Nate Silver believes Democrats will not suffer from low turnout in the 2022 midterms

[UncleSam]

Love the Nate Silver atlas-level analysis.

The fact that Ds are consistently gaining among college educated voters means that there’s a chance this is true, at least to an extent. I think a 2014-esque win for Rs is unlikely. However, I’m also not seeing much in the way of statistical evidence that low propensity D voters will show up. Coalition changes have helped Ds in this regard but low propensity voters still make up a bigger portion of their base.

Some atlas threads from 2009:


https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=94194.0

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=95338.0;viewResults


Some atlas threads from 2005:


https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=21417.0

To be fair to the Toomey one, at that point in time he was a decided underdog. He needed Specter to swap parties and lose a primary in order to win by 2 points. Ofc those saying he had <10% chance were hacks, but those saying he had some but only a small chance were pretty reasonable IMO.

Obviously in hindsight the AR one is laughable but at the time AR had a history of voting for Ds down ballot.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

https://www.fivethirtyeight.com/features/senate-rankings-may-2009-edition/

A Jim Bunning retirement would help Republicans — but perhaps not as much as you’d think in a state where Democrats still have a significant registration advantage.

Lincoln raised $1.7 million in the first quarter, which may further reduce the mostly-theoretical possibility that Republicans decide to mount a serious challenge to her.

Amazing.

More gems:

(Missouri) increasingly feels like a lean Democratic race.

A Republican comeback is unlikely if the uber-conservative Pat Toomey is the Republican nominee.

A nice 1Q fundraising haul by Dorgan reduces the already-slim chance that popular GOP governor John Hoeven might decide to challenge him.

Also Indiana was seen as one of the safest. And Lol at Toomey being considered "uber-conservative".

Moral of the story: Politics can be VERY unpredictable.

Err...Toomey is uber-conservative.  The Republican Party has simply become a hate-fueled cult. 

Also, this article is from May 2009.  That’s like mocking someone b/c they didn’t think both Georgia’s Senate seats would be competitive in mid-2019.  I mean, virtually no one on Atlas did and IIRC Loeffler wasn’t even a Senator yet; in fact we all spent much of the cycle ragging on the DSCC for its terrible candidate recruitment in Georgia (meanwhile some folks insisted Kansas would be a marquee Senate race). 

[politicallefty]

I think it's far too early to say. We really can't even begin to imagine the environment for the midterms until next year. That was certainly true of 2010. Remember, Democrats actually gained a seat in a special election in Upstates NY in November 2009. It wasn't until Ted Kennedy's seat fell that I think serious alarms were going off in Democratic circles. It's also worth noting that the unemployment rate was bottoming out around then, but it was still a very slow recovery. The unemployment rate going into the 2010 midterms was 9.5%.

I'm not going to make a prediction because it's too early. Yes, I agree that the House is at extreme risk. The Senate is completely different because of the staggered terms and the map that's up at the time. There are years when both Houses experience a wave, years when it's one or the other, and also years where it's neither. The past four midterms have seen 2 in the first category and 2 in the second category (and of those 2, one of each: Senate wave in 2014 and a House wave in 2018). For this purpose, I would consider a wave to be +5 in the Senate and +25 in the House. To break it down by year since 1960 (the year colour shows the party in power at the time):

DOUBLE WAVE
1994
-House: R+54
-Senate: R+8
2006
-House: D+31
-Senate: D+6
2010
-House: R+63
-Senate: R+6

HOUSE WAVE ONLY
1966
-House: R+47
-Senate: R+3
1974
-House: D+49
-Senate: D+4
1982
-House: D+26
-Senate: D+1
2018
-House: D+41
-Senate: R+2

SENATE WAVE ONLY
1986
-House: D+5
-Senate: D+8
2014
-House: R+13
-Senate: R+9

NO WAVE
1970
-House: D+12
-Senate: R+1
1978
-House: R+15
-Senate: R+3
1990
-House: D+7
-Senate: D+1

PARTY IN POWER WINS
1962
-House: R+1
-Senate: D+4
1998
-House: D+5
-Senate: No Net Change
2002
-House: R+8
-Senate: R+2

Interestingly, this categorization almost divides the elections evenly. That was not by design. When I started sorting the years, I found that a couple didn't quite fit the profile of a non-wave year. They were really outright wins for the party in power. That includes 1962, 1998, and 2002. If you went back, 1934 would be in this category, but even further as a Senate wave for the party in power (and one could argue for a new category if I was going back that far). Both 1962 and 2002 had national security explanations. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis had basically ended very shortly before the midterms and 2002 had an incumbent President riding on high approvals after 9/11. And as we all know, impeachment backfired on Republicans in 1998. Even if they hadn't moved on impeachment, it probably would've been at worst a "No Wave" election for Clinton and the Democrats.

It's not surprising that the Senate-only waves happened during the 6-year midterm of a two-term President. Both Reagan and Obama had significant Senate coattails which were enough to hold for 6 years.

I'm not going to make a prediction this far out, but there's a lot of reason to believe that 2022 could fall into one of the latter categories. Even a "No Wave" scenario could topple both Houses of Congress though, considering the tight margins. For Democrats to hold the House, they probably need to fall into the last category, although passage of HR1 could save their majority under a "No Wave" year. There's no reason to discount Senate Democrats out yet either. Next year is extremely unlikely to be a Senate-only wave. If the economy starts booming and the pandemic is largely behind us, there's reason to hope for a relatively good Democratic year. That said, they're going to have to be on the lower end of a rather ugly bell curve. But as I said before, it's way too early to predict how the midterms are going to go.

[Pericles]

It was obvious Georgia would be close, the question was whether Democrats could actually manage to get 50%+1.

