Victor Davis Hanson: The Final Countdown to the Midterms

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

I want to talk about the impending midterms. Conventional wisdom six months ago was that the House was up for grabs, and the Senate was a sure Republican lock. Now, the polls and the pundits have reversed course, and they said it’s a sure thing that the Republicans are going to lose the House and probably the Senate. History is sort of on their side since 1900. 

In the last 126 years, only on three occasions did the in-party in the White House pick up seats in the House or Senate: under FDR and the good feelings of the New Deal in 1934, before things sort of fell apart; Bill Clinton’s 1998 midterm, where people were very angry when the economy was booming that he had been impeached; and 2002, when George Bush had rallied the country in the aftermath of 9/11. 

And all the other midterms, 90% of the midterms go to the out party. There’s another force multiplier. When the president is at a 40% approval rating or below, and in the cases that I just talked about, Obama and Clinton fit that bill, they especially lose the midterm. 

So that is what’s guiding the general historical framework. But there’s a couple of what I would call extenuating circumstances. The first is the 2022 midterms. Everybody had predicted a red wave takeover of the House and the Senate by large margins. The Afghanistan withdrawal had been a disaster. It’s 2022 in November. 

We remember in February, Ukraine had been invaded by the Russians. People had blamed Joe Biden because he had said his reaction would depend on whether it was a minor invasion or not. We lost deterrence in Afghanistan. We turned over $50 billion in weapons, equipment, infrastructure and bases to the Taliban. 

The  inflation rate that year, that midterm year, was 9.1%, three times higher than it is now. The GDP was lower. The price of gas peaked at about $5 a gallon in June and July. It had only gone down to a little over $4. In other words, the situation was pretty much where it is now, and yet Joe Biden only lost nine seats, and he picked up one in the Senate. 

So that is a precedent. But the big difference is the media in 2022 played down all the bad economic news of 9%-plus inflation, the foreign policy disasters, the $5 gasoline in June of that year. They’re exaggerating it this year despite robust GDP growth, low poverty rates, high per capita income at a historical level. 

So that’s one thing to keep in mind. The others is the polls don’t have necessarily a good record the last three elections. People have studied it closely in 2016, 2024, the midterms, and especially the primaries, midterms in the past. It seems like the Republicans are underrated by about four points. 

The pollsters seem to be mostly on the left side of the ledger. They want to drum up support, donations and media coverage by favorable polls, and then they don’t self-correct to the very end, if at all. So we can’t really trust the polls entirely that show the big Democratic wins this week. Then there’s Israel and British Columbia and Brazil. 

We’ve just witnessed three international elections abroad. Mr. [Benjamin] Netanyahu was supposed to be wiped out. He’s fighting for his political life, but in the latest election, his party, the Likud Party, got more seats than any other party. It wasn’t supposed to do that. And they’re sort of in a government deadlock, but he’s still in control. 

We were told even on election eve that the polls were right, and the exit polls were right, and he would face a resounding defeat. British Columbia has not really had a provincial government that was conservative in about 100 years. The polls suggested the conservatives might show strength, but nobody anticipated this huge win where the conservatives took control of the parliament and the executive governance in British Columbia. 

Brazil was kind of the opposite. Bolsonaro was supposed to win because he had won in the primary. Now, that election’s a little different because it was plagued by fraud. But the polls were wrong on that. It was a very close race, and Lula won.  

There’s another known unknown. These candidates on the left are pretty scary. 

I think if a normal candidate would’ve run in Michigan, Texas, Maine, Minnesota, the Democrats would’ve easily picked up those seats given the Republicans’ problem this year. But [James] Talarico is in Texas, and he’s at one time in his career endorsed vegetarianism over Texas beef, green energy over Texas oil, a strange left-wing evangelicalism over Texas traditional religion and open borders against Texas border security. 

It doesn’t make any sense that he can win. He may, but that was the wrong candidate to nominate if you were a Democrat. Same thing in Michigan. Mr. [Abdul] El-Sayed is on record showing sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood. He has members of his family that have helped run an antisemitic ad, and he’s very curt. 

He never answers questions. He ridicules journalists, etc. There’s a strong possibility that blacks and Jews, because of the things he said about those respective communities, may not come out in numbers sufficient for him to win. We’ll see. There’s also a couple of October surprises nationwide. 

In Alaska, the Democrats thought they would be cute on this crazy ranked voting. There was only one Republican senator, incumbent [Dan] Sullivan. They thought they would have another Republican. And then, in addition to that, they would have the regular Democratic candidate and then another Daniel Sullivan, a person who was obscure and not interested in running. 

