Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Inflation has helped decide elections worldwide. Here's what that means for the midterms.

"With the GOP on track to claim the House, how will Democrats respond?"

Inflation helped fuel government turnover across the world, some experts said.
By Max Zahn November 8, 2022, 8:11 PM
[...]
"This is a global inflationary shock – many countries are seeing inflationary pressure they haven't seen since the 1970s and 1980s," Robert Kahn, the managing director of global macro-geoeconomics at the New York-based Eurasia Group, told ABC News. "It's driving a level of unhappiness among populations that's definitely putting pressure on governments."
[...]
In Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro cut taxes on fuel and electricity in an effort to slash prices over the months preceding an election that concluded in October, the nation nevertheless replaced him with a leftwing challenger.

Meanwhile, in England, Prime Minister Liz Truss responded to the highest inflation in four decades with an economic policy centered on tax cuts and energy price controls. Her tenure in office lasted just 44 days before market reaction and political disarray led to her stepping down.

Over the summer, Colombia elected the first leftist president in its history as the inflation rate soared near 10%. While in Sri Lanka, a mass uprising led to the removal of the country's sitting president, as protesters cited frustration over the fastest inflation rate in Asia.

“When essential prices explode in ways that people can’t pay them anymore, it’s like some basic social contract breaks,” Isabella Weber, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told ABC News.
[...]
"There is a tendency in the American economic debate to see what's happening in the U.S. as unique to the U.S.," Kahn said. "It's right to say that it's playing out differently in the U.S. than it is elsewhere but it's a part of the same global phenomenon."

"In the face of a global shock, there is a vote-the-bums-out element to this," he added. "It punishes whoever is in power, whether left or right."

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/inflation-helped-decide-elections-worldwide-means-midterms/story?id=92808587

So no thanks to the extraordinary surge of inflation worldwide acting against Democrats, who economists generally feel could have done little if anything to have had enough of an affect on it to change it's influence in the elections. Therefore a fair person would concede 2022 presents an extraordinarily negative year for the Democrats. That agreed, let's have a look at the bar they would be facing in a so-called ordinary year.

1982 --- Reagan -26 House seats ... - 4.4% of congressional vote.
1994 --- Clinton - 54 .... ditto deal .... -5.4% ...............
2010 --- Obama - 63 ........................ -8.3% ...............
2018 --- Trump .. -42 ........................ -4.3% ............
Average ........... -46 ......................... -5.6% ...............
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/10/31/one-week-to-go-what-history-tells-us-about-how-the-house-races-are-shaping-up/

Therefor, since Democrats are facing an extraordinarily negative situation a House loss by Democrats less than that average, though disappointing, would represent a reasonable achievement for Biden's party. .

For Dems, the bright side of the equation, of course, is that with Republicans in charge in the House, and possibly the Senate as well, most all of America's problems will be settled almost overnight. The border with Mexico will be quiet. All crime will plunge. Refugees will be treated with more empathy than ever before. Inflation will come down almost overnight. And since Republicans will not even attempt to pass any legislation of any real significance Biden's near record - if not - job creation surge will continue on it's merry way almost unabated. For a time, anyway.