The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
The federal election of November, 2022 is more than sixteen months away. The winning party will determine the political direction of the USA for at least a decade or more. If the Republicans gain control of both houses of Congress, it will be the Trump wing of the Republican Party that will triumph.
Furthermore, the two “Micks” will be in charge: Mitch McConnell as the Senate Majority Leader (as the Psalmist plaintively cried out, “How long, O Lord; how long?”), and the Speaker of the House will be Kevin McCarthy. What a revolting development that would be. At least 20+ million Republicans and every Democrat would be correctly alarmed and appalled by such an outcome.
Nearly every Democratically-inclined citizen and millions of Republicans will never understand why so many Republicans have remained so fanatically dedicated to one of the most divisive presidents in American history. Nothing is to be gained by obsessing over that mystery any longer. Instead, these mystified Americans need to accept the near-certainty that every able-bodied Trumplican will turn out on November 1, 2022. If they do not admit that likelihood, they shall lose the election, and Messrs. McConnell and McCarty will seize the reins of congressional power, thereby thwarting everything President Biden will attempt to do from 2022-2024.
The primary objective of too many elected politicians at every level of government is to be re-elected. Too few politicians perceive their primary objective should be to pass as many of the best kinds of laws as is legislatively feasible for the entire American people. If all Trump loyalists stake their re-election on their support for Donald Trump, it is conceivable that a few of them who live in purple states or congressional districts might discover that they have backed the wrong horse.
On the other hand, many Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed laws they claim will prevent voter fraud. The real intent of these laws is to make it difficult for Democratic voters to get to the polls, especially Black voters. Unless the Democratic organizations of every state can somehow convince virtually all of their supporters to traverse the steeper pathways to the polling places they shall face in 2022, the GOP state legislators will have guaranteed themselves victory through their smaller-vote strategy.
It has become painfully evident that Donald Trump still controls the GOP. Any elected Republican official who speaks ill of him, or who admits that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was won fairly, will be challenged in a Republican primary in 2022, and nearly all of these brave souls will be defeated in those primaries.
Unless the Democrats can repeat the kind of astonishing voter turnout engineered by Stacey Abrams in Georgia in the 2020 election, the Democrats might not only lose both the House and Senate in 2022, but the nation might be confronted by the prospect of Donald Trump as president once again in 2024. Every Trumplican who can vote will vote. Shades of Grover Cleveland!
However, as grim as the current picture might appear, there are five factors which could possibly bode well for Democrats in 2022.
ONE. If much of the Biden “Bring America Back” agenda is passed by Congress, and its passage continues to evoke the highly favorable ratings the agenda has thus far engendered, there may be enough voters not only to return the razor-thin Democratic majorities which now exist in Congress, but a few more seats in the Senate and several seats in the House might be added. Admittedly though, that is a very big “if,” because Republican state legislatures will gerrymander several ongressional districts to their advantage this year.
TWO. In most recent national elections, there have been more Democratic than Republican voters. That was particularly true in the last two presidential elections. However, only in the 2020 election was the higher number high enough to defeat the Republican candidate. If the Democratic candidates and their state organizations can successfully encourage nearly all of those voters to go to the polls again in 2022, however difficult it may be to do so, the Democrats will win again.
THREE. If 10 to 20% of Republicans who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 either don’t vote at all in 2022 or vote Democratic, the Democrats shall enlarge their majority in both houses of Congress. Most of these people would be the Republicans who accepted the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, and are disgusted by the strong majority of Republicans who blindly echo the former president’s claim of a stolen election.
FOUR. Demographers are noting that because of COVID, many employees, especially younger ones, have been working out of their homes for more than a year. Political demographers are predicting that many of those people and their employers have concluded they can live wherever they want if they do not need to work in center-city offices. They are already moving away from large cities to the suburbs or to smaller cities in the states where they have been residing. If they are leaving heavily “blue” cities which Democrats have controlled for decades into “purple” congressional districts, there may be more House seats won by Democrats than anyone might have prognosticated.
However, it is FACTOR NO. 5 that holds out the greatest hope for a resounding Democratic victory in 2022. For the past few years, the prosecutorial staff of the Southern District of the state court system in New York has been diligently working to uncover sufficient evidence to convict Donald J. Trump of some alleged significantly high crimes and not a few gnarly misdemeanors. Should Mr. Trump come to trial and be convicted of those alleged infractions before the next election, all but ten Republicans in the House and every Republican in the Senate will have considerable blotches of egg on their Republican-red faces. Thoughtful voters will note that incongruity. No doubt Trump and his ever-growing legal team would appeal his conviction, but if he is convicted (and that is not a big “if” at all), it will inevitably have a major impact on the election of 2022.
Nothing in this essay is a certainty. Everything it addresses is in flux. But the next sixteen months will give far better hints for what shall transpire next year than these predictive palaverings have any hope of providing. Hang on; it will be a wild ride!
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.