The last four times a president went into midterm elections holding unified control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, as Joe Biden and Democrats do now, voters have revoked it.
It happened to Donald Trump in 2018, Barack Obama in 2010, George W. Bush in 2006 and Bill Clinton in 1994: All lost control of at least one congressional chamber, crippling their ability to advance their legislative agendas. In fact, no president who went into midterms with unified control of government has successfully defended it since Jimmy Carter in 1978, when Democrats were still cushioned by the enormous margins they amassed in the backlash against Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
That’s the foreboding history heightening Democratic anxiety about their struggle to move the key pillars of their economic and voting rights agenda past the resistance of Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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