Here's why Joe Biden is smiling this morning, even after U.S. midterm setbacks
CBC
Joe Biden might someday look back fondly on the first two years of his presidency as a carefree ride in his beloved convertible Corvette.
Because the next two could be painful.
His party's potential loss of the U.S. House of Representatives in Tuesday's midterm election would mean both personal and professional turmoil.
It likely means a hostile legislature that blocks his legislative agenda and investigates his son, his family businesses, his administration officials, the FBI, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Here's the most surprising part, however: Biden may be celebrating.
That's because a surprising thing happened on the way to the widely anticipated drubbing for Democrats. It didn't quite happen.
"Definitely not a Republican wave, that's for darn sure," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham lamented on NBC.
The incumbent president's party appeared to lose its razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives while remaining unexpectedly competitive.
It was not the type of midterm pounding habitually handed out to incumbent presidents from Lyndon Johnson, to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
The results are laden with silver linings for Biden. And they include lumps of coal for his opponents, including his chief nemesis Donald Trump.
Republicans netted far fewer seats than average for an opposition party in a midterm; they may barely win the House and may not win the Senate at all.
It was closer than the generations-long norm for midterms, where the opposition party almost always romps with an average gain of 27 House seats since the Second World War.
But Republicans actually lost previously held governorships and legislative seats. Several election-deniers lost races to control the voting process in swing states.
The anti-abortion side lost referendums. Trump's hardest-core allies lost or under-performed, as in the Wisconsin gubernatorial race, and Georgia and New Hampshire Senate races. Mainstream Republicans did better. Case in point, Georgia: the Republican Trump backed, football star Herschel Walker, got way fewer votes in a Senate race than a Republican foe of Trump, Brian Kemp, got in the same state's gubernatorial race.
