Could Biden and McConnell Form Alliance as MAGA Candidates Swamp Congress?

President Joe Biden could soon be facing a new Congress that contains more Republicans who are staunch allies of former President Donald Trump as the midterm elections approach.

Trump has weighed into the crucial contests, endorsing a slew of candidates including Herschel Walker in Georgia and Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania—two close races that could determine control of the Senate.

The race for the Senate is now a dead heat, according to poll tracker FiveThirtyEight, but Republicans are favored to win the House of Representatives, which would allow them to stymie Biden's agenda.

Much will depend on whether Republicans can retake the Senate and whether Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will return as the upper chamber's majority leader. McConnell has supported bipartisan legislation in the past, including a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that Trump urged the GOP to oppose.

McConnell also backed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, becoming one of just 15 Senate Republicans to vote in favor of the firearms legislation.

Both McConnell and Biden could face difficulties after the midterms if more Trump-aligned Republicans take office, many of whom may oppose any cooperation with Democrats. Trump has suggested McConnell should be replaced as the Senate Republican leader.

McConnell has previously questioned the "quality" of some Republican candidates while being the subject of strong criticism from Trump for months.

Political experts who spoke to Newsweek said that bipartisan legislation was possible, but they doubted that Biden and McConnell would work together to oppose the Make America Great Again (MAGA) wing of the GOP.

A Republican Senate

If Republicans do take control of the Senate, the Biden administration will have no choice but to work with them if they hope to pass any legislation.

"Bipartisan legislating is by no means dead," David A. Bateman, an associate professor of government at Cornell University, told Newsweek.

"If Biden wants to pass stuff, and he does, it is almost certain that he will have to work with McConnell—as he has already—or work with other members of the Senate GOP conference. This is true already, and will become even more important if the GOP takes the Senate and McConnell becomes majority leader," he said.

Bateman said that McConnell is "unlikely to work on anything that is seriously opposed by majorities of his conference."

"But it's not difficult to imagine him voting for legislation that gets some but not majority GOP support. And it's easy to imagine him advancing legislation that the majority of his conference is fine with even if a majority doesn't want to vote for it," he said.

"But that's just regular legislating—it's not an alliance against the extreme right," Bateman added. "That seems a lot less likely, especially not overtly. McConnell is already working behind the scenes to slow and limit the advance of the extreme right in the GOP. But once they're elected, it's a different story. "

"And at the end of the day, he can't do much unless he retains the support of his conferences, and forming an explicit alliance against the far right is almost certain to make that impossible," he said.

War on the White House

A Republican-led Senate and House could see the GOP take aim at the Biden administration in an all-out effort to win the next presidential election, according to Mark Shanahan, an associate professor at the University of Surrey in the U.K. and co-editor of The Trump Presidency: From Campaign Trail to World Stage.

"Politics is far too partisan and polarized for any meeting of minds between the elder statesmen of the Senate and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," Shanahan told Newsweek.

"Any whiff of an alliance between McConnell and Biden could easily be terminal for either of them," he said. "If the GOP takes the Senate in the midterms, it will likely usher in a Trump run at the presidency and the total Republican effort will be on securing a win for 45."

"If McConnell is to secure his status as Senate Majority Leader, that relationship won't be an alliance. It will effectively be war on the White House," Shanahan said.

Hyper-Partisan Allegiance

Thomas Gift, founding director of University College London's Centre on U.S. Politics, told Newsweek: "Mitch McConnell is concerned with two things, and two things only—ensuring that Republicans hold power and wield power."

"While that doesn't mean he's never willing to work across the aisle, it does mean that he only does so when he thinks it's in his party's best interest," he said.

"McConnell may not like Trump, but he's anathema to the Democratic policy agenda even more. That means that any kind of truce, much less alliance, with Biden is unlikely if it means compromising on his core ideological principles," Gift said.

"Remember, this is the same man who once said his number one objective was to ensure Barack Obama was a one-term president," he went on. "That kind of hyper-partisan allegiance, combined with a sharpness and ruthlessness that few leaders in Washington posses, doesn't just go out the window because he's lukewarm to a full-out Trumpian agenda."

Gift said that it seems more likely that McConnell "will try to work with Trump-endorsed candidates where he can on policy, even while trying to distance himself from the more extreme impulses of the ultra-MAGA wing."

Paul Quirk, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Newsweek that McConnell is "one of the most partisan congressional leaders of our era."

"After the Republicans captured control of Congress in the 2010 midterm elections, he famously declared that the party's main goal, in the next stage, was to ensure that Barack Obama would be a one-term president," he said.

"When he was criticized as putting election victory above serving the public, he did not dispute the interpretation," Quirk said.

McConnell's Calculations

McConnell has co-operated on bipartisan legislation in the past, but Quirk argued this was part of what the Republican believed was in the GOP's best interest.

"On some measures—such as the infrastructure bill or, in the current climate, the assault weapons ban—he apparently calculates that the party will take a beating if Republicans are blamed for blocking action, so he helps the Democrats pass a bill," Quirk said.

"This happens even on bills that most Republican senators, representing deep red states, oppose. The contest for control of the Senate is in the competitive states, and few Republicans will give McConnell grief for recognizing that," he said.

Quirk added that McConnell and Biden "may cooperate occasionally in the next Congress."

"One possibility for increased collaboration between them would be if McConnell decided, at long last, that the long-term interests of the party required more overt opposition to Trump and MAGA Republicans," he said. "But at this point, there is no evidence of a budding alliance."

Making Republicans Acceptable

It remains possible that Democrats could retain the Senate while losing the House, which would mean McConnell leading a GOP minority that could feel more empowered.

"Even if the Democrats hold on in the Senate, Joe Biden will be weakened by the likely loss of the House," Shanahan told Newsweek.

"McConnell's job will be twofold. He will be leading a rumbustious Senate minority emboldened most likely by a strengthened MAGA wing. He will need to keep them ruthlessly focused on stymying the president's legislative agenda and not descending totally into ideological gesture politics or getting blanketed in refighting the 2020 election," he said.

"But his second role will be more important: making the Republicans an acceptable choice for 2024 with a goal of a clean sweep for the GOP from the White House to Congress," Shanahan went on.

"That means helping whoever the nominee is to craft a coherent policy plan for the next administration; one that can be delivered through Republican-led legislation," he said.

"To win in two years' time, the GOP needs to display some grown-up politics. The Kentuckian is better placed to offer that than the likely presidential frontrunner," Shanahan said.