Tuesday's elections for governors and local authorities in some places in the United States, which could set a trend towards the 2022 mid-term elections, were a serious wake-up call for the Democratic Party and President Joseph Biden.
By Guillermo Alvarado
Tuesday's elections for governors and local authorities in some places in the United States, which could set a trend towards the 2022 mid-term elections, were a serious wake-up call for the Democratic Party and President Joseph Biden.
There is no doubt that the strange immobility of the current head of the White House, who not only fails to fulfill several of his campaign promises but insists on implementing measures designed by his predecessor, Donald Trump, is beginning to create discontent among voters.
This can explain, for example, what happened in the state of Virginia, which for a decade was a stronghold of the Democrats and where Biden won the 2020 presidential election with a more than ten-point lead over his Republican rival.
Now, however, the governorship of that entity remained in the hands of the newcomer to politics, Glenn Youngkin (on the right in the photo), who with the support of the hardest pro-Trump core prevented the re-election of Democrat Terry McAuliffe, something that no one expected until a few weeks ago.
A complex situation occurred in New Jersey, where there was a tough fight between Democrats and Republicans resolved at the last minute in favor of the former.
There, Biden had won the presidential election with a wide 16-point lead, but Phillip Murphy (on the right in the photo) felt in his own skin how that enthusiasm was lost, to the point of forcing him to fight vote by vote and win by the slimmest of margins.
At the city level, things are not going better either. In Boston, for the first time in two centuries, a woman, Michelle Wu, won the mayoralty with the support of a progressive alliance including the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party, as well as several ethnic minorities.
It is an example that within the Democratic Party there are currents that are gaining ground, until now occupied by the most conservative and well-to-do, of whom Biden is a representative.
There is still a year to go, days more, days less, to renew the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate in the so-called mid-term elections, and many Democrats fear that, at the rate they are going, they will lose the precarious legislative majority they currently have.
An additional cause for concern is the drop in approval of Biden's job, who has a 43 percent approval rating, one of the lowest ratings for a U.S. president in his first year in office.
The fact is that it is not possible to retain sympathy by promising one thing and doing something different when coming to power, an elementary lesson.
