What if the 2022 Midterm Falls in the Forest but Nobody Hears?

This works only if those leaders accept the results and don’t insist they were fraudulent—an increasingly bipartisan claim in 21st-century American politics. But even if they do accept the outcome, at least rhetorically, they don’t always act on it, preferring either to ascribe it (privately) to voters’ stupidity or (publicly) to some version of a “communications failure.” What might we get next month?

The first task is to assess what the signal is. This isn’t always easy. Perhaps the most obvious recent example of midterm electoral clarity, and a salutary response to it, came in 1994.

Bill Clinton’s

chaotic first two years in office—in which he tried and failed to enact universal healthcare, executed a fiscal volte-face from promised stimulus to deficit reduction, and generally stumbled around in the semipermanent miasma of scandal that already surrounded him—ended in historic Republican triumph. In not much more than a year the president was declaring that the era of big government was over and triangulating his way to re-election in 1996.

In 2010, Barack Obama acknowledged, verbally at least, the “shellacking” he took from the midterms that year. But his self-certitude was so epic that he didn’t really think he needed to change course because of a little matter like an election, and he pressed on pretty much regardless. He duly went on to a narrow re-election two years later, but the seeds sown in that Tea Party and anti-ObamaCare midterm election took root and flowered soon enough in the populist revolution that gave us

Donald Trump

in 2016.

The 2022 midterms could prove especially consequential in lots of ways depending on the message and how our leaders choose to interpret it. For one thing, they may well determine the identities of both main parties’ presidential nominees in 2024.

If

Joe Biden’s

Democrats take the hammering they deserve for their performance in the past two years, it is hard to see how the president can seriously continue with the proposition that he will be running again two years from now. The ambitious and the restless in his party will surely lose no time in amplifying the increasingly loud murmurings about his incapacity for office. The investigations that a Republican-controlled House will unleash will weaken him further and hasten the urgency of Democratic leaders in their search for an alternative.

On the Republican side, the implications of the elections for the top of the ticket in 2024 are more complex. The voters’ message will probably lie less in the pattern of the tapestry of GOP seats won and lost and more in the microfibers of who won and lost them.

If Donald Trump’s endorsed candidates win, especially in Senate races such as Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania, it will become less likely that the former president can be denied the nomination if he wants it.

But consider some combination of a thumping re-election victory for Florida Gov.

Ron DeSantis

and a scattering of setbacks for Mr. Trump’s candidates across the country. If a Republican failure to win a Senate can be plausibly laid at the former president’s door for the second straight election, the foundations of a Trumpian restoration may start to crumble.

The disaggregated micro pattern in the election results will need to be studied closely for other, wider ramifications. It would be a significant development if those Republican candidates who have been most prominent and vocal in their rejection of the results of the last election were to go down to defeat. The voters’ judgment on candidates such as

Doug Mastriano

and

Kari Lake,

the GOP candidates for governor in Pennsylvania and Arizona respectively, may force a rethink there and in other places on the virtues of relitigating past elections and threatening to undo future ones.

The voters will also send a message on the relative saliency of the pressing policy issues of the next few years and will find out how much abortion, immigration and crime occupy the minds of Americans.

Above all though, if polling is to be believed, it is the economy that is uppermost in voters’ concerns, and it’s here that we can hope the clearest signal is delivered by them and heeded by our leaders. We have had two years of reckless policy making that followed a decade of delusion in which politicians (and central bankers) somehow convinced themselves that cheap and free money were costless ways to achieve growth. Now that the inevitable inflation they produced looks increasingly embedded, perhaps voters will seize the opportunity to inaugurate a new era of economic seriousness and fiscal sanity.