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Profile of US President Joe Biden leaves after speaking during a plenary session as part of the World Leaders Summit of the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow on November 1, 2021.
Deadlocked Dems and Republicans on a roll
Democrats were dreading this week's off-year US elections even before the votes were counted. History shows that US voters tend to punish the party of first-year presidents (see the Graphic Truth here.) Results from this week's governors' races in the states of Virginia and New Jersey have made matters worse, as the two parties look ahead to national elections next November.
Start with the history: it doesn't look good for the Democrats. Since 1934, the party that controls the White House has on average lost more seats in midterm elections than Democrats, already clinging to razor-thin majorities, can spare next November. In general, voters of the party that lost the most recent election always feel a stronger urge to set things right.
But there are three reasons why Biden and the current class of Democrats may be in even bigger trouble than past incumbents.
First, voters doubt Biden's competence. After less than a year in office, his approval numbers have fallen from the mid-50s to the low 40s. Maybe that's because the pandemic hasn't ended as quickly as hoped. (Dems blame unvaccinated Republicans for this failure, but Biden is still the man in charge.) Or maybe the president's sagging numbers still reflect public anger at a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that got American soldiers killed and left too many allies abandoned. (That's a sentiment shared even by many who supported his decision to end the war.)
Fairly or unfairly, American voters just aren't convinced that Biden knows what he's doing. Only 41 percent see him as "competent" according to a recent poll.
Second, voters see Democrats fighting each other rather than governing. Democrats say that government can and must act to strengthen the nation and boost opportunity for all Americans. Republicans argue that the federal government creates obstacles to both national progress and individual liberty. That's the defining difference between the two parties.
Now that they are in power, Dems have promised a major investment in America's physical infrastructure and another huge spend to strengthen the social contract. But for now, progressives and moderates within the party are fighting one another over whether and how to pass these landmark pieces of legislation — and they have nothing to show for their promises.
Until they prove they can compromise — and govern — they can't prove that the US government can make a positive difference for the country and its people. For now, Republicans are reminding voters that Washington is dysfunctional, and Democrats are proving them right.
Third, Republican voters are ready to vote. They demonstrated this week that they don't need Donald Trump on the ballot to motivate them, and independents aren't bothered by Democratic warnings that (the still-unpopular) Trump stands behind Republican candidates. A year ago, Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points, but the Democratic candidate for governor lost on Tuesday by two points. A Dem governor won re-election by less than 2 points this week in New Jersey, a state Biden carried by 16 points.
Maybe this is because Republican voters are motivated less by Trump than by the simple drive to beat Democrats, and independents don't feel that the Dems have shown much reason for confidence in their leadership.
This is the backdrop for 2022; the 2024 presidential race is too far in the future. This week's results were bad for Biden, but to put things in perspective: it's the 11th time in the past 12 Virginia gubernatorial elections that the president's party has lost. New Jersey has followed a similar pattern.
And Democrats can still pass those two big investment bills in coming weeks, which could change both political perceptions and economic reality over time.
Republicans, meanwhile, have proven they can win without Trump on the ballot. That's good news for them in 2022. But they haven't proven they can win with Trump as the face of the party since his 2016 victory. In fact, though most Republicans still back him, 59 percent of US voters say Trump should not run for president in 2024.
Finally, while history doesn't favor incumbents in midterms, it does favor their odds of re-election two years after that. In the last 89 years, only three presidents have failed to win re-election: Trump (2020), George H.W. Bush (1992), and Jimmy Carter (1980).
The exit poll: Dems are certainly in trouble in 2022, but whether that matters for the 2024 presidential vote isn't yet clear — especially since we don't know whether Biden or Trump will be candidates.
Republican 2021 election wins
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, discusses the results of the US election on November 2.
What was the warning to Democrats in this week's governor's races?
Yesterday's elections in Virginia and New Jersey were a really bad sign for Democrats. Biden won both those states by 10 points and 16 points respectively just last year. In Virginia, the Republicans are going to win not only the governorship, but the top three spots in state government and take one of the houses of the legislature. And New Jersey, the Republican was way behind in the polls, but came within a hair's breadth of actually winning it.
Republicans had a great day across the board, with gains in the suburbs and gains across both states, but particularly gain with white women, which probably reflects, at least in the case of New Jersey, the fact that education was such a big focus, but also probably reflects a no Donald Trump effect. Without Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, a lot of the conservative-leaning suburbanite independents that fled the Republican Party in 2018 and 2020 came back into the fold.
