2022 Election Results Deep Dive

So I didn't see that one coming!  With each passing week after Labor Day, this year's midterm election looked as though it was gonna be a bigger disaster for the Democratic Party.  By the time the weekend before the election arrived, I was convinced that even my bearish pre-election predictions were obsolete and that far more Democratic seats were in imminent jeopardy.  But I'd also been through enough election nights to realize it was futile to think you had the country figured out the month before or even the weekend before, and qualified my predictions accordingly until the very end.

Still, it was a bigger surprise than usual when the numbers started pouring in on November 8th and mostly painted a picture of a nation politically unchanged since the 2020 Presidential election.  It's debatable whether that would have been as true if not for the Dobbs ruling ending abortion as a national right.  After all, it seemed like most of the kinds of voters who would have been moved by the abortion issue had already realigned to the Democrats during the Trump era.  The Dobbs ruling may well have locked enough of them in place to avoid the Biden coalition collapsing.  

That was my original instinct this past summer but most of the tea leaves were pointing to the abortion issue losing resonance as the election approached.  Even most Democratic polls were showing numbers much closer to the Republican internals than they were to the media polls.  Given the ineptitude of the media polls in 2016 and 2020, it was easy to dismiss them this year.  Hell, even New York Times pollster Nate Cohn publicly doubted the accuracy of his own poll, believing that they had oversampled Democrats.  But in the end, the media polls were much closer to right than the Democratic and Republican internals showing more substantial Republican momentum.

I'll break it down state by state as I do every year in search of regional trends and patterns, but then conclude by exploring the more complicated national questions.  It really was a historically strange election night which I hope the coming paragraphs will make abundantly clear.  But without further adieu, I first present you with the state numbers....

Alabama--The reddening of the Yellowhammer State continued this year with both Republican Governor Kay Ivey and GOP Senate candidate Katie Britt winning by margins of greater than 2-1 and both exceeding the margins from my pre-election predictions.  Ivey, who I figured would get beaten in the primary based on her public condemnation of anti-vaxxers, prevailed by 38 points, a tick better than the 34 points I predicted.  Britt, running for the open seat vacated by long-time Senator Richard Shelby, overshot my prediction even more widely, prevailing by 36 points when I predicted 24 points.  These overwhelming Republican margins really underscore how much of a perfect storm it was in 2017 when Democrat Doug Jones won that Senate special election against Roy Moore.  Alabama's 6-1 GOP House majority also remained intact with nary a single competitive race.  The state's evolution to an even darker shade of red is probably a combination of a modest shift to the GOP among conservative rural blacks and a near-unanimous Republican consolidation among the vanishing ranks of Yellow Dog Democrats in the white population.  Plenty of rural Alabama counties that were 75-25 GOP a decade ago are now in the 88-12 GOP range, for instance.  Even the Democrat-dominant "Black belt" running through south-central Alabama from the Mississippi border to the Georgia border is no longer a "belt" as Russell County on the state's eastern edge voted Republican up and down the ballot this year.

Alaska--I'm not at all a fan generally of complex "instant runoff voting" and expect it to get incredible scrutiny as more places consider adopting it, but there's no question that IRV has worked to Democrats' benefit in the state of Alaska where it was adopted last year.  Not only did Democrat Mary Peltola manage to win the late Don Young's House seat in this summer's special election despite getting far fewer votes than Sarah Palin, it positioned Peltola to capture the at-large House seat with ease in the November 8th general election by crowding the field with Republicans whose voters canceled each other out.  Alaska has without question gotten less conservative in the last decade or so, but it's still not there yet in terms of electing statewide Democrats organically, and that will make IRV tremendously controversial moving forward.  Instant runoff voting also indisputably saved Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski in her quest for a fourth term without having to endure a GOP primary that she would have almost certainly lost.  Murkowski, despite being to the right of even the most conservative Democrat on the vast majority of issues, nonetheless became the de facto Democratic Senate nominee this year.  Most "real Republicans" cast their ballot for conservative GOP challenger Kelly Tschibaka.  But the deck was stacked with a token Democratic challenger Pat Chesbro who enabled Murkowski to game the IRV process and win another term, despite getting fewer first-ballot voters than Tshibaka.  In fact, Tshibaka was even stronger than I predicted, and the final outcome, after three tedious weeks of ballot reorganization, lost by only 7 points, lower than the 11-point margin of victory I had predicted for Murkowski.  The Governor's race turned out to be the only drama-free affair with Republican Mike Dunleavey getting re-elected to a second term with a clear majority, with former Independent Governor Bill Walker, his main challenger, being an embarrassingly minor factor in the end.  Walker managed to come in third place, behind token Democrat Les Cara.  While I predicted Dunleavey would win, I overestimated his challenge and predicted Dunleavey to prevail by 10 when he eventually won by 26.  Given the headache-inducing complexity of instant runoff voting, I think it's fair to say that Alaska will be one of if not the hardest states to accurately predict margins moving forward.

Arizona--I suppose it's a fitting coincidence that the Grand Canyon State had perhaps the widest difference between the state that the race appeared to be in the weekend before the election and the actual voting results.  My instinct after Arizona's primary last summer was that the GOP shot themselves in the foot by nominating a slate of right-wing radicals whose priorities seemed tone-deaf in a state that had just flipped to Joe Biden two years earlier.  That instinct was ultimately vindicated, but not without me doubting my own assertion as poll after poll started coming in uglier for the Democrats.  In my final prediction, I actually held firm on behalf of Democratic Senator Mark Kelly being narrowly re-elected, but if I had waited another week to make my final predictions, I probably would have flipped that call in the GOP direction.  In the end, Kelly prevailed by a surprisingly robust 5 points, higher than the 2-point margin I predicted and substantially higher than the amended margin in my mind that I had going into November 8th.  The outcome of the Governor's race turned out to be even more of a surprise.  My formal prediction was that execrable right-wing GOP emissary Kari Lake would win by 1 point, but the polling after I made that prediction pointed to a much more dominant Lake performance.  It was undoubtedly a surprise to just about every election analyst when feeble Democratic challenger Katie Hobbs pulled out an unlikely victory of less than 1 point, dumping cold water on one of the GOP's would-be rising stars.  As I said, my original instinct last summer was a GOP wipeout in Arizona which appears to be exactly what happened as the Democrats handily toppled an infamous GOP election denier in the Secretary of State race and the Democrat has a 500-some vote lead in the still-uncalled Attorney General race as well, likely locking the GOP out of all of the major statewide and federal offices.  But the one bright spot for the Arizona GOP was in the House races, where the Republicans successfully gamed the redistricting committee to tilt the playing field, and even in a strong Democratic year, the effort was successful.  The previous map had a 5-4 Democratic majority but Republicans are going into 2023 with a 6-3 advantage in Arizona's House delegation, getting the better of two 1-point races including that of long-time GOP incumbent David Schweikert from suburban Phoenix whose district took on a bit more Democratic turf to shore up Republican strength elsewhere on the map.  The gamble worked as Democrat Tom O'Halleran, a three-term incumbent from a rural GOP-leaning district in northeastern Arizona, was one of the few incumbent Democrats nationally to be felled when his district became even more Republican this year.  Still, on balance, it was a great year for Democrats in the Grand Canyon State whose rebuke against Trumpism could not be clearer.  The state's blue pivot in 2020 no longer seems like an aberration and the party has much stronger prospects of prevailing here in 2024.  But as a point of personal privilege, their pandemic-era approach to voting and vote-counting is a disgrace and needs to be upgraded.  The slow-motion nightly counting of "buckets of votes" is a very bad look and foments the very doubts about election integrity that has served to radicalize the minority party and enabled the demagogues who only barely lost their respective races....this time.

Arkansas--Moving from a state where I had quite a bit to say to a state where I have very little to say, the once deep-blue Natural State continued its stampede to the GOP this year with dominating Republican victories up and down the ballot.  Former Trump flack Sarah Huckabee Sanders was elected Governor by a 28-point margin.  That's less than the 36-point margin I predicted but still overwhelming for an open seat.  I also overshot the runway a bit in the Senate race where Republican John Boozman won by 35 points, less than the 40 points I predicted.  The state's 4-0 GOP monopoly in the House delegation also held strong and the downballot state races also went GOP by 25 points or more.  The Democratic Party is in as bad of shape in Arkansas as it is anywhere in the country, with the Mississippi Delta counties in particular in full-blown collapse, with white voters now consolidating to the GOP as unanimously as they long have on the eastern side of the river, and with the black population in decline.  If there's a single bright spot on the entire map of Arkansas, its Washington County in the northwestern corner of the state, home to the college town of Fayetteville.  It used to be well to the right of the state but has been trending bluer in recent cycles until flipping for token Democratic challenger Chris Jones this year against Huckabee Sanders.  That's a pretty thin reed upon which to build a "moral victory", but it's as good as it's likely to get in the foreseeable future for Democrats in Arkansas.

