That American midterm elections tend to be about the president in power is a long-established reality — hence the “term” in midterm. The midterm elections being held this November 8^th are unprecedented in a number of ways, including that the president starring in this off-year narrative isn’t running against the Republican Party as such, he’s running against an anti-democracy propaganda machine. Which makes the role of voters in this exercise a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.

Lisa Van Dusen

June 21, 2022

First, the conventional wisdom on midterm elections. Traditionally, midterm or off-year elections in the United States — in which the 435 seats in the House of Representatives contested every two years and a portion of the 100 Senate seats contested every six years are up for grabs — almost always register a loss for the party of the president in power.

This truism of the American political cycle was perhaps most memorably acknowledged by Barack Obama on November 3^rd  2010, when he referred to the previous night’s “shellacking” whereby Republicans gained a number of statehouses, 63 seats in the House — shifting the majority to the GOP — and seven seats in the Senate (including the Massachusetts seat won by Scott Brown that January after the death of Senator Ted Kennedy), with the Democrats holding the majority there at 53 seats. For George W. Bush, the 2006 midterms were a “thumping”.

The inherent irony of this quadrennial tradition is that conventional wisdom also once dictated that presidents not campaign too overtly during midterm election years, which means that while inhibited from directly making the exercise about them in a positive way, they are invariably blamed for the results. A president shouldn’t intervene “too intensively and directly in off-year Congressional elections,” Dwight Eisenhower told a news conference in 1954, but rather create an “umbrella of accomplishment” under which their party’s candidates can run.

The tradition of making the midterms a referendum on the incumbent within a tactical atmosphere designed to make him a drag on the ticket has — like so many other elements of democracy — evolved since the antediluvian gentility of Eisenhower’s polite distances and accomplishment umbrellas.

In an age of political warfare defined by performative lunacy, propaganda saturation and the deconstruction, degradation and weaponization of every element of every narrative, organic and manufactured, Joe Biden has been a pre-midterm tactical target since the summer of 2021, when two factors arguably not of his making — inflation and the Taliban comeback in Afghanistan — ushered in his first approval dip below 50 percent. His umbrella of accomplishments has been a target for almost as long.

How could the following two headlines exist on the Politico home page at the same time, unironically, on the same day? ‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections and Republicans are poised to win the House and Senate. Welcome to our Election Forecast. Are Americans really going to hand the fate of their country and the world to a political party with a proven record of coup plotting, insurrection, sedition, tactical intractability, strategic corruption and unhinged autocrat worship?

Herewith, a small selection of the missing links in the headline logic chain above: Biden’s approval slump hits a dreary new milestone, We have entered the self-pity stage of the Biden presidency, Gas prices are through the roof. That’s just how Biden wants it, Inside a White House adrift and, the winner for fait-accomplit subtlety, The GOP midterm wave is set — and Democrats can’t do anything about it. Closing out on a not-The Onion headline from the Bangkok Post: In Biden’s America, Even the Babies are Upset.

The otherwise imponderable outcome of a capture of both houses of the United States Congress by the same party whose proxy nutters and rampaging astroturfers smeared its halls with feces then set it ablaze on January 6^th, 2021, depends on a massive propaganda effort that blames Joe Biden for everything from the global scourge of inflation to kinky supply chains.

It should surprise no-one that the midterms have been painted as a referendum on Biden by the same anti-democracy actors in the Republican Party and elsewhere who stand to gain the most from a Democratic shellacking in November. The difference between the “midterms classic” tactical battlefield and the 2022 midterms is that, in an age of narrative warfare fuelled in America by domestic interests bent on destroying their own democracy, industrialized malarkey, to put it politely, is a weapon.

The capture of both houses of Congress by the same party whose proxy nutters and rampaging astroturfers smeared its halls with feces then set it ablaze depends on a massive propaganda effort that blames Joe Biden for everything from the global scourge of inflation to kinky supply chains.

So, the notion that the conventional wisdom about midterm elections applies to the 2022 midterm elections is just one among many lies being spun to foam the runway for an outcome whose inherent unbelievability juxtaposed against everything the Republican party now represents makes this vortex of nonsense a means to an otherwise implausible end.

Joe Biden won the 2020 election based on two core arguments: 1) That this is a battle for the soul of America and, 2) That he has the qualifications and character to win it. The current adversary in that battle is neither Donald Trump nor a resurgence of populism. By traditional standards of populism as a political approach that appeals to the wants and needs of ordinary people who feel disregarded by elites, Biden is the genuine populist — from his policies to his frequently cited working-class backstory to his stump speech greatest hits to his long-vaunted anti-status status as the least wealthy member of the US Senate.

The word “populism” as it is currently deployed denotes neither an ideology nor a belief system nor an organic reiteration of pre-21^st-century populism. It is used as shorthand for an array of behaviours — casual mendacity, racist dog whistling, commodified fearmongering, manufactured virality, brazenly hypocritical anti-elitism, and baseless belligerence — that have been popping up in candidates around the world, as though populism is contagious. Populism has been repurposed by the same Orwellian propaganda stylists who gave us “post-truth”, “Westlessness” and, lately, “hipster antitrust policies”, among other agenda-serving chestnuts, as a fig leaf for performative politics designed to rationalize otherwise ludicrous events, choices and actions, all of which make democracy seem dysfunctional, ridiculous or downright dangerous. Most cynically, populism has become a misdirectional label for a breed of politician outwardly defending the disgruntled masses while espousing the anti-democracy agenda of interests whose puppets have systematically turned against their own people in capital after capital, from Ankara to Caracas to San Salvador to Colombo to Moscow to Washington and multiple datelines in between.

Joe Biden’s principal adversary in the battle for the soul of America in both the midterm elections and in general is the daily deluge of propaganda and the feedback loop of polling and perception it feeds. That manipulation apparatus, honed during the firehose of falsehoods that defined the Trump presidency, has pre-emptively calibrated the narrative of these midterms as an unavoidable doomsday for Democrats (the party of the president who happens to be the world’s most prominent democracy advocate) and a sweep of both houses of Congress by Republicans (the party whose former president staged a deadly, treasonous, failed anti-democracy coup).

The only way to fight that type and volume of corruption is for Democrats to do what they did in 2020 and vote like their country and their freedom depend on it, which they do. Both the corruption and the propaganda that are pre-emptively rationalizing the failure of that prospect have already kicked in. American voters can defy that narrative by voting in massive, undeniable numbers. It may be their last chance to do so.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.