Why is this bad for Democrats? Because even though Biden ran as a moderate with a very progressive platform, the progressives in the party have really been driving the legislative train and the agenda in the Biden administration. So now the Democrats have a problem. Even though most of their party is comfortable with a more left-wing agenda, their conservative block is sure to grow as several members become very worried about losing their seats in the 2022 midterms. This means trimming back President Biden's ambitious social spending agenda, but also creating more urgency to pass it. Republicans, feeling pretty good about the midterms right now, probably have better than even chances of taking that, certainly the House and probably the Senate.
Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin speaks during his election night party at a hotel in Chantilly, Virginia, U.S., November 3, 2021.
Big Republican win, shock Dem loss in Virginia
GOP wins Virginia gubernatorial race. In a stunning upset, Republican Glenn Youngkin won Virginia's highly-anticipated governor's race. Youngkin beat Democrat former Gov. Terry McAuliffe by two points, a wider-than-expected margin. The result — in a purple state that President Joe Biden bagged by a comfortable 10 percent a year ago — is very bad news for Democrats ahead of the 2022 midterms. Biden didn't get the boost he was hoping for to turn the tide on his poor approval rating and his domestic political agenda, stalled by deep divisions within the party over two landmark infrastructure and social spending bills. What's more, McAuliffe underperformed with suburban voters and independents — crucial to Biden's 2020 victory and whom Democrats must woo to keep control of Congress a year from now. Republicans now gain momentum because winning back suburbanites and independents who hate Donald Trump improves their (already good) odds for the midterms. More broadly, the outcome in Virginia also shows the GOP a new electoral college pathway to win the presidential race in 2024... as long as Trump himself isn't on the ballot.
Leaders at COP26 pledge to end deforestation by 2030; US election day bets
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week with a look at world leaders' deforestation pledge, US election outlooks, and China's "zero COVID" policy.
World leaders are pledging to end deforestation by 2030. What are the updates on COP26?
Well, that is one of the wins. It's the same pledge, but more countries are on board. The Russians, the Chinese, others that weren't before, and also, we're seeing movement on methane reduction pledges. Not as significant in amount as carbon dioxide emissions, but more dangerous in terms of impact on global warming. But the big issue, of course, is that still on carbon into the atmosphere, much lower coordination than you desperately need between north and south, rich and poor, Americans and Chinese. We are very far from where we want to be on that, and there, COP26 is a disappointment.
How are the elections going in the United States?
Well, it's early for me to say. I feel very comfortable saying Eric Adams here in New York City is going to be the next mayor. That doesn't require any intelligence on my part. Dems just win in New York. Plus, Sliwa on the Republican side has something like 18 cats in a studio apartment. You can't vote for that. You just can't do that. You can't do that. But of course, Virginia is what's interesting. If you made me bet, gun to my head, I'd say Youngkin wins, the Republican, in part because he has been able to navigate both getting Trump's support without being seen as close to Trump, which is hard to do. He's been more effective at most things. He's also been playing the culture war, the education war, identity war card very effectively and McAuliffe has not been very effective in response. So, it looks to me like the most important election of the day probably goes GOP, but it's really tight and I wouldn't want to make a big bet on that.
China urges families to stock up on food for winter months. How long can China's "zero COVID" policy last?
This is really not the message you want to be sending, as the Chinese President, trying to get his unprecedented third term, getting rid of term limits and saying, "By the way, we've got all of these energy challenges and now we might have food challenges." China's supposed to be the manufacturing center and the supply chain center for the world, but because they have zero tolerance for COVID, that has meant absolute lockdowns in addition to surveillance whenever they have outbreaks. That's a really hard thing to handle when you've got Delta variant that transmits very easily. And your vaccines, which are being rolled out across the country, but they don't work very well against Delta variant. I have to think that at some point, they're going to need to show more flexibility and avoid "zero COVID". As challenging as it will be to say that they got it wrong, they just need to say something like, "Well, we have more people vaccinated so it's not as lethal, but we can handle some level of spread," because otherwise, the economic hit for China, and of course the rest of the world, is going to be come increasingly hard for them to bear. A very tough corner they have backed themselves into on COVID, the Chinese.
Education clashes take center stage in Virginia governor's race
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, shares insights on US politics:
What's going on with the Virginia governor's race?
Well, the story in US politics this week is this governor's race in Virginia. Virginia is a state that's gone increasingly democratic in recent years. And President Biden won it by 10 points just last year, but the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, finds himself in a position to potentially win the election if you believe the public opinion polling, which is showing he's either ahead or tied in most of the horse race polling, that the Democratic governor, the incumbent governor has approval ratings that are low enough to make it very hard for his successor to win an election in an evenly balanced state. Virginia's not an evenly balanced state. It leans Democratic. But third, and perhaps most importantly, the Republican's ahead on the key issue in this race: education.
