2022 will be a midterm election year in the U.S. The incumbent political party usually loses seats in the midterm election, and since the Democrats have a majority of 1 in the Senate, losing any seats will mean losing what little control they have. Here are the historical facts according to Alternet:

• The party that controls the White House has lost seats in 19 of the 22 midterm elections since 1932.
• The first exception was 1934, when FDR was in office. His New Deal was popular and seemed to offer hope during the pain of the Great Depression.
• The second exception was 1998, when Bill Clinton was in office. The economy was growing quickly and the Clinton impeachment had just happened.
• The third exception was 2002, when George W. Bush was in office. 9/11 had happened about a year earlier, and the response to 9/11 including the Afghanistan invasion was popular.

So what will probably happen is the Democrats will lose seats in 2022, because that happens 86% of the time. The Republicans will say the Democrats did everything wrong and that explains the result. The Democrats will say they did everything right and it still just happens 86% of the time. The media will more or less side with the Republicans because they like to give explanations, like when they give an “explanation” every day for why the stock market went up or down when it is clearly much more than 86% random.

To have a shot at bucking the trend, the Democrats would need (1) a big, popular, perceived to be successful policy agenda, (2) a war or other major acute crisis perceived to be handled well, and/or (3) fast economic growth.

On (1), I just don’t buy the idea that policy success is going to get Biden very far. He has done objectively well on pandemic rescue and direct payments to taxpayers, and he seems to be getting little or no credit for it. I don’t think people are even aware of these successes. The pandemic is grinding on and people are in a generally sour mood. They do not judge politicians on how much worse things could be if actions hadn’t been taken, or how much less sour the mood could be. It is just the sour mood that counts. I do think there was one mis-step, which was giving people enormous amounts of money without making sure they appreciated it. Doing this as electronic tax refunds, even on a monthly basis, does not seem to have worked well politically. I saw one poll where many people said they had not received the payments, even though most of them demonstrably, factually had! This is the flip side of the phenomenon companies are well aware of, where charges that show up in our bank accounts or credit card statements after the fact and with minimal fanfare “feel” less painful than when we open our wallets and fork over cash or write a check. Payroll deductions also take advantage of this psychology. So I think the optimal political strategy would have been for the Democrats to mail people paper checks, even if that would have been less efficient economically than the way it was done. Some sort of debit card, as is typically done for food stamps, could also have worked. Imagine if it had Biden’s face on it, like a Roman emperor stamping their face on a gold coin. And the big infrastructure and social “spending bills”, even if they pass, do not seem to be scoring the Democrats any points. People don’t understand the long-term benefits of these critical investments and the Republicans are just winning the narrative by screaming incoherently about debt and inflation and socialism. It’s a meme, not a rational argument, and it’s resonating with where our heads are as a society right now.

On (2), it seems like Covid has become too much of a long-term, grinding, slow-burn crisis for Biden to get much credit for managing it reasonably well. Like I said, things are going moderately badly, and there is no credit given because things could be going much more badly. That said, it seems entirely plausible that Covid could largely burn itself out in 2022, as almost every (surviving) human on Earth will have some immunity from vaccination, infection, or both. This is in the absence of a major new killer variant, of course. Things could also improve to near-normal over the summer, and then a new fall wave could hit just at the wrong time (politically speaking, for the party in power.) A major terrorist attack or a war over Taiwan, Ukraine, or Iran could be good timing for the mid-term elections, and disastrous for life on Earth. I’m not sure anyone knows what a major meltdown of the communication, financial, and/or electrical systems would mean politically. Please no on all of these.

On (3) it seems entirely plausible that the economy could pick up and inflation could moderate throughout 2022. Things are definitely getting off to a rocky start, and if they steadily improve and seem to be going really well in the late summer and fall, the public will give the party in power credit for that whether they deserve it or not. If inflation seems to be spiraling out of control, it will be the political kiss of death and could lead to a landslide against the party in power.

I’ll go out on a limb and give a prediction of what I think is most likely: Economic growth will pick up, inflation will moderate, and Covid will recede into the background by late summer into fall. The world will avoid major geopolitical turmoil and nuclear war. The public will be in a pretty good mood and the President’s approval ratings will be relatively high. The Democrats will still lose a handful of seats in the Congress because that just happens 86% of the time. This will be the end of Biden’s big, bold legislative policy agenda. In the second half of his term, he will focus on unglamorous administrative policy and foreign policy because those will be the options left to him. The Republicans will say their gaining a handful of seats spells certain doom for Biden in 2024, and they will be wrong, because Presidential elections seem to be tossups lately no matter what else is happening.