2022 Midterm Elections Quick Take

 I haven't talked much about the 2022 midterms in a few months, primarily because I wanted some time to see how my core prediction of this cycle would play out.  When the Supreme Court inevitably threw out Roe vs. Wade, would it motivate Democratic base voters and independents, who three months ago were not motivated at all?  I expected it would have a modest effect and would likely cut Democrats' losses in the House from 40-45 seats to 25-30 seats, as well as save a few otherwise endangered Democratic Governors.  Every indication in both polling and special elections points in the direction of my prediction being correct, and quite possibly understated.  Election fundamentals that foreshadowed a complete Democratic wipeout at this point in June have nearly all pivoted back toward Democrats, both in generic Congressional balloting and in individual battlegrounds.  Election prognosticators like Charlie Cook and Larry Sabato have recently begun shifting nearly all their predictions toward Democrats in a long list of hotly contested races.

Whatever one thinks about the Supreme Court ruling in the Dobbs case, it was a political gift for Democrats in 2022.  Biden was narrowly elected President in 2020 because of country club Republicans from the suburbs who couldn't abide Trump's mental illness.  But even as these voters went for Biden, they maintained allegiance to Republicans downballot.  Worse yet, they showed signs of doubling down on Republicans this midterm, leaving the Democrats with a husk of a coalition.  It wasn't gonna be easy to get these voters back, and while the January 6th committee likely managed to draw some blood and remind this upscale demographic why they were so appalled by Trumpism, I don't think it was enough to convince them to not cast a ballot for Glenn Youngkin-style Republicans running for congressional and legislative seats throughout the country.  But this was always the wing of the Republican Party coalition that was most sensitive on the abortion issue, repeatedly playing chicken with Republicans vowing to overturn Roe and voting for them anyway based on pocketbook priorities.  Now that the Republicans have made good on their promise in the immediate aftermath of these voters' flirtation with Democrats in 2020, this year's midterms all at once began to look a lot more like the evenly divided electorate of 2020 than Obama's bloody midterm cycle of 2010.

Polling has been highly problematic for several cycles now and I'd be tempted to downplay the reversal of fortune in Democrats' direction post-Dobbs ruling if it was entirely based on polls.  After all, the highly educated suburbanite has been most likely to be oversampled in public and private polls in the previous four election cycles, so it's easy to surmise that they're being oversampled once again this year.  But in this case, actual election results are confirming the shift, and in fact not fully measuring the extent of it.  There's a long history of a "shy Roe vote" in the polls, where voters in the privacy of the voting booth cast a ballot in favor of abortion rights despite having told pollsters otherwise.  We saw this several times in the last 20 years, even in states as bright red and nominally "pro-life" as South Dakota and Mississippi.   And we just saw it again big-time in the dark red state of Kansas last month, with an up-or-down referendum on abortion rights expected to be a photo finish ending up as an 18-point landslide in favor of abortion rights, and with blistering turnout to boot.

It's worth qualifying that an up-or-down vote on abortion rights is not necessarily a determinative proxy for Democrats versus Republicans, but every indication suggests that it's impacting partisan elections as well, thus far in Democrats' favor.  A retirement in an upstate New York Congressional district opened up a seat for a special election last month.  It's an evenly divided seat that the Republicans were confident they'd pick up in the current environment.  Few Democrats went into election night expecting to pull it out, but Democrat Pat Ryan, running on preserving abortion rights as the centerpiece of his campaign, managed to win by a little over 2 points.  Meanwhile, in southern Minnesota, the death of GOP Congressman Jim Hagedorn in a district that has been trending Republican was expected to be a lay-up for GOP emissary Brad Finstad.  I expected Finstad to win by double digits.  But a funny thing happened on his way to coronation.  The district's population center of Rochester, home to Mayo Clinic and tens of thousands of the exact kind of highly educated, center-right Republicans that were most vulnerable over the abortion rights issue, went for Finstad's Democratic challenger in margins never seen before in Rochester.  While Finstad still won district-wide, his 4-point margin was abysmal, and if college students in Mankato and Winona had been on campus rather than out for summer break, Finstad may well have lost.  And while Democrat Mary Peltola won her special election in Alaska because of a flukish instant-runoff-voting technicality, the narrative still holds of an ascendant Democratic Party and a Republican Party heading into these midterms in far worse shape than expected.

With all of that said, the voting samples we've seen have consisted of higher numbers of upscale, educated voters than the median.  Even when Democrats maxed out their performance among country club Republicans in MN-01, Brad Finstad still dominated downscale voters, in many cases very recent Democrats, by large enough margins to overcome it.  And that's no small qualifier, particularly since the most recent special election before that was in the Rio Grande Valley, where a downscale and 90% Hispanic district held by Democrats for a century flipped to the GOP.  If that pattern holds, Republicans could still have a pretty good night on November 8th regardless of how well Democrats do among suburban soccer moms with college degrees.

Even generally, the Democrats' momentum is being held together by toothpicks and remains incredibly vulnerable to a reversal that puts them back to where they were in June.  Gas prices have gone down substantially in the past three months, mostly because the hurricane season has thus far been extremely mild and hasn't led to any rig or refinery shutdowns on the Gulf of Mexico.  One Category 4 hurricane in late September off the coast of Louisiana could blow that all up and make consumers as grouchy as they were when gas was selling for $5.29 a gallon.  Beyond that, Democrats have considerable vulnerabilities on inflation as well on crime, immigration, education, and COVID, all of which will be thoroughly scrutinized in campaign ads in the next eight weeks and all of which would have led to a decisive midterm defeat for Democrats if not for the high-salience abortion issue temporarily dominating the political conversation.  If history is any indication, the further removed voters become from the Dobbs ruling, the more likely they are to be motivated by new issues that arise, leaving the Republicans a fair amount of time to change the subject.

Furthermore, despite the Democrats' recent spurts of momentum, it's far more likely than not that they wrestle control of the U.S. House away from Nancy Pelosi, forfeiting the gavel to her mentally challenged fellow Californian Kevin McCarthy.  It would be truly surprising if Republicans didn't recapture the House, and that would be true even if the redistricting process hadn't been so lopsided in favor of Republican gains.  As for control of the Senate, it's very much a jump ball.  The conventional wisdom is that horrific Republican nominees in key battleground states will result in the Democrats holding the Senate another term.  Even Mitch McConnell seems to think the Democrats will do so.  I'm not as convinced and could easily see a GOP net gain of one Senate seat in the cards.  Holding the Senate for another two years should absolutely be the Democrats' top priority this midterm cycle as it will likely be their last chance in a generation to nominate judges with the nation's geographic bias toward Republicans being what it is.  If they can't pull that off, especially against this year's slate of cartoonishly inept GOP challengers, then they will failed at the only thing that truly matters this cycle.

I'm not yet prepared to make official calls for the Senate and Governors' races, but will return in the second half of October with final calls.  Suffice it to say this is not shaping up to be the most exciting election night of my lifetime, as the magnitude of our nation's tribal fissures are so depressing that they've managed to dilute my enthusiasm for the horse race, but I'm pretty sure by the time I return to make those final calls, I'll be just about as engaged as I usually am in the final weeks of October on an even-numbered year.