Everywhere you look on the 2022 political craps table, President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats keep rolling only snake eyes.

olls show voters narrowly favor Republican control of Congress, buttressing history's warning that the president's party faces midterm election losses. Twice as many Democrats as Republicans have declined to run again for their House seats.

Weighed down by the coronavirus pandemic, surging inflation and a stalled legislative agenda, Biden's approval rating has long since dropped into the low 40s danger zone. That leaves him below the level of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at similar points before midterm contests that dealt them staggering setbacks.

Their predicament leaves White House aides and political advisers reaching for recovery scenarios like this one: Maybe Biden's faster-than-normal decline will give way to a faster-than-normal comeback.

Fanciful as it sounds now, their hope is rooted in the unique political dynamics of a once-in-a-century pandemic. As quickly as Covid-19's persistence has soured the mood of voters, they reason, replacing its disruptions with something approaching normalcy later this year could lift spirits faster than Biden's predecessors experienced.

"None of them had a two-year change in how people lived their lives," observed Biden pollster John Anzalone. "When it's finally over, the trajectory up may well be accelerated."

That appears a forbiddingly difficult hill to climb fewer than 10 months before Election Day. Holdout Democratic senators have scuttled his voting rights and economic policy ambitions, inflation has hit four-decade highs and the Omicron wildfire has burned so much hospital capacity that Biden has dispatched military personnel to help.

Yet potential elements of a comeback remain plausible, if distant and unlikely at the moment.

Some public health experts see Omicron -- with its high transmissibility but generally less severe health consequences -- as the leading edge of a transition from emergency pandemic to more manageable endemic conditions. The advent of new Covid treatment pills, expected to become more widely available by midyear, carries the promise of dramatically reducing deaths from the virus.

Some economists expect a receding pandemic to shift patterns of consumer demand and smooth kinks in supply chains in ways that would alleviate price spikes. Forecasters already expect inflation, recently measured at a 7% annual rate, to fall to 3% or 4% in 2022. Other measures of economic well-being, such as output growth and the unemployment rate, are already strong.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/battered-white-house-searches-for-a-biden-comeback-scenario/ar-AASQ0j9?ocid=msedgntp