Over the entire year, inflation increased 7% — the most since the Federal Reserve and Paul Volker put the screws on the economy by increasing the interest rates to 16.3% to fight double-digit inflation. That year came to an end with inflation at 6.2% after peaking at 13.5% in 1979.
Where in 1980 America put a president in the White House who promised to do whatever it would take to get inflation under control, America in 2020 put a president in the White House who has stumbled into his own inflationary spiral mainly of his own making.
With great glee and enthusiasm, the Biden administration started dismantling the oil and coal industries, all to make his green friends happy. Now, Pres. Biden is blaming the oil companies for trying to make “excess profits” on whatever oil they could bring to market. Thankfully, it is not working. The American people are blaming Biden anyway.
In order to break these inflationary expectations — a major driving force behind increasing prices — the people have to have some confidence that their president is getting the situation under control. In 1982, Pres. Ronald Reagan had a really bad midterm election, but just less than two years after that, his booming economy led to the largest re-election victory in the history of America.
For Biden, it will be the performance of his party in the midterms that is on the line. Even without the ruinous inflation, the Dems were set up to have a terrible year in 2022. Redistricting will give the republicans at least around 10 seats in red states–and given the inordinately big number of retirements by Dems who understand the situation, Republicans should steal another 3-4 seats in some blue states.
But those gains were set to happen even with the inflation rate or the situation with the Covid-19 pandemic. A truly epic defeat might easily see those gains more than doubled as happened in the 2010 elections, when Dems lost over 50 seats in the House mainly due to Republicans successfully nationalizing the election while using Obamacare as the catalyst. This time, faith in Pres. Joe Biden’s ability to get inflation under control and the worsening pandemic and handle the growing competition with Russia, China and Iran will have a big impact on the 2022 midterms.
