Joe Biden escaped the “beating”. Barack Obama had used this image to describe the Democrating rout to the House of Representatives in 2010, during his first mid-term elections. In his time, Bill Clinton could also have taken her on his own after the 1994 election. The first results of the mid-term elections, almost invariably fatal to the party which occupied the White House, described a democratic resistance on November 9 in the morning of November 9 unexpected.
This soon octogenarian president, little comfortable with the words, not very popular, and whose mandate has been weighted by an unprecedented inflation thrust for decades, can form his illustrious predecessors, to which he is often compared to his disadvantage. Halfway through his mandate, he added this resistance to a substantial legislative assessment. The blockage that could produce the probable loss of the House of Representatives by its camp, before the situation clears up for the Senate, should now prevent it from going further.
This legislative assessment will result in the long term, after Joe Biden has left the White House, by an in -depth modernization of his country, whether it is his infrastructure or his adaptation to the challenge posed by the climate change . An important legacy for a regularly underestimated political figure.
The second teaching of the narrowness of republican gains directly concerns the conservative camp. The latter expected a vote of confidence that did not materialize in the ballot boxes. Admittedly, he was able to benefit from the faults of Joe Biden, whose initial misunderstanding of inflation which turned out to be durable and severe. The Republicans were brought by the high prices of petrol to the pump, undoubtedly the most scrutinized index in the United States, but their attractiveness manifestly leaves something to be desired.
The great old party can only attack itself. By being unable to resist the pressure of Donald Trump and his delusional thesis of a rigged presidential election to explain his indisputable defeat in 2020, the republican party rushed into a dead end.
a Already a fault committed
The chief of the republican minority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, was not wrong to worry about the “quality” of the candidates propelled during the primaries by the former president, especially in the race for the control of the Senate . The fact of the prince and the taste of Donald Trump for flamboyant candidates, straight out of television platforms or frankly conspiratorial, produced unconvincing results.
The disappointments recorded on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday in states such as Michigan or Pennsylvania attest to it. The Conservatives would probably have recorded greater successes with more conventional or simply more qualified personalities to exercise the functions to which they claimed.
This fault is all the more remarkable since the great Old Party had already committed it a decade ago, at the peak of the almost insurrectionary wave of the Tea Party. Already at that time, incendiary candidates had won the primary election test before wiping disintegible scathing during the general elections.
The Republican Party has always been a “big tent”, according to the consecrated formula, where different sensitivities can cohabit. Hunting for ideological purity and infamous denunciation of paper republicans (“Republican in Name Only”) rarely brought him luck. No more today than the internal hunt for elected officials deemed insufficiently loyal to the beaten of 2020.
While the cycle of the presidential election of 2024 already opens, at a disheveled rate which is a democratic wound, the time for renewal seems imperative for the two major parties, for very different reasons. Democrats must be looking for the next generation because the years, not its assessment, catch up with Joe Biden. The Republicans, if they want to prevail, must on the contrary break with at least part of what defines them today and sums up the name of Donald Trump.