Chuck Todd: 2022 midterms misled Democrats about public appetite for Trump

NBC political analyst Chuck Todd weighed in on the debate over how Democrats lost Tuesday's election in an article Thursday, arguing the party misread the public appetite for former President Trump because of its success in holding off a "red wave" in the 2022 midterms.

“[President] Biden and the party as a whole took the Democrats' ‘better than expected’ performance in the 2022 midterms, when they still lost the House but gained a Senate seat, as a sign that they were on to something and that they didn’t need to course-correct as much as polling was actually telling them to course-correct,” Todd wrote in an NBC analysis.

“Democrats did well in the 2022 midterms despite Biden, not because of him or his pro-democracy messaging.”

The “midterm mirage,” Todd argued, meant the Biden-Harris campaign was not forced to rethink its policies like former President Obama did during his campaign for reelection, after Republicans pummeled Democrats in the 2010 midterms.

Todd, the former host of "Meet the Press," also said Trump would have won in 2020 against Biden if not for the COVID-19 pandemic.

“[Voters] did like him on the economy. They did like what he was doing on the border. And I think ignoring those two things for as long as they did in the Biden administration, I think put them in this hole,” Todd said during Friday morning’s "Today" show.

Trump’s decisive victory against Vice President Harris has led to larger conversations about the future of the Democratic Party and where the party went wrong. Trump’s victory also marks the first time a Republican candidate won the popular vote since former President George W. Bush in 2004.

Todd said the conversation about the importance of democracy in this election meant different things to different voters, and even though it ranked high as a priority, was not the right closing message for Harris.

“While I think Harris was dealt a bad hand and played it about as well as she could have, for the most part, this decision to close with the idea that Trump is a threat, rather than on the issues many Democrats down the ballot closed on (Social Security, costs and the border), proved to be a mistake,” he wrote in his analysis.