State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin on November 9, the second day after the midterm elections in the United States, published a joyful message: the party of President Joseph Biden, according to him, was defeated. He went on to conduct a thorough analysis of why the Democrats lost. Among other things, he listed the US national debt, Washington's sanctions against Russia, "LGBT propaganda, the imposition of same-sex marriages, the destruction of traditional values."
The Democrats most likely did lose a majority of their seats in the House of Representatives (the lower house of Congress), but this is hardly an extraordinary event: since the end of World War II, the president's party has lost seats in the House of Representatives in all but two of the midterm elections: in 2002 ( after 9/11) and 1998, when the Republican image was paradoxically damaged by the desire to impeach President Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So the loss of the Democrats cannot in any way indicate a "political crisis" in the United States – rather, stability.
In addition, it should be noted that this time the Democrats performed much better than forecasts, because they were predicted to be completely defeated, which even Biden himself admitted. His party's current record in the midterms is the best for a presidential party since 2002, according to a Bloomberg infographic. Alexandra Filippenko, senior fellow at the Institute for the USA and Canada, said in a comment to The Insider:
“Historically, the presidential party in the first midterm elections always loses seats in the House of Representatives and those less than 20 seats that Biden now loses are not so many. In his first term, Trump lost 41 seats, Obama lost 68 seats, and Bill Clinton lost 54 seats. A significant GOP bias would mean that, two years before the presidential election, Republicans could lower Biden's approval rating by initiating investigations into his activities on a number of key issues. In particular, spending on Ukraine, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, stories with Biden's son Hunter. With a large majority, the Republicans would have the opportunity to slow down the work of the government, as it was in 2013. Then the Republicans demanded that Obama not sign Obamacare, and there was a shutdown (government shutdown). But with the current results, this will not be possible.”
In addition, the outcome of the elections to the Senate is still not clear, the Democrats may well take the majority there.
In this regard, it is not surprising that the reasons for the unpopularity of Volodin's democrats have little to do with reality. The growing US national debt and “unbacked dollars” are a long-standing narrative of Kremlin propagandists who regularly predict the collapse of the American national currency and default in the States. Economists have repeatedly debunked these forecasts. In 2020, Vladislav Leibov, a financial analyst at the Russian Finversia portal, wrote :
“About the default of the United States under any scenario, we are not talking at all. The secret is simple – the US borrows money only in its own currency. The former chairman of the Fed spoke about this Alan Greenspan: "The United States can pay off any debt because we can always print money to do it."
Of course, in reality, with such a one-time method of debt repayment, the problem of high inflation arises. But the thing is that no one in the States is going to pay off all his debt in this way. Moreover, it is very likely that the problem of the size of the debt of countries whose currency is the world one and is used in world calculations is not very relevant today. Let me remind you that the share of the US dollar in the foreign exchange reserves of the world's central banks is 62%, the dollar is involved in 88% of currency trading transactions, 40% of transactions in the world are in dollars. US debt is important to the global financial market. They are used by private companies and foreign countries as a way to securely store capital. Moreover, buyers of securities need these instruments almost as much as the United States that issues them.
We add that the United States is now really experiencing an economic crisis and the highest inflation in 40 years (however, both Europe and Russia are facing the same thing). But as far as the energy crisis is concerned, the United States is likely to benefit from it so far. As The Insider already wrote , oil exports from the United States are breaking historical records (over 4.5 million barrels per day) and, according to analysts, growth may continue. The situation is the same with liquefied gas: in the first half of 2022, the United States became the largest exporter of LNG in the world, increasing exports to the EU and the UK by 63%. Supply volumes could grow even more if European buyers continue to offer orders of magnitude more for LNG shipments than their Asian competitors.
And finally, Volodin talks about a split in American society due to "LGBT propaganda." At the same time, it is not clear why the speaker of the State Duma focuses so much on the topic of homosexuality, which has already ceased to be a discussed issue in the United States. The federal authorities recognized same-sex marriage as early as 2015 under Barack Obama (and this did not lead to any political crisis). On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned all state bans on same-sex marriage, legalized it in all fifty states, and required local authorities to recognize evidence of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. In 2021, same-sex marriage was supported by 70% of Americans, a record majority in history, with a majority of Republicans (55%) also in favor, according to a Gallup poll. Even Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, saying he was a "true friend" of the LGBT community.
However, already on November 11, Volodin probably realized that he was in a hurry with analytics, and this time he limited himself to the story that candidates who had died a month earlier had won in two states. “The standards promoted by the US are worthless, and the American political system is literally dead,” he concluded. However, it is possible that the speaker of the State Duma again rushed to conclusions, because such cases have already happened in American history – in this scenario of events in a state or district, they simply call a repeat election.