California--Back in 2018, after the most comprehensive Democratic blowout yet in the Golden State, I mused how the party had been defying gravity for multiple cycles in a row and somehow managed to keep getting more and more Democratic every two years.  But after this year's midterm results, it's pretty clear looking back that 2018 was the year California hit "peak Democrat," with its diverse coalition now showing plenty of signs of cleaving amidst nearly two decades of immersion in the state's muscularly progressive governance.  While I anticipated this to a degree, I still overestimated the strength of the Democrats on the top of the ticket, particularly incumbent Governor Gavin Newsom, fresh off of a dominating victory in last year's ill-advised recall election.  Newsom still bested fourth-rate challenger Brian Dahle by a very decisive 18 points, but fell far short of the state's recent fundamentals as well as my prediction of a 32-point Newsom victory.  In the Senate race, incumbent Democrat Alex Padilla did better, his 22-point margin of victory comparing to my prediction of Padilla by 28.  It was striking to look at the county maps in both races, both of which resembled what a California county map typically looked like 20 years ago before the realignment of Hispanic-majority counties in the Central Valley and in southern California.  It's not entirely clear if the problem was disproportionately low Hispanic turnout, a long-time issue in California midterms, or if there was genuinely robust movement toward the GOP among the Hispanic voters who did turn out, flying below the radar of national pundits who generally breathed a sigh of relief that the feared collapse of Democratic support among Hispanics did not happen this year.  Still, if safe Democratic incumbents are losing San Bernardino and Riverside counties as both Newsom and Padilla did, and even San Joaquin counties (Stockton, Lodi), as Newsom did, the party's absolute lock on the state is probably beginning to soften.  Ultimately the House races were where the Democrats took the most obvious hits, losing most of the contested races with rising star Katie Porter only narrowly prevailing in her Orange County-based CA-47 which she first won in 2018.   Hispanic majority Central Valley-based CA-13 went narrowly for Republican John Duarte.  Ditto for incumbent Republican David Valadao from Hispanic-majority Bakersfield, a long-time survivor who won by 3 points yet again in his CA-22, as did long-time Republican incumbent Ken Calvert from Riverside who also won by 3 points despite being redistricted into bluer turf.  Asian American-heavy districts in Orange County that went Democrat in 2018 but flipped back in 2020 now look like pretty safe terrain after clear wins for Republicans Young Kim and Michelle Steel this year, pointing to another possible trouble spot for Democrats with the Asian-American vote showing signs of moving back to their GOP roots.  Some Democratic incumbents who were long shots on the GOP wish list such as Julia Brownley and Mike Levin managed to hang on to their seats, but by underwhelming single-digit margins that reaffirm that 2022's California no longer looks like 2018's California.  I was skeptical when some of the polling suggested the red wave might be felt more in deep blue states than the purple states, but looking at these California numbers there was definitely some truth to it.

Colorado--While some blue states certainly showed some signs of a backlash to Democratic dominance this year, one of the more recent additions to the list of safe blue states continued its sprint leftward on November 8th.  Rocky Mountain State voters proved that Biden's robust double-digit victory in 2020 was no fluke with similarly sized margins for the two Democrats at the top of the ticket this year.  It was no surprise at all for me that incumbent Governor Jared Polis was re-elected after getting solid marks all around for his stewardship of the state.  Polis's 19-point margin of victory even exceeded my prediction of a 14-point Polis win.  But Senator Michael Bennet's nearly 15-point margin in his race was a bit more surprising as his challenger Joe O'Dea was a highly lauded GOP recruit.  Bennet's margin doubled my prediction of Bennet +7.  Similarly impressive double-digit Democratic wins held up in downballot statewide races as well and almost certainly position Colorado as outside of the 2024 Presidential battleground where it had been for a generation until recently.  Even the perfect storm eight years ago that allowed Republican Cory Gardner to eke out a Senate race win against an incumbent running a historically terrible campaign seems like an increasingly steep challenge in today's Colorado.  The only potential soft spot for Colorado Democrats is the House district map.  Republicans successfully gamed the redistricting process (not sure how they pulled it off!!!) and drew a GOP-friendly map, but at least this year it didn't work out.  The state added a House district, with CO-08 centered amongst a patchwork of Democratic and Republican strongholds north of Denver, but Democrat Yadira Careveo prevailed by less than 1 point.  Meanwhile, suburban CO-07 southwest of Denver was drawn to be less Democratic yet Brittany Pettersen still prevailed in the open seat by 15 points.  And of course the race that got the most attention after the election was the vast CO-03, encompassing more than half of the state's geography in the western and southern part of the state.  Since it's the only region of the state trending a bit toward Republicans, the Democrats largely shrugged off their chances of taking out freshman GOP bomb thrower Lauren Boebert when her district got a couple of points more Republican in redistricting.  But lo and behold, Boebert's Democratic challenger came within 500 votes of taking her out in what ended up as one of the nation's closest House races.  Now if Colorado continues its leftward march, perhaps CO-03 will eventually flip their way and CO-08 will remain blue, but the House map nonetheless shows a measure of vulnerability for Democrats that they're not experiencing elsewhere in the Rocky Mountain State.

Connecticut--Democrats likewise have only good things to say about their performance in the Nutmeg State in 2022.  The party had only narrowly prevailed in the state's most recent three gubernatorial elections, but incumbent Democrat Ned Lamont broke the streak this year, winning by 13 points.  I may have dropped the ball in a number of my predictions this year regarding margins of victory, but Lamont's 13-point margin matched my prediction exactly.  On the other hand, I dramatically overshot the runway in my prediction for Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal's margin.  Blumenthal won his third term by 15 points, which isn't bad of course, but fell far short of the 31-point Blumenthal victory I predicted as well as Blumenthal's own 28-point margin of victory in 2016.  Just as is the case everywhere else, Connecticut's political fault lines appear to be polarizing inexorably along geographic and education lines, with more rural and working-class jurisdictions voting straight-ticket red and limiting the potential for statewide blowouts.  Blumenthal's performance notwithstanding, Democrats still got everything they wanted out of Connecticut this year, with the state's 5-0 Democratic House delegation monopoly holding once again, including in the state's least Democratic district where incumbent Jahana Hayes held back a strong GOP challenge by 1 point.

Delaware--It's been more than a decade since the last genuinely contested statewide race in the First State and that streak did not end in 2022, a year where Delaware had no Senate or gubernatorial election.  With that said, there was still curiously high turnout in the state's at-large House race where Democrat Lisa Blunt Rochester once again prevailed by double digits.

Florida--While it's fair to say Democrats did quite a bit better than expected on November 8, 2022, one state where they did worse than even the most bearish expectations was the Sunshine State.  Florida has been trending sharply to the right of the country for the last decade, but apparently after two years of accelerated in-migration during the pandemic, the state has quite rapidly become the nation's foremost GOP vote sink.  All of the pre-election tea leaves, particularly early voter registrations, were pointing to a comprehensive Democratic wipeout, and I was at the front of the line predicting a bloodbath.  For instance, I predicted Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who prevailed by only a half percentage point against a progressive Democratic challenger in 2018, would win by 11 points this time.  That seemed generous for DeSantis in mid-October, until the votes were counted to reveal he won by more than 19 points.  DeSantis' victory was all the more impressive when factoring in that his challenger was no squish, but another former Governor.  The Senate race was just as much of a romp with Republican incumbent Marco Rubio beating back a strong Democratic challenge from Val Demings by an astonishing 16 points, double my prediction of 8 points.  A number of polls showed Rubio with a soft low-single-digit lead.  I never bought them, but was still shell-shocked by the final numbers.  Republicans already drew themselves an aggressive gerrymander, ensuring that they would pick up quite a few seats.  The GOP ended the night with a gain of four House seats, including Charlie Crist's old seat in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area.  Republicans had already picked up two House seats from Democrats in 2020 in heavily Cuban districts in South Florida and head into 2023 with an impressive 20-8 advantage in the state's delegation.  But it actually could have been even worse for Democrats--and might be next time--as the state's influx of right-wing retirees is saturating formerly deep blue areas, leading to modest victories for Democratic incumbents thought to be safe such as Darren Soto, Lois Frankel, and especially Jared Moskowitz, who prevailed by less than 5 points in his Palm Beach County district.  Democrats went into the night thinking Miami-Dade County would flip red, but were astonished to see DeSantis and Rubio prevail by double digits.  The aforementioned former Democratic stronghold of Palm Beach County that was teeming with liberal retired Jews back when Gore was winning it 2-1 in 2000 is now right on the precipice of flipping red.  And up and down the I-4 corridor from Tampa to Orlando to Daytona, the trend is unmistakably bright red.  With as quickly as Florida is becoming an all-purpose magnet for conservatives, especially retirees and anti-socialist Latin American refugees, the Democrats can forget about it being a Presidential battleground again in the foreseeable future, and would be well-advised to simply hang on tight to their remaining House incumbents until the point where they lose control of their districts, as seems increasingly possible.  I'm not sure anybody saw this coming just a few years ago, at least not to this comprehensive extent.  Florida might as well be Tennessee right now in terms of its political future for the Democratic Party.

