The Democrats Are Freaking Out About the 2022 Midterms. Good!

For the better part of President Joe Biden’s first year in office, there’s been talk of an FDR-size presidency and a “hot vax” summer. Now we might be on the cusp of a bipartisan infrastructure deal. The adults are in the room, and the sensible Democrats are in ascendance. But those tides could quickly shift: “During a closed-door lunch last week with some of his most vulnerable incumbents, House Democrats’ campaign chief delivered a blunt warning: If the midterms were held now, they would lose the majority,” wrote Sarah Ferris and Heather Caygle in Politico this week.

At that grave meeting, New York Representative Sean Patrick Maloney (pictured above), with “new polling that showed Democrats falling behind Republicans by a half-dozen points on a generic ballot in battleground districts” in hand, called on Democrats to “course-correct” before 2022 by better promoting of the Biden agenda (which, we’re told, “polls strongly”). Democrats plan to respond to these headwinds with a “messaging blitz” that will highlight the White House’s “ambitious plans to juice the economy” and “better explain what Democrats have been doing to help the Covid-ravaged” country.

“Here’s the good news,” says Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee executive director Tim Perisco in the article: “Everything we are doing and everything we’ve talked about doing is incredibly popular.” The funny thing, of course, about the things that Democrats are doing or talking about doing is that they’re not yet done.