Education has emerged as a top issue as Republicans have taken advantage of a backlash against local school boards, that's happening across the country over COVID-19 restrictions, including masking and remote learning, but also over what Republicans are calling Critical Race Theory, teaching about race and racism in schools that spurred a lot of parental anger that's been publicly expressed at school boards and is leading to a lot of partisan school board elections happening all over the country this November. This has created an opening for Youngkin who's ahead of the Democrat by double digits on the education issue and has as a lead with parents in polls.
It also shows a path back for Republicans among suburban voters that they largely lost during the Trump years. And you're going to hear a lot more about this in the 2022 midterms. A win or even a close loss in Virginia would be huge for the GOP. It would set off major warning bells for the Democrats, who are already struggling to push President Biden's fiscal policy over the line as Biden's approval ratings have dropped off and there's more concerns being expressed in polling about inflation, and the state of the economy.
U.S. President Joe Biden arrives for the G20 leaders summit in Rome, Italy October 30, 2021.
What We’re Watching: Biden in Europe, Gulf states vs Lebanon, elections in Nicaragua, South Africa & Virginia
Biden's Euro trip. President Joe Biden is on a crucial Euro trip. It began in Rome at the G-20 Summit, where his idea for a global minimum tax rate was broadly endorsed by the group. Biden also visited Pope Francis at the Vatican — a get-together that produced decidedly less scary photos than when his predecessor held a papal visit — and met with France's President Emmanuel Macron to try to smooth over strained relations after the AUKUS debacle, which he now says had been "clumsy." The US president had another face-to-face with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, just a week after Ankara threatened to expel the US ambassador. But there's a domestic component at play too: Biden was hoping to have passed two infrastructure bills, which include money for climate change, before he attended the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, which kicked off on Sunday. Failure to close the deal on Capitol Hill would deal Biden's credibility a heavy blow just at the moment he wants to reinforce the US commitment to climate change reduction goals at this week's summit and to claim, yet again, that America is indeed back! But Democrats continue to wrangle over both what's in the bills and how to pay for them. Meanwhile, only a third of Americans now say that the US is headed in the right direction. Biden was hoping to have the wind at his back as he sailed into Europe. Instead, he is facing a strong political headwind.
Gulf states lash out at Lebanon. Cash-strapped Lebanon is grappling with yet another crisis after Saudi Arabia expelled its ambassador, a move promptly followed by the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait in solidarity with Riyadh. The trigger? A Lebanese minister had previously criticized the Saudis' involvement in the ongoing war in Yemen, suggesting that the coalition led by Riyadh was the aggressor in a conflict with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Indeed, this latest episode reveals that Lebanon — which has long been plagued by sectarian tensions — yet again finds itself in the crosshairs of the Iran-Saudi rivalry. (Saudi Arabia has cut off aid to Beirut since the-Iran backed Hezbollah movement has gained increasing influence in Lebanese political and social life.) But since billionaire tycoon Najib Mikati was appointed Lebanon's PM in September, the US and France have been lobbying the Saudis to soften their hardline approach to Lebanon, which the Gulf views as an Iranian client state, and reinstate aid to the crisis-ridden country, where three-quarters of the population now live below the poverty line. The latest episode shows that despite speculation of a détente between Tehran and Riyadh, deep animosity persists.
Nicaragua's fake election. At the tail end of this week Nicaragua will hold a presidential "election." We're putting that in quotation marks because President Daniel Ortega, who has ruled the Central American country with a tight fist since 2011, has eliminated any serious (and even unserious) competition. He controls the electoral authorities, and since June, his goons have arrested at least a dozen prominent opposition figures. But things haven't been smooth sailing for Ortega, who led the left-wing Sandinistas during Nicaragua's bloody civil war in the 1980s and has since reinvented himself as a business-friendly devout Catholic. Back in 2018 a botched social security reform prompted protests that quickly spiraled into a challenge to his authoritarian rule. Although he crushed the uprising with brute force, rumblings of discontent continue. What's more, the US and other partners in the region are already readying a new round of sanctions in response to what will certainly be a sham vote on Sunday.
