisis, an issue both parties say they want to resolve, one Democratic strategist slammed Biden’s efforts, describing the outcome as “a past tense of a four-letter word that starts with an F.”
Democrats limited the damage in the midterm elections partly by running on progressive issues such as support for abortion rights. But they also edged out Republicans nationally among independent voters, according to exit polls. “These independents and crossover voters were motivated to support Democrats where they did because many Democrats in key races were perceived as being more moderate than their extremist Republican opponents,” argued Ruy Teixeira, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority, and now at the American Enterprise Institute.
The midterm elections were in contrast with 2020. Democrats actually lost House seats even as Biden won nationally.
This has set up a debate among Democrats about what to do next.
Ramadan said the “smart play” for Biden is a move to the center as the president positions himself ahead of 2024, drawing a contrast with Republicans expected to inch rightward as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) battles for the speakership.
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“If we want to win, we will continue to pound the middle,” said TJ Rooney, a former chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. But Rooney said it would be up to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who will lead 51 Democratic senators even after the partial defection of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ).
“The president has proven himself. Now, it’s time to determine what type of effective leader Schumer is or is not,” he said. “The House will be the place where bad ideas are hatched and good ideas go to die. Schumer needs to step up, engage, and lead.”
