No, the 2022 midterm elections will not be about Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean the situation won’t matter.
While Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump contributed to the military morass, and there was close to bipartisan consensus that leaving Afghanistan was the right thing to do, there are few people defending how President Joe Biden handled the departure.
At a minimum, the exit has to be considered a fiasco, combined with the tragedy of a terrorist attack that killed 13 American servicemembers. But I’m not convinced Afghanistan will be a top issue next fall.
While the news and pictures coming from Afghanistan are saturating the conversation now, it’s not sustainable as a top story. The attention spans of Americans are simply too short, particularly for events happening nearly 7,000 miles away from Washington, D.C., with relatively few Americans directly involved. Nearly eight months ago, hundreds of people invaded the U.S. Capitol building, and the story has a tough time staying in the headlines.
The midterms are still more than a year away. Plenty of other events, human-caused or natural disasters, will replace Afghanistan as the country’s top story. It's only been a few days since the last soldier left Afghanistan and Hurricane Ida, Biblical flooding in the mid-Atlantic region, and a Supreme Court decision on abortion are already competing for headlines. The economy and the pandemic are still better bets to be at the top of voters’ minds next year.
Also, we simply do not have elections focused on foreign policy, at least not in recent history.
Foreign policy wasn’t in the top four issues voters thought were the most important in the 2020 or 2018 elections, according to the...