Georgia--Democrats largely got a rude awakening on November 8th that despite their big gains two years ago, the Peach State hasn't yet realigned and still leans Republican.  Still, Democrats caught a lucky break in the race that mattered most to them since Republicans nominated a national joke for a candidate.  With some help from a lackluster encore campaign by Democrat Stacey Abrams, Republican Governor Brian Kemp was one of the rare Republicans to benefit from standing up to Trump and won his rematch with Abrams by more than 6 points.  That was actually closer than I anticipated as my prediction was Kemp +10.  The rest of the downballot statewide races in Georgia also went Republican by margins comparable to Kemp's.  But one Republican underperformed the others  and didn't have quite enough coattails to ride to get to 50% on November 8th, and that was Senate nominee Herschel Walker, perhaps the only person with an (R) next to their name incapable of unseating Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock.  It's no easy task for a Republican candidate to run 200,000 votes behind the top of the ticket in a state as polarized as Georgia, but Walker pulled it off, only getting 48.5% of the vote and forcing a runoff in early December where he was the underdog.  Warnock prevailed by nearly 3 points in the runoff and, against all odds, held the seat for the Democrats.  It's nonetheless a bit astonishing that Warnock did less than 1 point better this year against the incompetent Walker than he did in the 2021 runoff against a normal opponent, serving as a stark reminder of Georgia's polarization and what a perfect storm it requires, at least for now, for Democrats to eke out a win.  The long-term trends in the state look much more promising for Democrats though.  As for the Georgia House races, Republicans were in charge of redistricting and snuffed out freshman Democrat Carolyn Boudreaux in suburban Atlanta to enlarge their House delegation majority to 9-5 GOP, a delegation that continues to include Marjorie Taylor Greene who prevailed by nearly 2-1 in GA-14 in the state's northwest corner.

Hawaii--I think it's been 18 years, when George W. Bush was discovered to have surprising poll strength in his re-election bid against John Kerry, since the last time there was any suspense about the outcome of any statewide race in the Aloha State.  That tradition continued in 2022 with the usual Democratic blowouts in the Senate and gubernatorial races.  Democrat Josh Green prevailed by 26 points in the open gubernatorial race, lower than the 33 points I predicted him to win by but still pretty good for an open seat.  But a more traditional Hawaii-sized margin came for Democrat Brian Schatz running for his second full Senate term and winning by 45 points, even better than the 40 points I predicted.  The state's two House Democrats also persevered.  The flip side of being a one-party state is that sometimes a heterodox oddball or a con artist such as Tulsi Gabbard can slip through in a contested field and flourish as an ostensible "Democrat", but I'm afraid Gabbard represents the closest thing Republicans can ever expect to get to a victory in federal elected office in Hawaii, at least in my lifetime.

Idaho--I typically don't pay very close attention to the electoral scene in the Gem State since it's as uncompetitively red as Hawaii is blue, meaning I wasn't privy to the right-wing third party presence in the state's gubernatorial and Senate races.  To be sure, the conservative split still fell far short of helping hapless Democratic nominees get anywhere close to victory but it was eye-opening to see a conservative independent get more than 8% in the Senate race and to see right-wing kook Ammon Bundy (who I thought lived in Nevada!!) get more than 17% in the gubernatorial race, coming in second place ahead of the Democrat in several Idaho counties, particularly in militia country up in the Panhandle.  It's telling that even with a divided right where a large minority of Idaho conservatives didn't believe Republican Governor Brad Little or Senator Michael Crapo were conservative enough, the two incumbents both still managed more than 60% of the vote.  Little prevailed by more than 40 points over his fourth-rate Democratic challenger who barely managed 20% of the vote, consistent with my prediction of a 43-point win for Little.  My Senate race prediction of Crapo +36 also held up pretty well as Crapo prevailed by 32 points.  Both of the GOP's House incumbents also prevailed handily.

Illinois--A decade ago, it would have been hard to see coming the geographic realignment of the Land of Lincoln, with the furthest reaches of upscale Chicagoland becoming a Democratic redoubt while almost the entirety of downstate reflexively voted for whichever unfamiliar name has an (R) next to it on the ballot.  This is consistent with much of the country after the education attainment realignment, but the Illinois map is for whatever reason more striking.  Anyway, once again the Democrats came out smelling like roses in Illinois this cycle even though the state's governing fundamentals are among the worst in the nation.  Incumbent Governor J.B. Pritzker was re-elected by 12 points, decisive but only about half what his margin was four years ago.  I predicted he'd win by 15 points.  Senator Tammy Duckworth won a second term with a slightly better 14 points, which was actually a bit higher than the 12 points I predicted.  However, I correctly predicted that her map would look different than six years ago when she performed surprisingly well downstate....where she definitely did not perform well this year.  Democrats also cleaned up in the House races, made possible by the ruthless gerrymander that their all-Democratic legislature was able to push through.  Just like last decade, Illinois was the only Democratic state to get away with an aggressive gerrymander that wasn't sabotaged by a court challenge.  And I'll give them credit for their efficiency as this gerrymander managed to dilute Republican strength very successfully, limiting the party to only 3 House seats compared to the Democrats' 14 seats.  Chicagoland incumbents like Lauren Underwood, Sean Casten, and Bill Foster were all shored up and prevailed comfortably if not overwhelmingly, speaking to the efficiency of the vote distribution the gerrymander provided.  Democrats also managed to squeeze out a seat stretching from the St. Louis suburbs to Springfield to Champaign that elected Democrat Nikki Budzinski.  And somehow, some way, they managed to reconfigure retiring Cheri Bustos' old IL-17 seat which had been trending decisively against them into a horseshoe-shaped district encompassing Rockford and Peoria that still elected freshman Democrat Eric Sorensen by 3 points.  It's hard to know what form our politics will take by the end of the decade but I'll be fascinated to see if the Democrats' gerrymander holds for most of the 2020s.  To whatever degree it does, the party owes a lot to the Chicago machine that enabled them to choose their voters to this extent.

Indiana--More than a dozen years removed, the Hoosier State's Democratic flirtation in the mid-to-late 2000s seems that much weirder today.  Indiana has definitely reverted to its historical origins as a bright red state as we were reminded of last month.  I never for a second bought into the polls showing Senator Todd Young's Democratic challenger nipping at his heels, predicting that Young would win by 20 points.  I actually narrowly undersold Young's eventual performance as he prevailed by 21 points.  With that said, it's possible that Young's challenger, Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott, helped the cause of the only competitive race in Indiana which was of course a House race where the Democrats were playing defense.  There's been some indication that northwest Indiana, unlike the region of Chicagoland on the Illinois side of the state line, has been trending toward Republicans, putting a target on the back of IN-01 Democrat Frank Mrvan.  Honestly, I was expecting Mrvan to be felled, but he ended up winning by 5 points.  Having a fellow northwest Indiana elected official at the top of the ticket may well have been the difference here, keeping the state's House delegation at 7-2 GOP.

Iowa--The trendline in the Hawkeye State basically puts it about four years behind neighboring Missouri in the race to complete Republican consolidation, right down to the State Auditor narrowly hanging on to be the only statewide elected Democrat just as was the case in the Show Me State in 2018.  Living in Iowa, none of this was a surprise as the farm and factory vote has again chimed in to inform the Democrats that they have absolutely no use for them anymore after a generation where those voters were the party's base.  Republican incumbent Governor Kim Reynolds prevailed by an impressive 19 points despite pursuing a movement conservative agenda in a historically moderate state, matching my prediction of Reynolds +18 almost perfectly.  Iowa's GOP Senator-for-life Chuck Grassley won his eighth term by 12 points, a bit better than the 9 points I predicted in mid-October when there was some indication that the race was tighter.  Beyond that, a new Congressional map that carved out Iowa's four top Democratic power centers into four separate districts worked as intended, narrowly wiping out Cindy Axne, the state's lone Democrat in the House delegation, by less than 1 point.  The three incumbent Republicans prevailed more decisively, including in the two eastern Iowa districts that went twice for Obama by double-digits.  Iowa's divorce with the Democratic Party just got a lot messier with the recently announced erasure of Iowa from the party's presidential selection process.  This way, no Democrat running for national office has to get his shoes dirty on a Midwestern farm or factory floor ever again!  Seems like the perfect formula to reverse the party's working-class and Midwestern decline, no?

Kansas--As one Midwestern state trends one direction, Kansas trends another, at least to an incremental degree.  The new version of the Democratic Party that appeals to the upscale college boys is finding traction in parts of the Sunflower State, particularly the Kansas side of the Kansas City metro area which boasts some of the most educated demographics of the Midwest.  Basically, in the long-standing split between the moderates and conservatives of the Kansas Republican Party, the moderates are becoming Democrats.  While conservatives are still very much the majority, a united front of moderates along with the faction of legacy Democrats can come together with enough might to win an election, and have actually done so in four of the last six gubernatorial races, including the one last month.  Incumbent Democrat Laura Kelly was re-elected by 2 points, contrary to my prediction where I had her challenger, GOP Attorney General Derek Schmidt, winning by 3 points.  Kelly's coalition put together the Kansas City suburbs, metropolitan Wichita, Topeka, and a spattering of small cities and college towns on the eastern side of the state.  It looked similar to Kelly's coalition of 2018, only with a narrower margin.  In the Senate race, Republican Jerry Moran easily won a third term with a 23-point margin nearly identical to my prediction of Moran +22.  But tellingly, even Moran narrowly lost Johnson County, the most populous and upscale county of metropolitan Kansas City, which had been a hotbed of GOP moderates for generations...and he lost it to a token Democratic challenger.  Republicans maintained their 3-1 advantage in the Sunflower State's House delegation, but they had hoped for a clean sweep when they attempted to make Kansas City-area Democrat Sharice Davids' district redder in redistricting.  It didn't even come close to working though as Davids prevailed in KS-03 by an impressive 12 points, putting an exclamation point on the region's realignment.  But lest anyone think Kansas in the on the precipice of shedding its rock-ribbed Republican past, massively controversial right wing former Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who was deemed too extreme to win the gubernatorial election four years ago, eked out a 1-point win to get elected Attorney General last month.

