A voter fills out a mail-in ballot at the Board of Elections office in the Allegheny County Office Building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Nov 3, 2022. Photo/Agencies
US President Joe Biden has made four state stops in three days, campaigning for the Democrats ahead of the Nov 8 midterm elections.
In all, 35 Senate seats are up for grabs, with Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada, key states that will determine whether the Democrats can hold on to their slim majority in the Senate. Polls indicate that the Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives is all but certain.
Losing control of the House would certainly have a big impact on Biden's legislative agenda, but losing both houses would be a disaster for the Biden administration.
Therefore, the outcome of the midterm elections will have a huge impact, not only determining the direction of the Biden administration's future policy push in raising business tax and lowering government's spending on climate change, but also affect the 2024 presidential election to some extent.
It is inevitable that the Biden administration will continue to struggle to bring down the high inflation that it has been unable to tackle effectively for a long time, and the influence of that will last until the 2024 presidential election, if it cannot resolve the situation.
According to the latest poll, as of last week, Biden's approval rating was just 42.3 percent, the lowest of any recent president, while his disapproval rating is as high as 53.2 percent.
No matter how hard the Biden administration takes advantage of the leaked file scandal to attack the Republicans, particularly previous US president Donald Trump, it cannot dodge the fact that inflation and the economy remain its major challenge, and those are issues that cannot be resolved in a short time.
According to a poll released by Reuters on Nov 1, 46 percent of US voters think inflation or the economy will have the biggest impact on the midterm elections, and 31 percent of them think inflation is the biggest issue facing the country.
Clearly, it will be very difficult for the Democrats to hold on to both houses of Congress and their narrow majority in the Senate. The Democratic Party's looming electoral "disaster" means that the latter part of the Biden presidency will be even more difficult.
