If you’re looking for a real winner in the 2022 election, check out the trend-bucking victor. With all the talk about how many seats the Republicans could win in the House or whether the Democrats can take the Senate, keep an eye out for the candidate to step up and become the one to watch. Because these are the names that will end up in the history books.
In 1928, Franklin Roosevelt won the governorship of New York in the same year that Herbert Hoover carried the Empire State and the country for the Republicans.
Four years later, FDR won it all.
In 1952, 35-year-old Democrat John F. Kennedy defeated Henry Cabot Lodge for the United States Senate. He did so the same year that the country, including Massachusetts, elected General Dwight D. Eisenhower president.
Kennedy won because he ignored the old Democratic tendency to pin his hopes on Boston. He campaigned in smaller cities and suburbs that tended to vote Republican. He imagined all those new postwar families who aspired to something more than Boston Mayor James Michael Curley’s ethnic politics, those who aspired to someone who would make them and their people proud.
When all the votes were counted, the old-line Democratic governor was defeated, as was the Democratic presidential nominee. It was Kennedy who rode the tide and won, along with the general who had accepted the Nazi surrender.
We know the rest. Eight years later, Kennedy succeeded Ike as president.
I know a guy closer to Philly who did a similar trick.
In 1972, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s expected big re-election, another young candidate was sailing against the wind that fall. In Delaware, a 29-year-old was running against Caleb Boggs, the state’s two-term U.S. senator, a man who had previously served as the state’s governor.
He had seen the young candidate’s photo earlier this summer on a large billboard in southern Delaware. He seemed like the usual “lamb to the slaughter”, a candidate with no real chance against the powerful incumbent. At 29, not yet of constitutional age for the job, Joe Biden struck me as someone with more audacity than eligibility.
But this youngster was said to have a real chance of causing an upset in November.
The last weekend made all the difference. I remember how Biden volunteers hand-delivered a Daily News-type newspaper to every door in the state. He talked about how the candidate who was not yet of constitutional age was already making an impact in the US Senate.
It included images of the young Biden sitting with the best-known senators in that body.
It showed that boldness was what the people of Delaware were looking for in that Watergate-plagued year.
And it worked. The young Democrat won that year by 3,000 votes in a Nixon state by 20 percentage points and the country by an astounding 18 million vote margin.
He won seven more elections in Delaware.
Here’s how I’m judging the 2022 midterm elections: looking for winners when the weather is worrying. I will look for those green shoots that will challenge the national pattern and perhaps make a difference in the future.
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I say this because “wave” elections are not global. There are both surprising winners and equally surprising losers.
Everyone is talking about Arizona, Nevada, Georgia or New Hampshire as the likely Democratic defeats. But the election waves can surprise even the most confident incumbent. Consider House Speaker Tom Foley, who lost his Washington state seat in Clinton’s first term. Or Senator Harris Wofford in Pennsylvania fell short that same year.
I believe that November will show a Republican “wave” but that it will affect in a way that is difficult to predict. There will be people we don’t expect to lose who will. There will be people we don’t expect to win who will
My big hope for the fall is that we’ll see candidates like Rep. Tim Ryan, who will take on red Ohio.
Ryan, running for Senate against Republican JD Vance, is an old-school working-class Democrat. He hopes to win over not only Biden voters, but Trump voters as well. He argues that political opponents should not be treated as enemies, that Democrats should find votes among their old roots as well as their newer ones.
Ryan campaigns for Democrats and Republicans for the best of reasons. He needs them and is ready to prove it.
Matthews is a political commentator. His latest book, “This Country,” is now available in paperback.
