Election 2022 Postmortem Quick Takes

I'll be back late this month or early next month with my usual full state-by-state analysis of the 2022 midterms, but here's a cluster of hot takes that were top of mind for me the day after the big event....

No Red Wave-- I made the disclaimer at the outset that I never go into an election night fully confident that I have the electorate figured out, and qualified my bearish predictions accordingly.  Of the range of scenarios that could have unfolded, the one that seemed less likely to play out on November 8, 2022, actually materialized.  That's good.....not just for the Democratic Party but for making election nights exciting generally.  I'll take my lumps for buying into the red wave narrative, particularly since it was based on a reasonably comprehensive selection of data points, anecdotes, and tea leaves.  I have certainly earned the dunce cap this time.

Polls/Trump Factor--The fact that the polls underestimated Democratic strength in the August races certainly gave me pause when it came to accepting that that dynamic had changed so considerably in less than three months.  By and large, last weekend's media polls come out looking pretty good.  But as I digest the hot takes on cable news and elsewhere, I can't help but identify the cognitive dissonance in interpreting a number of the takeaways, including how the election results relate to Trump.  In one breath, we're told that the undersampling of Republican voters is a phenomenon that only occurs when Trump is on the ballot and brings these people out in droves.  But in the next breath, we're supposed to interpret yesterday's results as a massive rebuke of Trump and MAGA politics.  Can both things be true?  And if they can, how does that apply to 2024 when Trump remains the odds-on favorite to be the GOP Presidential nominee again?

Exit Polls--I made a special point of looking at exit polls at the exact moment of poll closing for all the battleground races last night.....and most of them turned out to be pretty close to right.  The NC-Sen result was about three points too red, making it the first time in 30 years of poll watching where I've seen an electoral outcome bluer than the exit poll indicated.  The remaining exit poll wild card is Nevada, where the exit poll numbers predicted an outcome almost identical to the current margins.  We'll see who's closer to right in the end....the exit polls or the notion of tens of thousands of deeply blue late mail-in votes reversing the current deficits.  Nothing would surprise me but I'm betting the exits are right and the final ballots don't alter the margins much.

Hispanic Vote--Quite a few people predicted a collapse of Democratic support among Hispanics while others didn't foresee much change from previous cycles.  The reality appears to be somewhere in the middle but it's too soon to know, if in fact we ever reliably can.  Everybody seems to lean hard on the RGV for lazy analysis of how the Hispanic vote went.  I was surprised the Democrats didn't collapse there more than they did, although at best it seems like the existing losses from 2020 are durable.  Outside of the RGV and South Florida, the picture is some combination of mixed and incomplete at this writing.  Certainly Democrats took some losses in Hispanic-heavy places like the Bronx and southern California, but it's possible the losses there were proportionally higher among other ethnic groups.  Ditto for Nevada, where win or lose, the needle is moving in the wrong direction.  I haven't dug in deeply enough as it relates to Puerto Rican-heavy communities in the northeast yet to see how those numbers broke down.  On the other hand, there was zero indication of atrophying Hispanic votes in Colorado, Arizona, or New Mexico.  I still think Dems have a troubled future with Hispanic voters, but if there is any kind of evolution it doesn't appear likely to happen in a straight line.

Abortion--It's hard to dispute that the Democrats made the right call to hype the abortion issue as much as they did.  I submit that there were quite a few jurisdictions where the message was a net negative in terms of salience, but on balance it seemed to motivate far more voters than it repelled.  It would be interesting, but probably impossible, to extrapolate how many seats the Democrats were able to save because of abortion rights voters.  Would we be looking at the 23 House seat losses I predicted if not for Dobbs and the Democrats' litigation of it?  On the other hand, if Kathy Hochul had taken crime messaging more seriously and talked less about abortion, could the downballot wipeout in the Empire State have been averted?  Who knows.

Minnesota and Marijuana Parties--Arguably my biggest fumble--and my biggest surprise--of the 2022 cycle came from the vastly truncated significance of the marijuana parties in Minnesota's statewide races.  I was absolutely certain that the eight-year growth trajectory of these gadfly parties would continue in a cycle with high wrong-track numbers and skepticism of both parties.  More than just about any other minor party in America, these cleverly branded parties were perfectly positioned to sponge protest votes.  Instead, the two parties fizzled, both failing to hit the 5% threshold needed to maintain major-party status.  Even in the Auditor's race, where I figured the pot parties would combine for more than 10%, they barely combined for 5%.  I truly did not see that one coming.  Had I foreseen the pot parties ebbing, I'd have been more likely to predict at least some of the Democratic wave that hit the Gopher State.  But even in the best-case scenario, I wouldn't have figured Keith Ellison would have been re-elected or that the Dems would win the state Senate.

Pennsylvania and Huge Geographic Differences--The most impressive performances of the night came from the top of the ticket in Pennsylvania which trickled downballot and saved multiple endangered House seats.  For a state that's on the demographic knife's edge and seems like it should be trending Republican, this is the third election cycle in a row where the Keystone State has significantly outperformed the adjusted Trump-era fundamentals.  Comparing last night's performance to its neighbors really helps put in context just how nicely Pennsylvania held up.  Along the same lines, remember the days not so long ago when Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin seemed to reliably shift in tandem with the political winds?  Just as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia have taken vastly different trajectories in recent cycles, the same divergence can be seen in last night's results from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.  

Where Do We Go From Here?--It's hard to glean any overarching takeaway from last night's results that can be directly deployed for 2024 messaging.  Even though litigating Dobbs appeared to have worked, I still think Democrats run a risk by talking about it too much, particularly if the predictions of a recession come to pass in 2023.  Beyond that, there's no clear mandate against immigration policy, crime enforcement, or any of the culture war touchstones the Fox News set obsesses about to where Democrats would hypothetically receive a loud and clear message.  That makes it tougher than ever in determining where we go from here because I think a number of those issues are still simmering under the surface even though voters fell far short of speaking about them in a unified voice.  As for the likelihood of narrowly losing the House of Representatives, I'm not one to buy into the "we win by losing" trope, but as I said last weekend, it seems likely that a GOP House with a narrow and dysfunctional majority sets up Democrats with at least a little less exposure going into the 2024 Presidential cycle?  If a recession is really coming, wouldn't Democrats be poised for an ever harder landing in 2024 if we didn't have a GOP House as a foil?

More detailed analysis to come on the other side of Thanskgiving.