If the Democrats end up losing the House and the Senate, an outcome that looks more likely than it did a month ago, it will be nothing particularly shocking. The incumbent president’s party almost always suffers losses in the midterms.
But as an exculpating narrative for the Biden administration, this goes only so far. Some races will be settled on the margins, and on the margins there’s always something a president could have done differently to yield a better political result.
President Joe Biden is no exception: The burdens of the midterms have been heavier for Democrats because of three notable failures, three courses his White House set.
The first began, as Matthew Continetti noted recently in The Washington Free Beacon, in the initial days of the administration, when Biden made decisions on energy and immigration his party’s activists demanded: for environmentalists, a moratorium on new oil-and-gas leases on public lands, and for immigration advocates, a partial rollback of key Trump administration border policies.