The only first-midterm in the past few decades to have gone the way of the sitting party was 2002, and that was largely because of the 9/11 effect. Otherwise, every sitting president - Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Obama, Trump, and likely Biden this year - has taken a hammering in the first midterm.
Does a sitting president have to turn in a performance along the lines of: no inflation, 3% unemployment, no major crises (or, alternatively, a highly-praised handling of a crisis), low crime, and getting several popular pieces of legislation passed in order to have a winning first-midterm?
That depends a lot on the tactics of the opposing party. Apparently, it is possible to convince a sizable portion of the populace that if the leader of the country is of the wrong political persuasion then anything done by that leader is automatically wrong.
It matters less how the president did, than how the country is feeling. The problem for the Democrats is that the last two have been left giant messes by their Republican predecessors that take longer than a year and a half to clean up, particularly when they have an opposition party who is doing everything they can to assure that they to fail.
Even a popular President will be past the honeymoon period, if he ever had one at all, but will have probably tried to do enough to really annoy some significant part of the electorate, many if not all of whom are of the other major political party. His supporters will inevitably be disappointed that he didn’t do this or that, and some of them won’t vote in the midterms. So the President can expect to lose at least some, and maybe quite a few, of his backers in Congress.
Clinton in 1994 and Obama in 2010, in particular, took a “shellacking” (Obama’s term) in their first midterms. With high inflation, high gas prices, lingering Covid and a low personal approval rating, I’m afraid it could get pretty ugly for ol’ Joe this November.
I don’t think it really matters how well things are going — the reasons for the “midterm curse” are largely structural and that’s why you see it regardless of party or the state of the economy. One factor is a “receding wave,” i.e. a new President often carries some marginal House seats with him when first elected, and these seats revert back when the incumbent has to run by him/herself.
But mostly it’s about why people vote. People don’t vote because they’re happy or content— they vote because they’re angry or afraid. During a midterm that all gets directed at the President, and by association his party. The only other recent midterm to buck the trend — Clinton’s second — was because Republicans embodied by Newt Gingrich pushed so hard on impeachment that they made themselves the target of that fear and anger.
I added some bolding to make my point clear. I was still a Republican then, but starting to be disappointed with “my” party being so damn obstructionist. I never for a moment believed Obama could have a second term – but a few years later, much to my surprise . . . he did!!
So lately I have been wishing that we could resurrect Osama bin Laden just so Biden could “get him” again. I am holding out hope that the Republicans can self immolate during the mid-terms (especially after a bunch of them get perp walked to jail just before and during the general). But any Republican president in 2024 will be a disaster.
I just hope the mid-terms leave Biden with the ability to accomplish things.