The open question, if you ask some of Biden’s advisers, is how voters will respond in this latest version of a warped political environment — one in which an unpopular president’s party can gain seats amid historic inflation
It was a new feeling within a White House that’s been struggling with an overheated economy and an electorate unconvinced by the nearly 80-year-old president’s performance, not to mention months of assumptions that the midterms would be a forceful rebuke of the president. But it wasn’t entirely new to Biden or to those Democrats who’d been at his side longest.
Yet in the days since, it has become clear that this vindication is also short-term and possibly conditional. It comes on uncertain ground — post-midterm press conferences are customary and Biden projected nothing but confidence on Wednesday, but his nervous staff had refused to even confirm that he would answer questions at all until that morning — and no one close to him believes the results were a direct approval of him so much as a rejection of his political enemies.
“Even when I was buying into the conventional wisdom that Tuesday would probably go the way the other 90 percent of midterms would go, I was also telling people that it was in no way a predictor of 2024,” said Brendan Boyle, a Philadelphia-area congressman close to the White House.
Ben LaBolt, a Democratic strategist and Obama-administration veteran who is close with Biden’s White House, pointed out that though few of his party’s candidates had openly embraced the president, even fewer actively ran against Biden or his signature accomplishments — a big break from the last Democratic president’s first midterms, when Obamacare was the central topic across the country.
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