Kentucky--The only statewide contest in the Bluegrass State this year was the Senate race, where Republican Rand Paul was re-elected for a third term.  Paul's always been a bit of an underperformer and prevailed by 23 points this year, which seems impressive without the context of how Republican Kentucky has gotten during the Trump years and the fact that Paul's challenger was a renowned social justice warrior from inner-city Louisville.  My prediction was Paul +26.  Republicans also easily maintained their 5-1 advantage in the House delegation with a freshly gerrymandered map that should prevent Lexington-based KY-06 from being competitive any time soon.  But the main event on election night in Kentucky was the ballot measure to outlaw abortion.  If abortion bans can't pass in Kentucky, it's hard to imagine them passing nearly anywhere.....and it didn't pass in Kentucky.  The measure fell nearly 5 points short of passage, and the map looks exactly like you'd expect it to with areas with higher levels of educational attainment rejecting the measure, including all of metropolitan Louisville and Lexington, along with Bowling Green and even the notoriously conservative southern suburbs of Cincinnati.  It's not uncommon for these kinds of culture war ballot measures to provide tea leaves for forecasting shifting electoral coalitions, so to be continued on whether it's a harbinger of things to come.

Louisiana--It was a low-key affair in the Pelican State last month with the re-election coronation of Senator Foghorn Leghorn, er, John Kennedy to a second term.  Kennedy easily laid waste to the multi-candidate field of lightweight Democratic challengers.  It's hard to know exactly how to categorize the spread here when a single Republican topples five Democratic challengers, none of whom did better than 18% individually.  Getting more than 61% of the total vote, Kennedy did 44 points better than his nearest opponent but performed 27 points better than the Democratic field collectively.  The latter number perfectly matches my prediction of Kennedy +27.  Beyond that, Louisiana's highly polarized House delegation maintained its existing 5-1 GOP advantage.  For a state with such historically colorful politics, it was a pretty boring November night in Louisiana.

Maine--The Maine main event last month the was the gubernatorial contest, pitting current Democratic Governor Janet Mills up against former Republican Governor Paul LePage.  It wasn't close, with Mills outpacing her foe by 13 points, nearly double my prediction of a Mills +7 victory.  But what was more interesting is how much different a 13-point Democratic victory in the state of Maine looks like today compared to a decade ago.  Historically, a win as lopsided as Mills' victory would produce a nearly unanimous wall of blue, but in 2022 it merely translates to a blue coastline with particularly lopsided Democratic margins around Portland, and the rest of the state as inflexibly red as white working-class areas have become in pretty much all of the rest of America.  With that in mind, it's particularly impressive that Democratic Congressman Jared Golden keeps getting re-elected in his Trump-voting northern Maine House district, prevailing by 6 points yet again this year and keeping both of Maine's House districts in Democratic hands.  I'll be very curious to see if Golden can hang on in a truly defensive cycle.

Maryland--While the Old Line State has always been a staunchly Democratic state, it's only been in the last 15 years or so where the Democratic advantage has become lopsided enough to qualify it as one of the nation's bluest, assisted by both its high black population and its large federal workforce.  More than any other state in the country, Maryland is "the deep state".  Ironically, Maryland's entrenched blueness comes with the backdrop of a popular two-term Republican Governor calling it quits this year and leaving an open seat behind.  There was no question that the Governor's mansion would revert to Democratic hands this year given the fringe right kook nominated by the GOP, and return it did with Democratic emissary Wes Moore coming out on top by 33 points, even wider than the 30 points I predicted.  In the Senate race, Democratic incumbent Chris Van Hollen won a second term by a similar 32-point margin against token opposition, also closely matching my prediction of 30 points.  In both cases, the blue ink on the county map keeps projecting further and further out from the DC and Baltimore areas into places that were pretty Republican only a decade ago.  And despite a court intervention that vetoed lawmakers' aggressive Democratic gerrymander, even the new map maintained the state's 7-1 Democratic advantage.  David Trone, the Democratic incumbent from MD-06 in the western part of the state, ended up with the least dependable district with the amended map, but still came from behind to win by nearly 10 points.

Massachusetts--For most of my lifetime, the Bay State has had a reputation as the nation's most liberal state.  I'm not sure that's true anymore but it's still extremely blue and its blueness was very much reinforced by the state's highly educated electorate during the Trump era.  Moderate Republican Governor Charlie Baker is throwing in the towel after two terms, leaving little doubt that Democrats would be back in charge this cycle.  Indeed, Democrat Maura Healey stomped her GOP challenger by 32 points, far above my prediction of Healey +20.  Healey's geographically comprehensive victory followed her downballot as the Democrats once again maintained the 9-0 monopoly of the state's House delegation, with Republicans only getting within 20 points of any of the nine Democrats in one of the districts.  This is the 14th consecutive cycle that Democrats have maintained their House delegation stranglehold, with no Republican winning a House race there since 1994.  That's a very impressive streak.

Michigan--Another example of where I should have stuck with my original instinct rather than allow the red wave narrative to get inside my head was in the Wolverine State, where my instinct over the summer was that Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer seemed like a safe bet for a decisive re-election victory over a lackluster GOP challenger.  I wavered on that and settled on a softer win for Whitmer, my final prediction being that she'd prevail by 3 points.  But election night proved my original assumption correct as she prevailed by more than 10 points, nearly identical to her margin of victory in 2018.  It was an impressive showing with considerable downballot consequences as Democrats handily won other downballot statewide races and even took control of both houses of the Michigan Legislature, a feat that was on nobody's radar and would have been unthinkable with the previous decade's GOP gerrymander.  The issue that likely drove this blue wave the most was abortion rights, where a ballot initiative adding language to the state constitution prevailed by 13 points.  It's hard to argue that Michigan was the state where abortion rights were most "on the ballot" and where the verdict came with the greatest partisan consequences.  The blue wave trickled down to the state's House races where Democrat Hillary Scholten easily picked up the blue-trending MI-03 seat in the Grand Rapids area.  Moderately vulnerable Flint-area incumbent Dan Kildee safely won-re-election to MI-05 while indisputably vulnerable Lansing-area incumbent Elissa Slotkin managed an impressive 5-point win in her Trump-voting MI-07 seat.  Democrats even came within a hair's breadth of picking up the open MI-10 seat in northern Macomb County, a seat most analysts (and Democratic campaign operatives) wrote off as outside of the battleground, but Republican John James only managed to eke out a half-point margin of victory.  The Democrats ended the night with a 7-6 advantage in Michigan's House delegation.  I don't think anybody should read the tea leaves of this cycle as an indication that the Wolverine State is trending blue again to the point of falling out of the Presidential battleground, particularly given the ugly trendline in so many of its rural areas and smaller industrial cities, but I will say that looking at the results I'd rather be the Democrats than the Republicans heading into 2024.

Minnesota--From one light blue Upper Midwest state that saw a surprise Democratic wave this year to another, Democrats widely exceeded expectations in the Gopher State this year.  They especially exceeded my expectations as I had anticipated a combination of suburban backlash to progressive excesses in Minneapolis combined with further competition from the gadfly marijuana parties stifling Democratic performance up and down the ballot.  Neither of these things happened, and the first to benefit was Democratic Governor Tim Walz, who was re-elected by nearly 8 points, far better than the 2 points I predicted.  Walz's strength at the top of the ticket pulled even the most vulnerable downballot Democratic incumbents along for the re-election victory ride, continuing the party's impressive streak of winning every statewide race in the last eight cycles.  Even more surprising, the Democrats took back control of the state Senate and now hold a trifecta in St. Paul, an outcome very few imagined possible.  The only competitive Congressional race also went the Democrats' way, with Angie Craig improving upon her narrow 2020 victory to prevail by 5 points in her south metro-based MN-02 district.  Even with Craig's victory, the Democrats are still only even with Republicans in the state's 4-4 House delegation. It's striking just how much the upscale suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul are propping up the Democratic strength, as the bleeding outstate very much persisted this cycle.  If the current realignment of upper-middle-class white suburban support for Democrats ever reverts back to form, as I'm almost certain it will in Minnesota and much of the country, Minnesota will very quickly become a red state. 

Mississippi--With no Senate or gubernatorial race, election day was a pretty quiet affair in the Magnolia State this cycle.  The only federal races on the ballot were the four House contests, all of which were handily won by incumbents.  The GOP's 3-1 majority in Mississippi's House delegation held once again.

