White House buoyed by early midterm results as Biden avoids fate of his predecessors

MILWAUKEE — President Joe Biden appears to have pulled off something few of his recent predecessors managed — a midterm election that wasn’t a clear shellacking for his party, providing a sense of vindication for the White House. 

While it remains unclear whether Democrats will maintain control of Congress, Biden and his party have avoided the “red wave” that some strategists predicted was going to be fueled by record inflation and economic woes.

Biden’s losses are likely to tally far fewer than President Barack Obama suffered in 2010 or former President Donald Trump in 2018. 

The results give validation to a White House that for weeks has been trying to make the case that Biden’s policies — from student debt relief to infrastructure investments — were widely popular with voters and that their strategy of touting those accomplishments would pay off. One Biden adviser said there was a feeling of vindication in the West Wing on Wednesday morning, particularly with the loss of some Trump-backed candidates who had continued to push falsehoods about who won the 2020 election.

Had the election gone how prognosticators predicted, Biden would have likely been fielding criticism about his ability to lead the party and Trump would have been boasting about victories ahead of an expected launch of a re-election bid next week.

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But instead, it’s Biden’s camp that is feeling confident.

Biden will speak at 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday and is expected to take questions from the press. The president spent election night at the White House watching returns with top advisers and family and making calls to Democrats who won their races. He will be leaving later this week for a string of meetings with world leaders in Egypt, Cambodia and Indonesia. 

Biden is expected to discuss abortion in his remarks, an advisor to the president said. Exit polls found abortion as the second most commonly cited concern among voters, supporting Democratic arguments that the reversal of Roe v. Wade was going to push their voters to the polls.

The aide said Democrats opting to focus on abortion was a “tremendous success.” 

Even though Democrats’ worst-case election scenario didn’t pan out, Biden could still face a difficult two years if Republicans are able to take control even by a thin margin of either the House or Senate, which would enable them to block legislative efforts by Democrats. If Republicans take control of the House they have indicated they would carry out a host of investigations on everything from Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s business dealings to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

For many voters, Biden appeared to play little role in their decision. According to the NBC News Exit Poll nearly half of voters said Biden wasn’t a factor in their vote for the U.S. House of Representatives. That compares to 2018 when only a third of voters said Trump was not a factor in their House vote.

There were other warning signs for Biden.

Two-thirds of voters said they didn’t want to see Biden run for re-election with three-quarters of independent midterm voters saying they don’t want to see Biden run again and 66% of midterms voters under age 30 saying the same, according to exit polls.  

But the win did seem to give him a bit more support among members of his party.

“If there was a rematch, based on the results we saw last night, I don’t think there’s any doubt that he would beat Donald Trump again,” Sen. Michael Bennet said on MSNBC.

Biden’s approval rating among voters was 41%, just slightly above Trump at 39%.

Ahead of the results, the president’s aides and advisers said that Tuesday’s outcome wouldn’t be a factor in his decision on whether to seek a second term in the White House, NBC News reported Tuesday.

Shannon Pettypiece reported from Milwaukee and Monica Alba reported from Washington.