Sanders warns Republicans may take control of Congress

Independent US Senator Bernie Sanders has warned Democrats that Republicans will win both the House of Representatives and the Senate in this year’s midterm elections.

Sanders said in an interview with Politico published on Thursday that enthusiasm within the Democratic Party is “extremely low” and warned of low turnout from the party’s base in the elections.

The senator said that Democrats won’t clinch victories in the midterms even after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade and the Republican opposition to most gun control measures following two mass shootings in May.

“The Republicans stand an excellent chance of gaining control of the House and quite possibly the Senate,” Sanders told the publication.

Recent opinion polls have depicted a gloomy landscape for Democrats as they gear up for the midterm elections.

A recent poll found that Republicans maintain a clear lead on the congressional ballot over Democrats as Joe Biden's approval rating plunges to a new low of 38 percent.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans, 64 percent, say they do not want Biden to run for a second term in 2024, including a troubling 28 percent of Democrats.

US President Joe Biden has proven a disappointment for many who voted him into office last year, with 16 percent of those surveyed saying he has done a worse job as president than they expected. Overall, 46 percent of Americans hold that view.

The problem for the Democrats has been exacerbated by voters’ concerns over high inflation. Inflation rates have soared to near 40-year highs in the wake of the pandemic.

Analyst: Midterm elections could determine Trump's future in the party

Former US President Donald Trump is still playing an active role in deciding the fate of the Republican Party, according to American political analyst and activist Myles Hoenig.

American political analyst and activist Myles Hoenig said that Democrats “are guaranteed to lose. President Obama called his first off-year defeats in 2010 a ‘shellacking’. How big a party loses depends on many factors, but losing is almost always the outcome.”

He said in an interview with Press TV that ending student debt for 46 million Americans can offset an embarrassing loss in November.

“First mid-term elections are usually corrective, often based on buyers’ remorse. This past election is different in that the losing candidate was Trump who broke all the rules for the Presidency and his party. But Biden needs to do a Herculean job to reverse the expected outcome in 2022. There is so much that he ran on that he and his party have ignored. Even if he took on one major issue, like forgiving student debt, one of his campaign promises, he would stand a chance of offsetting an embarrassing defeat this November,” Hoenig stated.

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