Reverse Flow

American politics has changed dramatically since the beginning of the summer. Two months ago, U.S. President Joe Biden faced the widespread public sentiment that his presidency was in trouble—flagging, maybe already failed. His approval rating was below 40 percent. His legislative agenda was stalled in Congress. Polling showed that most Democratic voters didn’t want him to seek re-election in 2024. Then, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its transformative decision to end a nationwide right to an abortion in America—overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In one sense, the decision was a victory for the Republican Party. Yet in another, it risked the party’s standing among American voters, most of whom oppose the Dobbs ruling and don’t favor massive restrictions on abortion rights.

You could see this in the heavily Republican state of Kansas earlier this month, when an overwhelming majority of voters rejected a proposed state constitutional amendment to end their statewide right to abortion. All of a sudden, with midterm elections coming this fall, the Republicans look to be on the defensive on a central issue in America’s culture wars. Until recently, they led the Democrats in “generic ballot” polling about which party should control Congress next year, but now the two are tied. The president meanwhile remains unpopular, yet things are looking up for him in some ways: He’s benefiting from good economic news and a number of legislative victories over the past few weeks—including the $750 billion Inflation Reduction Act he signed into law on Tuesday to addresses climate change, healthcare, and tax policy. How are all these developments affecting U.S. politics?

Julia Azari is an associate professor and assistant chair in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University. To Azari, the shifting political winds in America favoring the Democratic Party this summer are likely driven by the Dobbs decision more than anything else—though they also likely have to do with the increasing extremism and decreasing political experience of Republican candidates across the country. The Democrats have managed some substantial legislative accomplishments, Azari says—especially considering their small majorities in Congress and the difficult forces of political polarization—but it’s too soon to know what role these accomplishments will play in swaying U.S. voters this year. Beyond the fall’s midterm elections, and looking ahead to the next presidential election in 2024, Azari sees both the major American political parties as grappling with fundamental questions about their identities—about not only who should lead them but what should they stand for.

Graham Vyse: How do you see the significance of this big piece of legislation that the Democrats just passed in Congress, the Inflation Reduction Act?

Julia Azari: It arguably represents the biggest legislative effort to address climate change in U.S. history. Socially, its passage is a comeback story for the Democrats, as it’s a scaled-down, revised, and renamed version of Build Back Better—which was a much broader social-spending agenda that Biden put forward last year. Politically, the process that led to the passage of the act was a reminder that any party trying to get things done is going to have internal disagreements, and that’s okay. It’s not necessarily dysfunctional to have lots of different kinds of people with different kinds of needs within a party. And it’s not necessarily dysfunctional that presidents can’t conduct them all perfectly; presidents are always constrained by events or otherwise limited in their ability to lead their parties internally. So, this moment is just a demonstration that getting a big bill done takes a lot of time and effort.