They drafted him. They deliberately put on the ballot, in other words, not just a Republican shadow candidate to draw off votes, but another Republican who wasn’t really a Republican but had the exact same name deliberately to confuse the voters. And it seems like the Democrats were behind this. It was a carefully calculated ploy, and it may boomerang on them. 

So these are a lot of the outlying factors that may suggest that it’s not quite the sure thing. 

I want to turn very quickly, in conclusion, to what happens if it is the sure thing and Donald Trump loses? We have historical precedents there in Clinton and Obama. Bill Clinton and Obama came in with huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. 

They lost both of them in their last two years. They did not have the House. They did not have the Senate. Were they done for for two years? No. Bill Clinton had at one point been at a 39% approval rating. He left office over 60%. Obama had been down to 37% at one point. He left office at near 60%. Now, of course, it’s not good for an incumbent lame-duck president in a second term to lose the Senate and House, given the circus that we’re seeing today with lawfare and impeachment. 

There’s no doubt that Donald Trump will be impeached, and there’s no doubt that everybody around him will be subpoenaed. There will be investigations. He will not be able to get an appointee confirmed by a partisan Senate should he lose it. But if we look at the Clinton-Obama precedents, it didn’t bother them a bit. 

Obama and Clinton both faced that. What did Clinton do? After he was impeached, he was not going to be convicted. It’s very rare for the opposition party to have 60 votes. Instead, he had a big summit, trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He worked with Newt Gingrich for two more years of balanced budgets, four in total. 

He bombed Serbia without congressional authorization. He thumbed his nose at Congress. He said, “You’ll never give me permission to bomb Milošević. I’ve got to bomb him out of power so he doesn’t kill more people in Kosovo.” He bombed for 77 days. He hit bridges on the Danube. He hit dual targeting. 

He hit the electric grid. In other words, he did what he wanted in foreign policy. Was that an outlier? Not hardly at all. 

Obama, when he came in, he bragged that he still had a pen and phone. He used executive orders domestically to do what he wanted. Foreign policy, he did a lot of bad things, I think, but he did them with complete impunity. 

He had bombed. He had started Predator drone attacks. He would end up with 500 of them. They would kill over 2,500 people, including 800 civilians on the Pakistani border. He kept going. 26,000 bombing strikes. I’m not condoning it. I’m saying that he was flagrantly disrespectful of the majority in Congress. 

He couldn’t care less. He wanted to have the Iran deal. The Republicans said, “It’s a treaty, Barack. You need a two-thirds majority of the Senate.” He said, “No, I don’t. I’ll just conclude it.” He sent $400 million at night as a bonus for the Iranians to sign on a pallet. Was that all? No, he did a lot of other things on foreign policy. 

He not only continued the bombing strikes, he continued hitting Libya whenever he wanted. And, of course, besides the Iran deal, he got us into the Paris Climate Accord, which was kind of a fiasco. I mean, it had no restrictions on China, but it restricted emissions from Western countries. Was it a treaty? 

Yes. Did he go to Congress? No. So Obama and Clinton have taught us that even when you come in with huge majorities and you people, you’re very unpopular below 40%, and that continues, and then you lose all the Congress by the time of your last two years in the last midterms, you’re not done at all. Both, it was the best thing that ever happened to them in some ways. 

They ended up very popular. They did what they wanted abroad. They used executive orders in domestic policy. And you know what? What happens when a president is a lame duck and he loses the Congress? The opposition gets heady, and they start talking in megalomaniac terms, narcissistic terms. “We’re gonna do this to the president. We’re gonna do this.”  

And the president just acts like he’s a lame duck above the fray. And more importantly, the next campaign starts. So in 2000, George W. Bush and Al Gore fought it out bitterly. Bill Clinton said, “I’m not getting involved. Al Gore does not want me to campaign.” And he seemed statesmanlike. 

Barack Obama, Hillary, Trump, acrimonious, tough 2015, 2016. Obama was on the golf course with the assumption that the more you see of Barack Obama, the more you hear, and the less you like him, the more you don’t hear, the more you don’t see. You like the idea of him, and his favorability soared. 

What am I getting at? We don’t know, really, who’s going to win the midterms. Democrats should, but there’s enough known unknowns that maybe they won’t. 

 And if Trump should lose the Congress, Obama and Clinton have set a precedent that a president really does have powers that cannot be checked by Congress. 

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