ANC feels heat as South Africa votes. South Africans go to the polls on Monday to vote in local elections, which are viewed as the biggest test for the ruling ANC party since the end of apartheid. The ANC, which has won every nationwide election since 1994, could lose control of major cities, including Johannesburg, to the opposition Democratic Alliance and coalitions of small independent parties because many South Africans are fed up with government corruption and dysfunction. Indeed, ongoing power outages are being blamed on a state-owned power utility long suspected of graft, and crumbling infrastructure on years of financial mismanagement by successive ANC-led governments. President Cyril Ramaphosa, an ANC stalwart, has admitted (some) party mistakes, and required all ANC candidates to sign a non-enforceable pledge to improve public services. More broadly, it's also the first time the ANC will face voters since the deadly riots that followed former president Jacob Zuma's conviction for contempt of court last July. Zuma is now on parole while he faces trial for corruption, but he remains immensely popular with the ANC's left wing — and a thorn in the side of his successor Ramaphosa.
A nail-biter in Virginia. The campaign for the 2022 US midterm elections officially kicks off Tuesday, when Virginia votes to elect a new governor in a race widely seen as a temperature check on Joe Biden's popularity after 10 months. Democrats hope that former Gov. Terry McAuliffe wins back his old job so that the purple state does not slide into Republican hands ahead of presidential elections in 2024. But GOP challenger Glenn Youngkin, a millionaire businessman supported by Donald Trump, has caught up in the polls once led comfortably by McAuliffe in a campaign marked by education culture wars. Now both are in a dead heat, and the result will likely be very close. A Youngkin victory would be a big boost for Republicans, who'll gain momentum going into the midterms next year, where the Dems face long odds of keeping control of both houses of Congress. What's more, it would add pressure on Biden to mediate between the moderate and progressive wings of his party to pass a social spending bill, the hallmark of his policy agenda. With his own approval rate plummeting, the president needs a big win that Democrats can sell to voters a year from now.
Campaign signs for Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin stand together on the last day of early voting in the Virginia gubernatorial election in Fairfax, Virginia, U.S., October 30, 2021
What We're Watching: Virginia gov election a test for Biden
A nail-biter in Virginia. The campaign for the 2022 US midterm elections officially kicks off Tuesday, when Virginia votes to elect a new governor in a race widely seen as a temperature check on Joe Biden's popularity after 10 months. Democrats hope that former Gov. Terry McAuliffe wins back his old job so that the purple state does not slide into Republican hands ahead of presidential elections in 2024. But GOP challenger Glenn Youngkin, a millionaire businessman supported by Donald Trump, has caught up in the polls once led comfortably by McAuliffe in a campaign marked by education culture wars. Now both are in a dead heat, and the result will likely be very close. A Youngkin victory would be a big boost for Republicans, who'll gain momentum going into the midterms next year, where the Dems face long odds of keeping control of both houses of Congress. What's more, it would add pressure on Biden to mediate between the moderate and progressive wings of his party to pass a social spending bill, the hallmark of his policy agenda. With his own approval rate plummeting, the president needs a big win that Democrats can sell to voters a year from now.
Virginia’s governor race tests Democrats ahead of 2022 midterms
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, shares insights on US politics:
Why should all eyes be on the Virginia suburbs?
I'm here in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia, where the state will be having a gubernatorial election on November 2nd. The Virginia governor election is held in the year after the US presidential election typically, and is generally seen as a bellwether for how popular the incumbent president of the United States is. In 2009, the Republican candidate won by a commanding 16 points despite the fact that Virginia has been trending more and more Democratic in recent years due to the population growth here in the suburbs, which tend to be more blue than rural areas of the state.
The race is close, which is a little bit surprising because last year, Virginia went [Democratic] by for 10 points. So the competitiveness of the Republican candidate is being seen as a sign of weakness of Joe Biden, potentially correlated with his slide in approval ratings and also an indication that maybe some of the strength of a Democratic Party is related to backlash against Donald Trump who's not on the ballot this time around.
The Democrats are running a former governor and an insider's insider, who was the former head of the Democratic National Committee. The Republicans are running a private equity executive who looks a lot like a reborn version of Mitt Romney, the former presidential candidate for the Republicans, which is surprising in a party that's been trending more and more in Donald Trump's favor.
A win or a narrow loss for the Republican would be seen would affirm a narrative of backlash against Joe Biden and his policies, would affirm that his low approval rating could potentially be a weight on Democrats in next year's midterm elections and show that voters are getting frustrated both by COVID, high energy prices, and potentially school board issues, issues of education, which has been a major issue in this election. If the Democrat wins comfortably, then all that narrative will be largely deflated. Democrats can prove that they can continue to win in Democratic areas by running against Donald Trump, and it will help Joe Biden going into the midterm elections.- Is Donald Trump returning to social media? - GZERO Media ›
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