Two influential figures who have spent decades in Democratic politics have taken to the pages of the New York Times to try to warn fellow liberals to avoid a 2022 election disaster. If the warning is ignored, don’t blame the authors.

“Bill Clinton Saved His Presidency. Here’s How Biden Can, Too,” is the headline on an op-ed from former Clinton pollster Mark Penn and former New York City Council President Andrew Stein. They write:

Political...

Late on Election Night in November of 2010, President Barack Obama sits in the Treaty Room of the White House and talks on the phone with Rep. John Boehner (R., Ohio).

Photo: pete souza / white house / hando/European Pressphoto Agency

Two influential figures who have spent decades in Democratic politics have taken to the pages of the New York Times to try to warn fellow liberals to avoid a 2022 election disaster. If the warning is ignored, don’t blame the authors.

“ Bill Clinton Saved His Presidency. Here’s How Biden Can, Too,” is the headline on an op-ed from former Clinton pollster Mark Penn and former New York City Council President Andrew Stein. They write:

Swing voters in two blue-leaning states just sent a resounding wake-up call to the Biden administration: If Democrats remain on their current course and keep coddling and catering to progressives, they could lose as many as 50 seats and control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections...
The history of the 2020 election is undisputed: Joe Biden was nominated for president because he was the moderate alternative to Bernie Sanders and then elected president as the antidote to the division engendered by Donald J. Trump. He got off to a good start, especially meeting the early challenge of Covid-19 vaccine distribution. But polling on key issues show that voters have been turning against the Biden administration, and rejecting its embrace of parts of the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez playbook.
According to our October Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, only 35 percent of registered voters approve of the administration’s immigration policies (which a majority view as an open-borders approach); 64 percent oppose eliminating cash bail (a progressive proposal the administration has backed); and most reject even popular expansions of entitlements if they are bundled in a $1.5 to $2 trillion bill based on higher taxes and deficits (the pending Build Back Better initiative). Nearly nine in 10 voters express concern about inflation. And 61 percent of voters blame the Biden administration for the increase in gasoline prices, with most also preferring to maintain energy independence over reducing carbon emissions right now.

Political polling is an inexact endeavor but other pollsters have been finding similar results. The potential problem for Messrs. Penn and Stein is that their sensible recommendation based on both recent polling and voting results may be particularly unpersuasive to the Democrats who now run Washington. The Times op-ed authors note that after voters gave Republicans control of Congress in the 1994 elections, “Bill Clinton reoriented his administration to the center and saved his presidency. Mr. Biden should follow his lead, listen to centrists, push back on the left and reorient his policies to address the mounting economic issues people are facing.”

It’s sound advice but the 1994 election disaster for Democrats, when they lost 54 House seats, occurred after Mr. Clinton had failed to persuade Congress to pass First Lady Hillary Clinton’s unpopular federal takeover of the healthcare system. Many of today’s Democrats insist that voters will reward them for enacting the costly and destructive Bernie Sanders agenda expressed in the president’s “Build Back Better” festival of taxes, spending and borrowing. The argument is that voters demand significant achievements and current opposition largely reflects voter frustration with Democrats arguing among themselves instead of delivering results.

For those congressional Democrats who bitterly cling to this thesis, a more persuasive example of the political perils of forcing leftist change on a centrist country is 2010. President Barack Obama, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and other Democrats had just succeeded in ramming through the legislative process two significant federal interventions into American life: ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law.

In the months that followed, voters did not give Democrats credit for “getting things done,” but instead gave them an even worse House beating than in 1994. Democrats lost an astounding 63 seats in the chamber in the 2010 elections.

Just as in the run-ups to the elections of 1994 and 2010, we now find a President pushing an agenda that is not aligned with the desires of the electorate.

A new Suffolk University poll for USA Today asked voters:

In your view, what is the single thing that would be most important for President Biden to do over the next year?

Watching CNN or MSNBC one might assume that the most popular answer was mandating months of paid family leave or perhaps forcing taxpayers to fund a federal takeover of religious preschools.

But when Suffolk asked a thousand Americans what they most wanted President Biden to do over the next year the most popular answer was some version of “Resign/Retire/Quit.” Suffolk says that a full 200 out of the thousand respondents said this should be at the top of Mr. Biden’s to-do list. Presidents are sometimes frustrated trying to get policies past Congress and the courts. So perhaps Mr. Biden will be gratified to know that he now has the power to please a sizable slice of the electorate entirely on his own.

Suffolk describes the next most popular category as “Economy/Jobs” with nearly 11% saying that progress in this area should be Mr. Biden’s top priority. Next came “Immigration/Border control” with 7.5% of respondents hoping that Mr. Biden would focus on action in this area.

Further down the list, just 29 people out of the thousand participants prioritized “Climate change/Environment.” Would anyone watching the president and various members of his team attend climate conferences, demand hundreds of billions of dollars of new spending, and call for a transition away from the principal energy sources in the U.S. economy guess that less than 3% of voters think this issue should be Mr. Biden’s top priority?

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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