Missouri--I was a bit surprised that the Show Me State didn't show me an even darker shade of red this year in the Senate race, its main event on this year's ballot.  It was still a strong and geographically comprehensive victory for Republican Eric Schmitt to fill the open Senate seat vacated by Roy Blunt, but Schmitt's 13-point margin against an at-best second tier challenger fell short of my prediction of Schmitt +18.  It would have been interesting to see how unhinged former Governor Eric Greitens would have fared had he won the primary as he was expected to until the campaign's final couple of weeks.  I suspect Democrats managed to cut their losses courtesy of the marijuana legalization ballot initiative, which likely brought out a bunch of young people who otherwise would have stayed home.  Given Missouri's libertarian streak, I wasn't entirely surprised the measure passed.  It was definitely the only news made in Missouri last month though as the state's House races all fell along predictable partisan lines with double-digit margins for all incumbents.  The GOP's 6-2 majority in the delegation held.  I still can't believe their legislature didn't crack Kansas City to ensure that it would become a 7-1 majority though.

Montana--All that was on the statewide ballot in Montana this year was a backdoor abortion ban that, like nearly all measures to restrict abortion rights in red and blue states alike, went down to defeat.  Given the libertarianism of the Treasure State, I'd have expected it to fail by more than the 5 points that it did, but the language of the measure wasn't as cut and dry as that of many other states.  Whatever the case, the backdrop of the statewide abortion measure created an environment where the newly created MT-01, the bluer of the two districts on the western side of the state, became more competitive than most analysts expected.  The numbers rolling in on election night and into the next morning made it look like Republican incumbent Ryan Zinke was poised to be toppled, but he came from behind with late-counted ballots and ultimately prevailed by 3 points.  It's unclear whether a better electoral scenario may one day arise for Democrats to pluck this seat away, but given the profiles of the district's population centers of Missoula, Bozeman, and Butte, and the upside potential to squeeze larger Democratic margins out of them, it's not at all out of the question.  For now though, Republicans still control both of Montana's Congressional seats.

Nebraska--For the most part, it was business as usual in the Cornhusker State this cycle, with sweeping Republican victories up and down the ballot.  The open gubernatorial seat handily remained in the GOP column with Republican Jim Pillen winning by 23 points, a tick below my prediction of Pillen +27.  But it was nonetheless striking that even with such a landslide victory, the state's two population centers of Omaha and Lincoln voted for the Democrat.  The realignment was most clearly drawn out in the House races, where Republican incumbent Don Bacon prevailed by less than 3 points even though his seat was recently gerrymandered to become more Republican by the legislature.  If Bacon was running under NE-02's old lines, he'd almost certainly have lost.  Even as Nebraska become an increasingly impenetrable GOP redoubt statewide, it's interesting how the legislature keeps reinventing district lines every decade in attempt to stay ahead of shifting demographics in NE-02.

Nevada--A decade ago, the Silver State seemed like it was on a fast track to being an irreversibly blue state, a full embodiment of the "demographics is destiny" electoral hypothesis complete with a well-oiled labor machine harvesting ballots for them.  The results of this real-time experiment have been inconclusive in the last couple of cycles, with some key Democrat-friendly demographic groups proving to be less receptive to the machine than anticipated.  The warning shot came in 2020 when Biden only narrowly won the state he was expected to take easily.  The trend line suggests Republicans had legitimate hope for a red wave this cycle, trying to take down two Democratic incumbents who had gotten mediocre reviews in their first respective terms.  But in the end, the best Republicans could do was unseat incumbent Governor Steve Sisolak, who made some enemies for keeping the Vegas casinos closed too long during the worst months of COVID.  It helped the GOP that Sisolak had a strong challenger in Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who would cut into Sisolak's advantage right in his backyard.  In the end Lombardo pulled it out with a 1.5-point margin of victory, just shy of my prediction of Lombardo +2.  Beyond that though, Republicans fell quite a bit short of expectations, losing the Senate seat to embattled Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto which they believed would be a lay-up.  I was just as bullish on GOP chances and predicted Laxalt would win by 3 points, but I was wrong.  Cortez Masto was reelected by fewer than 10,000 votes, a margin of less than 1 point, making it the nation's closest Senate contest.  Downballot, more Democrats pulled out wins in key races than did Republicans, aided by the slate of election deniers running on the Republican ticket, as well as a rising blue tide in and around Reno that's canceling out the decline of Democratic domination in Vegas.  At least this cycle, the Democratic state legislature rolled sevens with their redistricting plan which took considerable numbers of Democratic base votes in central Vegas-centered NV-01 to help shore up neighboring metro Vegas districts NV-03 and NV-04.  It was a risky gambit but at least this year it paid off, reelecting all three Democratic House incumbents by low-to-mid single digits and maintaining Nevada's 3-1 Democratic House delegation.  The problem for Democrats is that if they keep "winning small" in the Silver State and if they have another defensive cycle like they did in 2014, a total wipeout up and down the ballot will ensue, likely giving Republicans all four House seats.  If I was to drop a bet at a Vegas casino, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't put my money on Democrats holding their fragile coalition together for four more cycles, the duration of their current gerrymander.

New Hampshire--Another battleground state where Democrats had a better night than either I or most other election analysts expected is the Granite State.  It was widely expected that Republican Governor Chris Sununu would win the same kind of dominating landslide he did last time.  That certainly was my bet when I predicted Sununu by 26, but he ended up winning by a more modest 15 points and didn't carry any real coattails the way he did in the 2020 legislative races.  But the main event in New Hampshire this year was the Senate race, which polls showed was closing on behalf of MAGAfied GOP nominee Don Bolduc.  In mid-October I predicted Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan would win a second term by 6 points but by the weekend before the election I would have amended that margin downward.  Thankfully I stuck with my original instinct because Hassan ended up winning by 9 points.  It was the first tea leaf on November 8th indicating the Democrats would have a better election night than anticipated.  Democrats also held on to both House seats by decisive margins, painting the picture of New Hampshire as a state that definitely leans blue heading into 2024.

New Jersey--There were no House or Senate races in the Garden State this year, leaving only one competitive race on the ballot in the state's recently reconfigured Congressional map.  It was a rematch in northwest Jersey-based NJ-07, pitting embattled Democratic incumbent Tom Malinowski versus GOP legislator and long-ago U.S. Senate candidate Tom Kean, Jr.  Malinowski narrowly, and surprisingly, beat Kean in 2020 but the district got a bit more Republican in redistricting and this year it was curtains for Malinowski, who lost by a decisive 4 points.  A few other House races were close enough to give Democrats a bit of indigestion given what happened across the river in New York last month, but for now Democrats still hold a strong 9-3 advantage in New Jersey's House delegation even after the Malinowski defeat.

New Mexico--Between some hard feelings about being an island of Mountain West COVID lockdowns, the anticipated Democratic losses among Hispanic voters, and a stronger-than-expected showing from Mark Ronchetti in the 2020 Senate race, I went into this race expecting Ronchetti would make it close against incumbent Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham this year.  My prediction was that Lujan Grisham would still prevail but only by 2 points.  Instead, Lujan Grisham pulled off the same 6-point victory against Ronchetti that her namesake Senator Ben Lujan did two years ago.  Democrats again swept the downballot row offices as well.  Controlling the Governor's mansion and both houses of the legislature ahead of redistricting, Democrats were able to gerrymander three blue-leaning Congressional districts and the gerrymander held, narrowly unseating freshman Republican Yvette Herrell from southern New Mexico and monopolizing the House delegation 3-0.  We'll see if the Hispanic exodus from the Democratic Party plays out more in the decade ahead than it did this year, potentially endangering this New Mexico gerrymander, but at least for the time being, the Democrats had their fourth successful cycle in the Land of Enchantment.

New York--The last thing I would ever have imagined two years ago was that the Empire State would be the place that would cost Democrats their House majority in 2022, particularly since the party went into the cycle in full control of the legislature and Governor's mansion to draw the district boundaries as they pleased.  Unfortunately for Democrats, everything went wrong from there, from a Governor who resigned in disgrace to a state Supreme Court who threw out the Congressional gerrymander.  Republican gubernatorial nominee Lee Zeldin from Long Island successfully exploited the rift between the city and the rest of the state and ran a 70s-style crime-centered campaign against Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul who inherited the job from Andrew Cuomo last year.  Polls suggested a tight race but I shrugged it off, believing most Democrats would come home in the end.  But it turned out the polls were fairly close to the reality, with Hochul winning by a lackluster 5 points, well below my prediction of Hochul +11, and a result that came with considerable downballot consequences for the majority party.  Even more shocking than Hochul's lackluster performance was the mediocrity of Chuck Schumer's reelection victory in the Senate race, even though the polls telegraphed that as well.  I correctly predicted that Schumer wouldn't get the kind of comprehensive victory he did in the past but still suspected the core of his coalition would hold and that he'd win by 24 points.  Schumer only ended up winning by 13 points, managing to lose Long Island and counties upstate that have been going Democrat for generations to a challenger just as random as the kind he's been crushing for a quarter century.  The real bloodbath came downballot, where Democrats prevailed in only one of the five districts that were considered battlegrounds.  Curiously, it was Democrat Pat Ryan, who had a surprise special election win just a few months earlier, who eked out a razor-thin victory in NY-18 in the Hudson Valley.  Republicans held the Syracuse-based NY-22 which should have been an easy Democratic pick-up based on Biden performance.  Sean Patrick Maloney's NY-17 in the northern New York City exurbs flipped to the GOP, which was particularly embarrassing since Maloney headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in charge of recruiting other Democratic candidates.  And most troubling of all was the GOP flipping two seats in Long Island that hadn't been Republican since the 80s, and in the case of NY-04 winning a seat that Biden won by 15 points two years ago.  In a year where the Democrats expected to come out of the election with a 22-4 House delegation, they ended up with a 15-11 Democratic majority.  Particularly in Nassau County on Long Island, it'll be interesting to see if this is a pattern that spreads beyond New York, with affluent, well-educated suburbs reverting to pre-Clinton voting patterns.  If it does, the Democrats have unbelievable electoral problems looming on the horizon.

