Trump’s Midterm Election Role Unprecedented Says Amy Walter: ‘We’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before’

Publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, Amy Walter, told the PBS News Hour on Monday that former President Donald Trump’s role in the 2022 midterm elections is unprecedented and therefore his impact is hard to predict.

The interview began with the anchor noting that neither Trump nor Biden are on the ballot in November.

“And you wouldn’t know that, right?” jested Walter.

“We’ve never seen, well, we’ve never seen anything like this before. I mean, midterm elections are almost always a referendum on the party that’s in power,” Walter explained, adding:

It’s hard to make the out party the focus. The only time that that has actually succeeded was in 1998, when it was Democrats in the White House. Republicans impeached then President Clinton. But the difference is that President Clinton was really popular. He had about a 60% approval rating

“So we’ve never really seen this before. Of course, we’ve never seen a former president put themselves in the politics front and center in the way that Donald Trump has,” Walter continued.

“And it’s pretty clear that the Democrats do believe that the coalition of voters who turned out in 2018, who turned out in 2020, not necessarily to vote for Joe Biden or vote for Democrats, but to vote against Donald Trump, that they’re still out there and they see that any time he’s in the news, it helps their prospects,” she continued.

“And so they don’t need to bring him in all that much. Because he will put himself front and center. As you said, he had a rally this week. And even regardless of where these investigations go, remember, we still have the January 6th committee,” she noted, adding:

That will hold hearings. And we don’t know how many, maybe one or so in the fall. And they still have to put a report out. Maybe that’s before November.

NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith jumped in and added, “And it isn’t just that you’ve never had a former president put himself in the news so much.”

“It’s also that you’ve never had a former president claim that the existing president isn’t legitimate or calling the existing president the rightfully elected president an enemy of the state, or declaring multiple times on social media in the last week that he needs to be reinstated. Hurry up and reinstate me. There was something that wasn’t quite right. Reinstate me. Re Hold the vote,” Keith continued.

“That’s absolutely unheard of. And so when President Biden is talking about Democratic erosion or when academics who specialize in Democratic erosion are talking about democratic erosion, they’re talking about the idea, this sort of fundamental idea of democracy, that if you lose, you accept that you lost. That has been broken,” she concluded.

Watch the full clip above