[OSR stands with Israel]

I think a No Wave Result would most likely result in something like the Republicans picking up 12 seats in the House and their being no net change in the senate(Republicans pick up NH and Democrats pick up PA) .


It is far easier though to see Republicans winning both houses than the Democrats winning both houses

[Vosem]

Senate races are sufficiently idiosyncratic and dependent on the identities of the specific candidates that it seems at least plausible to imagine Democrats gaining seats even as Biden is quite unpopular. I would by no means bet on this, but I can totally imagine Biden sitting at an Obama-level 45% approval but favorable matchups in PA and WI gifting the Senate to the Democrats. I don't think the 2022 Senate map is particularly helpful for Democrats -- a pure repeat of 2020's House voting gives you a GOP majority, and 2020 was a fairly strong election for Democrats by recent standards -- but I think Senate races are just that weird. There have been too many examples of Senate midterms delivering gains to the party in power, or no change at all (just since JFK, this is true of 1962, 1970, 1982, 1998, 2002, and 2018) for us to say that there's some coherent pattern in how the Senate shifts.

The story at the level of the House is different, though. The party in power can win, sure, but it almost always suffers a popular-vote swing against it. If we start with the formation of modern-ish political parties -- so, the John Quincy Adams midterm -- there have been only three House midterms that saw a popular-vote swing towards the party in power: 1878, 1934, and 2002. (And those swings were all minuscule). That's it. (And two of those come with an asterisk: in 1878, a third-party emerged which took more votes from the opposition than the incumbent; if the Patriot Party doesn't happen, that won't be a problem in 2022. And 1934 saw the swing towards the incumbent happen entirely in one state: Pennsylvania, where a GOP machine crumbled, causing a huge swing away from the illusory 1932 result. The country outside of PA very narrowly shifted right. Nothing like this seems to be happening in 2022. So 2002 is the only really pure example).

There is another interesting commonality between 1878, 1934, and 2002: in all three cases, the President campaigned on one thing, but ended up pursuing a bold version of his opponent's platform to national acclaim. In 1877, Republican Rutherford Hayes pivoted away from his pro-Reconstruction campaign to dismantle Reconstruction; in 1933, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt pivoted away from his anti-big-government campaign to enact the New Deal; and in 2001, Republican George Bush pivoted away from his isolationist-lite campaign to start the War on Terror. All of these midterms were victories for something not quite the same as what the Presidents had campaigned on.

But Biden is trying to fulfill his promises rather than pivoting away from them! Everything he's doing is the stuff he campaigned on. Points for honesty, but probably not towards an 1878/1934/2002 midterm.

The problem is that, because the 2022 maps are virtually certainly more favorable for the GOP than the 2020 maps, Republicans are likely to notionally hold the House already, so House Democrats need to gain support from somewhere to keep the House. I don't know about impossible, but this seems extremely unlikely -- it would be a once-in-a-century thing and Biden's Administration doesn't resemble the ones that achieved it.

tldr: Even under quite favorable assumptions for Biden holding the House in 2022 looks quite unlikely. I agree with Trende's thesis that -- assuming Biden remains popular which is a broad assumption -- holding the Senate may be likelier than it looks because of high variance in prior Senate results (though the flipside of this is that the circumstance of a huge Democratic defeat in the Senate, even as Biden remains popular, is also possible).

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

I am optimistic, but if you see polls in a Pandemic they go up and Down with the NH poll.

I hope we can win a Supermajority Senate but we won't know until Summer of 2022, not now, if we're are gonna achieve it.

My comment about donations was used to the fact Politicians shouldn't be begging us for donations during a Pandemic unless they give us regular stimulus checks, everyone isn't on Unemployment, whom are getting 300 more than everyone else. Things are tight

But, Summer of 2022, 3 mnths should be perfect timing to donate and ensure a Crt packing that Old School Republican think won't do Rs any good, Reparations for Afro Americans and freedom for Rs and D's from donations, no Citizens United Federal finding of all Elections

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

-snip of an excellent post about predicting this far out with certainty

95% of this board since November 7: "Doesn't matter. Dems are doomed to a landslide loss in 2022. They shouldn't even try"

[pbrower2a]

Democrats have very few weak incumbents in the House. Republicans made gains in the House in a year in which their Presidential opponent won the Presidency. Ordinarily the Party in White Houses loses big in the Senate and the House in a midterm, but consider some differences from 2010.

Most obviously, 2022 is still a reflection of the 2010 wave, as Democrats got practically nothing in the Senate in 2016. The House reflects no particular year, the last wave in the House being 2018, and Republicans cut into that.

Can Republicans enjoy a wave election in 2022? As in 2010 the Hard Right is flush with cash and can find willing stooges. The Big Money usually goes for people who accept that the only people who have any value are those already filthy rich. (It is anti-abortion, probably because a high birth rate means cheap labor, high rents, and plenty of cannon fodder twenty-some years later... little is better for instilling cynicism in political debate than plutocratic politics. Even something superficially humane has cruelty and greed behind it).

Three things are going wrong for Republicans. Democrats seem to be doing everything right on COVID-19. If people think that it will go away -- even the funerals are deferred. Everybody will know someone who died of it. Unlike the Civil War which abolished slavery in the South or the Second World War that abolished the demonic rule of you-know-who, the mass death involved in COVID-19 offers no grand purpose.  Democrats can use COVID-19 against any Republican who handled the plague badly. That will be Governors, largely, but there will be feedback in the House and Senate.

Second, the insurrection of January 6 has sullied many of the symbols not only of Donald Trump but also the Tea Party. Some politicians bungled the response, and if they are not in super-safe bailiwicks they stand to lose.

Third, the stench of Trump corruption and cronyism remains. It was small stuff with Dubya; it was the cornerstone of Trump policy. Republican pols have yet to get that fully out of the way... but they can't.