North Carolina--Election night 2020 went about the same as the previous five election nights in the Tar Heel State, at least in regards to federal races.  The only exception is that this year's open Senate race was never at the forefront of the battleground.  Democrat Cheri Beasley was a pretty strong candidate, but after so many cycles in a row getting burned in North Carolina, nobody seemed to believe that this year would somehow be different.  They were right in that Republican Ted Budd won by 3 points, but that outcome was closer than most expected, including myself as I predicted Budd would win by 6.  I guess we'll never know for sure if it would have made a difference if the national party went all in to assist Beasley, but given North Carolina's recent history it seems doubtful.  For every inch closer Democrats get to victory due to metro area population growth, conservative Democrats in the state's rural areas continue to realign toward the GOP.  We've been seeing this pattern for more than a decade and it's hard to see why it would end any time soon.  Beasley's better-than-expected performance did help Democrats out in the battleground House races, however, at least in avoiding full-blown embarrassment.  As is the case everywhere in the Southern rural Black Belt, Democrats' advantage is diminishing in the Rocky Mount-based NC-01 in the northeastern part of the state.  Democrat Don Davis managed to hang on by a decidedly modest 5 points this year.  And Democrats managed an equally soft 3-point margin in the swingy NC-13 district south of Raleigh, even with a right-wing nutjob as the GOP emissary.  So at least for now, the Democrats are at 7-7 parity with the GOP in the North Carolina House delegation, which is a far cry better than it was a decade ago under the aggressive gerrymander of the 2010s.  Of course, if NC's Republican legislature's Supreme Court challenge proves victorious, they'll get to throw the current map out ahead of next cycle, leaving a map that will look quite a bit more like the previous decade's gerrymander.

North Dakota--The big story out of the Flickertail State in 2022 was not just that Democrats got their butts kicked again, it's that they're starting to look like something of a third party in the state as candidates running as independents were either competitive or outright exceeded the performance of Democrats.  Republican Senator John Hoeven won with a solid 56% majority and a 31-point margin against his token Democratic challenger, but the independent challenger running to Hoeven's right managed more than 18% of the vote.  That's pretty hard to understand given that Hoeven has been a very reliable Republican vote since joining the Senate, making one wonder why so many conservative voters would be dissatisfied.  My prediction for the race was Hoeven +47 which I suspect would have materialized if his Democratic challenger was his only one, but I certainly didn't anticipate an 18% showing from an independent.  And in the state's at-large House district, a former Miss America ran as an independent, nudging the Democrats' token candidate off the ballot completely.  The Republican still won by more than 24 points.  Hard to believe based on these results that a Democrat was elected to the Senate here just 10 years ago.

Ohio--The results this year in the Buckeye State were simultaneously far better than they could have been and agonizingly depressing.  Republican Governor Mike DeWine's blowout re-election win gave the party downballot currency that was almost impossible to overcome.  DeWine is ostensibly a moderate by today's GOP standard but definitely occupies the right side of the moderate space in a way that makes it hard to understand how he toppled the Democrats' strong recruit by 25 points as he did, even exceeding my prediction of DeWine +20.   Republicans pulled off the kinds of blowouts in the other statewide offices that resembled what one used to expect out of neighboring Indiana, but the one exception was the Senate race.  Democrat Tim Ryan got considerable kudos for running the kind of old-school populist Democratic campaign that in the past would likely have been a winner in Ohio, and he faced off against verifiable GOP con man and Big Pharma flack J.D. Vance.  I knew Ohio was too far gone for Ryan to win the open seat and predicted Vance would win by 6 points, which is exactly where the race ended up when the results came in.  Unfortunately, the internal breakdown of the race didn't match my predictions at all.  Ryan represented the once dark-blue Mahoning Valley in Congress for 20 years and I figured his statewide margin would reflect an overperformance there.  But the counties in the Mahoning Valley were just as red for Vance as they were for Trump two years ago, reflecting not only a realignment occurring at warp speed but a virtually nonexistent path to statewide victory for Ohio Democrats moving forward, including Sherrod Brown in 2024.  But despite all of that doom and gloom, Democrats managed to win all three battleground House races.  They even flipped Cincinnati-based OH-01, unseating long-time GOP incumbent Steve Chabot in the one part of Ohio that's been trending aggressively Democratic.  Long-time Democratic incumbent Marcy Kaptur of Toledo hung on one more time as well, but lucked out in getting a pathological liar and nutjob for a challenger who was disowned by the GOP.  Still, Kaptur's 13-point margin in the district that the Republicans attempted to gerrymander her out of was an eye-opening overperformance of the rest of the ticket.  And lastly, an Akron-based iteration of Tim Ryan's old northeastern Ohio district also stayed in Democratic hands by a 5-point margin.  So the GOP finished the night with "only" a 10-5 majority of the state's Congressional delegation to show for their aggressive gerrymander.  Still, after the next defensive cycle, it's entirely reasonable to believe the gerrymander will yield the 13-2 GOP advantage that the party planned for.

Oklahoma--I partially bought into the hype in 2018 when polls in the Sooner State suggested a very tight Governor's race that ended up being a 12-point Republican blowout.  Fast forward to 2022 and I wasn't buying the hype at all when new polls suggested the Democrat was leading in the same contest against the same Republican.  Incumbent Governor Kevin Stitt went on to be re-elected by 13 points this time, an even wider spread than four years earlier, reinforcing that Oklahoma is one of those states where pollsters have no idea what they're doing.  Despite my skepticism, I still didn't given Stitt enough credit as I predicted he'd only win by 11!  There were two Senate races in Oklahoma this year that nobody was under the illusion of being competitive.  Republican incumbent James Lankford's big test came in the GOP primary but after prevailing there, he had no problem winning a full second term by a 32-point margin, slightly narrower than the 36 points I predicted.  The special election to fill the seat of retired Jim Inhofe also went GOP but by a less wide margin as Republican Markwayne Mullin only won by 27 points, almost identical to my prediction of Mullin +28.  Democratic challenger Kendra Horn nonetheless pulled off something not seen since 2008, however.  She won a single Oklahoma county in a federal statewide race, the same county she represented in the House for a hot minute back in 2018.  Mullin will be up again in two years for a full term.  We'll see if he can hang on!  Republicans strengthened their hold on the House delegation with favorable new district boundaries that should prevent a Democrat from sneaking in like Horn did in 2018.  The GOP once again has a 5-0 monopoly in the House.

Oregon--It was a mostly good night for Democrats in the Beaver State, particularly as the gubernatorial contest fell into place as I expected it would, with the centrist third-party candidate losing considerable steam as the race neared the finish line.  Democrat Tina Kotek reigned victorious in the open-seat contest, winning by more than 3 points and scoring 47% of the vote, keeping alive Democrats' impressive 40-year streak of holding the Oregon statehouse.  The would-be third-party spoiler only managed 8.6% in the end.  The Senate race was much more predictable with long-time Democratic incumbent Ron Wyden winning a fifth full term by 15 points, well below my prediction of Wyden +22.  As the elder statesman of Oregon politics who has in the past transcended the partisan divide, Wyden looked a lot more like just a typical Democratic Senator this year, his county map not reaching into red or even pink counties the way he has in previous runs.  Oregon added a Congressional district after redistricting and it was always gonna be a challenge for the Democratic legislature to configure another Democratic seat out of what they had without spreading themselves too thin.  It may have worked if moderate Democrat Kurt Schrader hadn't lost his primary to a progressive in the least blue of the Democratic-held seats.  Two of the three battlegrounds held with the open OR-04 seat centered in Eugene and the southwest Pacific Coast staying in Democratic hands by the most decisive margin (7 points).  The new OR-06 centered in Salem and the southwestern Portland exurbs went Democrat by a softer 2.5 points.  But it was Schrader's old OR-05 where Democrats predictably fell short as the open seat went to Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer by 2 points.  Perhaps in a Presidential cycle, the 5-1 Democratic map would have held, but at least for this year the Democrats had to settle for a 4-2 delegation.

