“We’ve been engaged in a battle all along,” said Representative David Price, a Democrat of North Carolina and a political scientist for many years at Duke University who wrote his dissertation about Johnson’s Great Society. “The counternarrative always was one of inflation and economic distress, and of course that’s a real challenge.”
But even Price, who said he thought many analysts were underrating Democrats’ chances of retaining the House, acknowledged the difficulty of the endeavor. “I don’t think I have a good answer, and I don’t think anybody does as to how to break through,” he said.
On the Senate side, the timing of the Inflation Reduction Act might be especially helpful for Democratic incumbents in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire. They are preparing to unleash hundreds of millions of dollars of television ad spending, playing up the prescription drug benefits in the new law along with what proponents say are other provisions intended to help Americans pay for household expenses.
Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, argues that Republicans still have plenty to work with.
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