I was about to post a reply in the Republican Civil War thread, then realized the tangent I was about to go on would make more sense as the beginning of a 2022 midterms discussion, so ... I've been trying to think through the different factors that might give each party an advantage in 2022 relative to 2020. In no particular order... Republicans: The traditional Republican strength in midterms, which stems from midterms being less publicized and less energizing, meaning that people who have long-established voting habits -- such as the older people who usually lean Republican -- make up a bigger share of the electorate. Democrats: Democrats were energized by Trump in a way that Bush, for example, couldn't manage. The energy from 2020 may well carry into another cycle. Plus, while Trump did turn off a huge chunk of suburban moderates, there is also evidence that he brought out a group of nontraditional voters who aren't particularly interested in the Republican party but worship at Trump's feet, and he is not very good at putting his own ego on the back burner for long enough to try to engage them on anyone else's behalf. Without his name at the top of the ticket, the Republican party may still carry his stink, yet at the same time be unable to mobilize his army of racist dipshits and QAnon whackadoodles. Republicans: The traditional backlash against whoever's in the White House. Democrats: Biden seems to have learned some lessons from the Obama administration's first two years. The ARRA was way too small and way too indirect (I can get more into that later), and the ACA was so new -- and the rollout of healthcare.gov so badly managed -- that only the negative aspects really had a chance to stick in the public's minds. (Plus, the administration did a crappy job of marketing it after the fact.) If Biden's health care plan is implemented, it will lower costs and expand access for a bunch of lower-income voters, while not involving the kind of massive structural upheaval that pisses people off in the short run. Republicans: They are already doubling down on voter suppression efforts, and control enough states to be successful in many cases. Democrats: In other cases, the genie is out of the bottle. The changes that Michigan voters approved overwhelmingly in 2018 aren't going away. Ron de Santis' ratfuckery with outstanding court fines will probably make its way through the court system by November 2022. Wild Card: I haven't read the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and I don't know how much a new VRA can do to combat suppression tactics.
More about the ARRA: It was too small to make a big difference, and too abstract and spread-out for voters to notice the difference it did make. The total cost ended up being about $900 billion (compare that to the CARES Act at $2.2 trillion). It probably wasn't even big enough to start with, then Republicans in the Senate made Obama water it down (before voting against it anyway). Biden probably learned two big lessons from this: When it comes to economic stimulus, go big or go home. Don't bother watering down your bills to chase votes from congresscritters who are just going to jerk you around. It was also very hard for Americans to see what it actually did. There was the nucleus of a good idea in doing a lot of it by increasing infrastructure funding -- a Roosevelt-esque idea, even -- and the signs on public works projects all over the country that said "Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" were a good idea. Unfortunately, those signs were just about the only thing most Americans were able to directly perceive. And some of the choices were just ... weird. For example, there was a pot of money available for Head Start that resulted in many schools giving Head Start teachers a temporary raise of ... I want to say about 1.5%. But spread out over 26 biweekly paychecks, that wasn't enough money to cause anyone to make a big "splurge" purchase, and because all the teachers knew it was a temporary raise that would go away in a few years, they didn't change anything about their day-to-day budgets. So a whole lot of money got spent, but the way in which it was distributed watered it down too much to have a noticeable impact on anyone.
One interesting line of thought is that IF Trump has swiftly progressed a realignment (rural and/or poor whites Dem->R, suburban and/or educated whites R->Dem). Then it might not be true that low propensity voters always skew Dem. In pretty much all the post ‘16 runoffs, the 2018 midterms and the 2021 GA Senate runoffs Dems actually did better than in ‘16 and ‘20 (in their respective districts). Now the big question is if it holds.
That is a good question... more education means higher voter turnout across the board, so if the college-educated suburban flip holds, the traditional midterm party advantage definitely could shift. If we could find a breakdown of turnout rates in 2016/2018/2020 for white non-college versus all other groups, we also might be able to figure out how much 2016/2020 turnout was juiced by Trump's cult appeal to non-habitual voters.