Pennsylvania--The MVP of the 2022 election cycle for Democrats is unquestionably the Keystone State.  Despite having a demographic profile at odds with the direction the Democratic Party is going, this is the third cycle in a row where everything has come together to go the Democrats' way.  A little bit of luck was involved as well, however, and that luck began with MAGA insurrectionist Doug Mastriano winning the GOP nomination for Governor over Congressman Lou Barletta.  This Trump-sanctioned result set the stage for the GOP disaster to come, ensuring Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro a glide path to a double-digit victory.  Indeed, Shapiro won by nearly 15 points, exceeding my prediction of Shapiro +12, and his big victory came with unquestionable downballot coattails.  The primary beneficiary of those coattails was Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman, who looked like he'd be a really strong candidate of his own early on until his muscularly progressive record on crime came to light and the magnitude of cognitive impairment incurred following a spring stroke became obvious on Pennsylvania airwaves.  Even against a lackluster GOP challenger in TV doctor Mehmet Oz, it was not looking good at all for Fetterman in the final days of the campaign.  At the very least, the race looked as though it would be tight, so Fetterman's 5-point margin of victory came out of nowhere on election night.  Things may have been different in the GOP had nominated Oz's primary challenger, but the size of Fetterman's margin suggests there were plenty of abortion rights voters in the Philadelphia suburbs for whom no Republican would have been an option this year.  And once again, Democrats held their most challenging House districts.  Susan Wild of the Lehigh Valley's PA-07 was considered highly vulnerable this year but won by 2 points.  Matthew Cartwright continues to live on borrowed time in his Scranton-centered PA-08 district, also winning by 2 points.  Even the open seat vacated by Conor Lamb in the northern and western Pittsburgh suburbs (PA-17) stayed in Democratic hands, and quite easily with a nearly 7-point win for Democrat Chris Deluzio.  Pennsylvania's House delegation continues to favor Democrats by a 9-8 margin, with long-time GOP incumbent Scott Perry showing increased vulnerability in his Harrisburg-area seat.  Obviously all it will take is one bad cycle for the Democrats' house of cards here to tumble, but it's impressive that thus far it keeps not happening. 

Rhode Island--One of the toughest statewide races to call this cycle was the gubernatorial contest in the Ocean State.  Democratic Governor Dan McKee only got the job because the previous RI Governor was appointed to Biden's Cabinet, and he barely eked out a 33% plurality in a three-way primary earlier this fall.  I took this is as a sign of weakness and figured Rhode Islanders might hedge their bets with a Republican Governor to counter their overwhelmingly Democratic legislature.  Absent any polling data (as in zero public polls), I predicted a very soft 4-point victory for McKee against what seemed like a credible challenger.  I was a bit surprised when the results rolled in and McKee managed a 19-point blowout, which is about on par with the Democratic baseline in Rhode Island.  Beyond the Governor's race, Rhode Island surprisingly held on to both of their Congressional districts after the 2020 Census, but long-time Democratic Congressman Jim Langevin retired in the more competitive of the two seats.  It was a battleground but RI-02 ultimately went to Democrat Seth Magaziner by more than 4 points.

South Carolina--It was a particularly unimpressive night for Democrats in the Palmetto State, despite having a strong candidate in former Congressman Joe Cunningham as their emissary in the gubernatorial race.  Republican incumbent Henry McMaster would go on to crush Cunningham by 17 points, which is larger than the partisan baseline in South Carolina and a couple of points larger than my prediction of McMaster +15.  Republican Senator Tim Scott had an even easier time in the Senate race, beating his Democratic challenger by 26 points, just a tick better than my Scott +25 prediction.  South Carolina's 6-1 GOP House delegation held yet again with every incumbent winning by double digits.  It wasn't the kind of night for the losing party that one would think would lead to their being promoted to the front of the line for Presidential selection...yet here we are.

South Dakota--The Republican Party's streak of dominance in the Mount Rushmore State continued in 2022, to nobody's surprise.  After a shockingly soft 3-point win in 2018, GOP Governor Kristi Noem quickly became a national figure as a libertarian cartoon caricature with obvious White House ambitions and it's served her well at home despite at least one credible scandal.  She was re-elected by a 27-point margin last month, lower than the 35-point margin I predicted but still a landslide.  In the Senate race, Republican John Thune broke a long-standing precedent to become the first South Dakota Senator in more than a half century to win a fourth term.  Thune prevailed by a 43-point margin, even wider than the 39-point win that I predicted.  The GOP held the state's at-large House district and cleaned up downballot.  The best that can be said for South Dakota Democrats is that they're not relegated to the effective third-party status they've become in their neighbor to the north.

Tennessee--There aren't many states in the country where the Democrats are in worse shape than South Dakota but the Volunteer State just might be an example of a state where they are worse off.  With their octogenarian former Governor's attempt at a comeback stifled four years ago, the Democrats are back to running random physicians as their emissaries for statewide office while hoping they can convince a liberal country singer to one day carry their party's banner and rescue them from political oblivion.  Republican Governor Bill Lee stomped his token challenger by 32 points, running a few points ahead of my prediction of Lee +28.  The GOP managed to pick up another seat in their House delegation after splintering Nashville among neighboring districts after last year's redistricting, making the delegation 8-1 Republican.  Given Nashville's blistering growth and increasing Democratic lean, it'll be interesting to see if the gerrymander holds the entire decade, but the other Tennessee House seats are all certainly safely in Republican hands.

Texas--While Republican dominance of the Lone Star State has shown some signs of slipping in the last few cycles, very few went into the 2022 cycle expecting this to be the year that the party's fortunes fell apart.  Republican Governor Greg Abbott sought a third term against the Democrats' "superstar loser" Beto O'Rourke and got it, winning by a healthy 12 points and slowing the opposition party's momentum in the state's urban and suburban population centers.  While Abbott's showing probably wouldn't have qualified as a landslide in Texas during the Bush years when the GOP hit its electoral peak, I figure the Democrats must be at least a little disappointed that O'Rourke couldn't hold the Governor to single digits.  Even I predicted Abbott's win would only be 10 points given the trend lines.  Controversial Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton were also re-elected by low double digits, suggesting that abortion politics had a pretty limited reach in Texas.  On the other hand, the feared Hispanic voter meltdown for Democrats didn't play out as anticipated, especially in the Rio Grande Valley.  Republicans by and large maintained their gains from 2020, but didn't see much additional improvements.  Recent Republican special election winner Mayra Flores found her McAllen-based district getting much more Democratic after redistricting, and she was beaten by 9 points.  Meanwhile, the House's most conservative Democrat--Henry Cuellar of Laredo--beat back a GOP challenge with surprising ease, winning by 13 points.  The Rio Grande Valley has definitely become less Democratic than it was in the Obama years but it's small potatoes in statewide elections in Texas.  On the other hand, it provides a helpful tea leaf for the trajectory of Texas Hispanics in more populated areas, a demographic we didn't get a particularly good feel for this year based on the results.  It's usually Presidential cycles that drive realignments and not midterms, so I'll hold out to see the 2024 numbers before judging on whether would-be losses among Hispanics will cancel out gains among upscale Dallas debutantes.  

Utah--The last time a Senate race in the Beehive State only went for the Republican by 10 points was 1976, the year before I was born.  But GOP incumbent Senator Mike Lee only managed a 10-point victory for his third term last month, vastly less than the 26-point margin I predicted for Lee against independent challenger and one-time pseudo-Presidential candidate Evan McMullin.  While these results aren't necessarily cause for celebration among Democrats since McMullin was not a Democrat and may well have caucused with Republicans if elected, it does show the extent to which the state's predominant Mormon population has had it with the MAGA brand of Republicanism.  It's the same trend that's likely contributed to some recent narrow Democratic wins in neighboring Arizona in the last few cycles.  McMullin fought Lee to a draw in the overall Salt Lake City metro area, leaving it up to the rurals to pull Lee across the finish line.  If this trend continues at the pace it has, Utah just might become a two-party state in the foreseeable future.  You'd never know that Utah Republicans were starting to recede based on this year's Congressional map though, as the legislature did its decennial duty and sliced up Salt Lake City in new and creative ways to ensure a 4-0 Republican monopoly in the delegation.  It worked very well, at least for this year.

Vermont--Just as was the case in 2020, the most polarized electorate in the country between the gubernatorial race and the federal statewide races was the Green Mountain State.  Popular moderate Republican Governor Phil Scott managed to outperform his previous landslides this year with a comprehensive 47-point blowout, exceeding my prediction of Scott +38.  He won every single community in the state, even some of Vermont's most historically left-wing backwaters.  The Senate race seemed like it was taking place in an entirely different state by today's tribal standards, as the open seat vacated by half-century Democrat Pat Leahy stayed in Democratic hands safely.  Congressman Peter Welch had to wait until age 75 to get a promotion to the Senate, but won by 40 points, just a tick below my prediction of Welch +38.  The gubernatorial race was definitely the outlier as Democrats swept the other statewide offices by double-digit margins.  And the state's at-large House district vacated by Welch also stayed in Democratic hands in a 25-point landslide.

