I’m pleasantly surprised that, at least so far, we haven’t heard many progressives offering the tired, implausible excuse that Democrats will lose because they were too nice, or too conciliatory towards the opposition. But I suspect that after Tuesday, at least some progressives, who were never big fans of Joe Biden’s paeans to old-school back-slapping bipartisanship to begin with, choose to interpret the election as evidence that Biden’s instinctive desire to work in a bipartisan manner failed. Biden reached out to the other side and look what happened!

The first problem with this interpretation is that Biden turned his bipartisanship on and off like a light switch. Biden did get a decent number of Republican legislators to buy-in on certain pieces of legislation like the infrastructure bill, the gun safety bill, and the burn pits bill. But he also had no problem with major pieces of legislation being passed along party lines, like the “American Rescue Plan,” Inflation Reduction Act, and making sweeping changes through executive order like his $10,000 per person student loan bailout. Also, Biden was perfectly happy to demonize the opposition when he felt the political need to do so, whether it was comparing opponents to George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis in a speech in Georgia in January, or his Independence Hall speech warning that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” (In the same speech, Biden need to “respect our legitimate political differences.”)

If Democrats get crushed in the midterms, it won’t be because Biden was just too darn nice and conciliatory to the opposition. The biggest reason will be the runaway inflation rate, which was exacerbated by throwing another $1.9 trillion into an already-recovering economy in spring 2021, creating too much money chasing too few goods. In other words, Democrats are in this mess because they got what they wanted… on an almost-entirely party-line vote.