Virginia--Even without any gubernatorial or Senate races in the Old Dominion this year, the state still served as a national bellwether with three battleground House races that election analysts had their eyes on, all Democrat-held.  The easiest win was VA-10 centered in Loudoun County in northern Virginia, a district that's become heavily Democrat over the last several cycles and stood to represent a Republican earthquake nationally if the GOP picked it up.  But Democrat Jennifer Wexton held on and beat a credible Republican challenger by more than 6 points.  The more competitive VA-07 seat held by moderate Democrat Abigail Spanberger was arguably the state's most tangible bellwether as the district's former home in the Richmond suburbs shifted northward in redistricting, encompassing a heavily Democratic patch of Prince William County in the southern DC metro along with a bunch of very red rural areas between DC and Richmond.  If Spanberger held on in this race, it wasn't expected to be too horrible of a night for Democrats, and hold on she did, winning by more than 4 points.  The most vulnerable of the Democrat-held seats was toppled though as Elaine Luria of VA-02 in the Virginia Beach area lost by 3 points.  The degree to which Glenn Youngkin's 2019 coalition held up in this part of Virginia is a slight warning sign. but Democrats were understandably relieved that in a year without any statewide races with coattails to ride, Luria was their only casualty.  The Democrats maintain a 6-5 advantage in Virginia's House delegation.

Washington--I may have bought into the hype of a Republican wave some places, but I never fell for the narrative of veteran Democratic Senator Patty Murray being the least bit vulnerable in the Evergreen State.  Murray had a scare in 2010 like so many other Democrats that cycle, but Washington has consolidated ever-more reliably blue since then.  She won by more than 14 points this year, about in line with her performance in most previous cycles and a tick above my prediction of Murray +12.  Beyond that, Democrats got an additional pleasant surprise in the House races.  They easily held their existing seven Congressional seats and narrowly picked up WA-03 in the southwest part of the state.  This is the one region of Washington that's been trending against Democrats in recent years and for several cycles has been held by Republican Jamie Herrera Beutler, whose vote to impeach Donald Trump led to her defeat in the primary earlier this year.  Even though the GOP's emissary was a right-wing radical named Joe Kent, it was still expected that the district was too far gone for a Democrat to win, yet Marie Gluesenkamp Perez nonetheless got it done, beating Kent by less than 1 point.  It'll be a hard district to hold, but if the Vancouver area across the river from Portland continues to grow and trend blue, it's winnable again.  Beyond that, the only other modestly tight race was WA-08 in the outer suburbs of Seattle and Tacoma, where Democrat Kim Schrier got a decisive 6-point win, allowing the Democrats to expand their majority in the House delegation to an impressive 8-2 margin.

West Virginia--Nothing going on statewide in the Mountain State this year and they lost one of their three House districts after the 2020 Census, so there are precious few results to report.  Both Republican incumbents won by 2-1 margins, which was actually a little lighter than their numbers in recent cycles, but probably just reflective of the reduced turnout.

Wisconsin--The situation had not been looking promising for Democrats in the Badger State in the campaign's final month but, in contrast to the last two Presidential cycles, Democrats ended up outperforming the polling on election night.  Democratic Governor Tony Evers was the primary beneficiary as he won a second term by a 3-point margin, exceeding both expectations and my prediction that his GOP challenger Tim Michels would win by 1 point.  The other good news for Democrats is that they beat back GOP election deniers in the Secretary of State and Attorney General races as well, albeit by less than 1 point.  It must make it a somewhat qualified victory for Wisconsin Democrats since they're now only barely able to eke out the slimmest of wins against even the worst GOP challengers.  Arguably the worst GOP challenger of all is incumbent Republican Senator Ron Johnson who pulled it out again, prevailing by a closer-than-expected 1-point margin against Democratic Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes.  Democrats' absolute dominance in fast-growing Dane County (Madison) is the only thing keeping them in the game in Wisconsin as most of the rest of the state realigns decisively red, so much so that Madison is almost becoming the same kind of bugaboo elsewhere in Wisconsin as Chicago is in Illinois and Portland is in Oregon.  Another indicator of the state's diminished competitiveness is the flipping of WI-03 in western Wisconsin to the GOP, a seat long held by Democrat Ron Kind that used to be a wall of rural blue counties but went for the Republican by nearly 4 points last month.  The Republicans now control the Wisconsin House delegation 6-2, underscoring the degree to which the state's Democratic fortunes are now centralized in Milwaukee and Madison.

Wyoming--This year's winner for the biggest partisan margin goes to the Equality State's Republican Governor Mark Gordon, reelected by a staggering 58 points over his token Democratic challenger, and doing so even with an independent candidate and write-ins combining for nearly 10% of the vote.  Gordon even managed to eke out a win in dark blue Teton County.  I thought I was being generous when I predicted a Gordon win of 49 points!  Liz Cheney's replacement in Wyoming's at-large House seat also managed a nearly 3-1 blowout win, solidifying Wyoming once again as America's reddest state.

So....was all of this about abortion?  The overwhelming national consensus is that it was....but all you have to do is scratch just a little below the surface in your analysis to discover the story isn't that simple.  If the election was all about abortion backlash, then why did Greg Abbott get reelected in Texas by 6 points better than Trump did in 2020 even after being at the tip of the spear of the most draconian anti-abortion laws in the country?  Or how about Mike DeWine in Ohio?  Or Ron DeSantis in Florida?  All of them ran against abortion rights and not only won, but won in massive landslides.  And even if you shrug off preexisting statewide abortion rights protections in deep blue states like California and New York, isn't it odd that millions of left-leaning voters would choose this cycle to reward the party responsible for the loss of abortion rights if the issue was the primary national motivator?  The evidence absolutely fails to add up beyond a reasonable doubt that this election was all or even mostly about abortion, and that makes it a crap shoot moving forward for Democrats in deciding how thoroughly they should run on it.

Beyond abortion, I was hoping we'd get more clarity on other matters this midterm as well, ranging from immigration to crime to racial and gender wokeness.  The signals were entirely mixed, with no national consensus or clear path forward for Democratic messaging heading into the next Presidential cycle.  I remain convinced that all of those matters are anvils around the neck of the Democratic Party, but the midterms by no means gave me full vindication for the flashing red warnings I signaled two months ago.

The trajectory of the Hispanic vote also, somehow, remains as muddled today as it was before the election.  The only state where a full-blown Hispanic collapse occurred for Democrats was Florida, but the Sunshine State has a unique Hispanic demographic mix not transferable to anywhere else in the country.  Beyond that, there were signs everywhere from southern California to the Bronx and many places in between that Democrats continue to bleed Hispanic support, but there was likewise signs in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado that the needle barely moved at all since 2020...or a couple of cycles before that for that matter.  It's not uncommon for realignments to hit something of a holding pattern in a midterm only to accelerate again in the next Presidential cycle.  I still think there's a pretty good chance of that, but we'll have to wait until 2024 to know for sure.

The electoral math itself was strange!  Back in 2018, the consensus was that the vote distribution tilted so much to the GOP's favor that Democrats would need to win the national popular vote by 6-7 points to get 218 seats in the House.  But that supposition fell apart in 2020 when Democrats won the generic ballot by only 2 points but managed to hang on to the House with 222 seats.  And then this year, Republicans won the generic ballot by 3 points yet only barely flipped the House, heading into 2023 with a slender 222-seat majority.  How was this possible?  It would seem as though the previous imbalance of "wasted votes" has evened out.  A decade ago, the average blue district was much more Democratic than the average red district was Republican given that so many were located in big cities.  But now, the rural districts are basically just as lopsidedly Republican as the urban districts are lopsidedly Democrat, and at least this year, Republicans had even more "wasted votes" than Democrats as a result.  It's funny how so many things political analysts thought they had all figured out shifted right under our noses and forced us to amend doctrines we held as articles of faith.

And yet for all the weirdness, ambiguity, and open questions that came out of this election cycle, the two most important outcomes from my perspective managed to materialize against all odds.  The Democrats held the Senate and will get two more years to appoint judges before the lengthy lockout I'm expecting after the 2024 cycle.  Had it not been for two unlikely cycles of Democrats stitching together Senate majorities, Mitch McConnell and whoever his GOP successor is would have had a generation to shape the judiciary with Federalist Society ideologues, and the country would have been unrecognizable in the pile of rubble left behind.  And secondly, just about all of the election deniers who would have been positioned to throw sand in the gears of the 2024 outcome in key battleground states failed to win their races.  In state after state, Republicans who believed that Trump really won in 2020 got defeated, even if at times very narrowly, and a pending constitutional crisis seems far less inevitable than it did 40 days ago.  Temporarily avoiding full-blown calamity is a pretty low bar for calling a midterm election a success, but suffice it to say my standards have adjusted downward in the last several years.

The state of America's electoral coalitions, while not unforeseeable, nonetheless sicken me.  Watching the Democrats become the party of the country club while the Republicans become the party of the union hall is about as depressing of a development as I could ever have imagined when I first got into electoral politics, and knowing that these trends are almost certain to get even worse moving forward will take about 80% of the fun out of elections.  With the Democrats now leaving Iowa for dead just as they left West Virginia for dead a generation ago, it's formalized that the people I grew up with--the white working class--have no future in the Democratic coalition in any capacity.  Worse yet, nothing coming out of the Republican Party's messaging makes me want to hitch my wagon to their carnival show.  Maybe I'll live long enough for the next electoral realignment that will make elections fun again, but I'm certainly not counting on that.