Official 2022 Congressional Election Results Thread

[Antonio the Sixth]

So I've been reading this thread assiduously but refrained from posting since I didn't have any analysis to contribute (many thanks to the posters who have been providing it! your contributions are valued and I hope my recommends speak for themselves). Now that the dust has more or less settled (still tracking the last few competitive races, but they won't change the big picture), here's my takeaway.

First of all, obviously, this was a surprisingly good night - far better than I was allowing myself to hope for. I was at this point finding it hard to believe that the polls wouldn't continue to have a Republican bias (albeit one that varies a lot by state) and that reflected in my assessments of the races. This is the first time that I didn't just copy-paste 538's model for my own predictions, but instead applied a homemade polling bias correction based on the past 3 cycles. Obviously this didn't end up very helpful, which is fascinating and quite heartening. It's not even necessarily that the polls underestimated Democrats across the board - the picture is a lot muddier. But the most interesting fact is that they did underestimate Democrats particularly in areas where they had severely overestimated them in 2016 and 2020 (and to a lesser extent 2018): PA, WI, OH etc. Conversely, states that historically have R polling bias actually saw the opposite pattern (NY, maybe CA?). So this is really a vindication for the idea that it's always dangerous to second-guess the pollsters. They do have a tendency to correct (even overcorrect) for their mistakes, so we shouldn't be too sure what way the polling bias will go. Still, I'll try to work through a more conservative version of my polling bias estimates, as they might still be useful guides in the future.

Polling aside, what do we make of these results? Well, in historical perspective they're obviously quite stunning. I'm not sure where to place it exactly in the ranking of "surprisingly good midterms for the sitting president, but at the very least it has some shades of 1998 and 2002. Of course, these years didn't experience record-high inflation, but then again it was never clear that inflation was a driver of voter anger in the same way economic depressions are (1978 were also not exactly terrible midterms for Dems, interestingly). Perhaps there's an important macroeconomic lesson here: to the extent that the old Philips Curve tradeoff applies, inflation seems to be the lesser evil in voters' minds. But of course it also proves that the economy isn't everything, and that concern for the future of our civil rights can be one hell of a motivator. It's becoming clear that turnout this year wasn't as high as 2018, but based on McDonald's calculations is it's still set to be the second-highest turnout since passage of the 26th amendment. This, perhaps, is the big difference with years like 2006, 2010 and 2014: those years were landslides because one side essentially gave up. This didn't happen this year, and one can hope it won't happen anymore. Democrats have hopefully learned their lesson that they can't just "sit this one out".

Indeed, because Democrats and moderates didn't sit this one out, we have probably guaranteed that 2024 will be a free and fair election. There was a real possibility that following this race, key offices across state governments would be in the hands of people openly contemptuous of the democratic process. The fact that these people were even remotely competitive still shows that American democracy is in deep trouble, but at least for now, it's not under threat. Unless the SCOTUS goes all in with Moore v. Harper, there are now checks and balances in places that make it impossible for swing state Republicans to steal Presidential electors. And so we live on to fight another day. The Senate staying in Democratic hands also means some of the damage done to the judicial branch can be repaired, although we'll still be in deep trouble unless another Scalia-type event happens. Truly a wonderful system you came up with here, thanks a lot Hamilton.

The House being in Republican hands means that the Biden agenda is dead and buried, of course. Hopefully he can get some good stuff through in the lame duck, but even then of course you have to get through the saboteurs. Please God let Warnock win so we can at least tell one of Manchin or Sinema to f**k off... Hopefully Gallego will kick Sinema's ass in 2024, of course, but goodness knows what the political climate will be at that point. Either way, Biden really needs to hold firm on the basics here. McCarthy will be a historically weak speaker, and if he tries to play games with government shutdowns or the debt ceiling he needs to feel the heat for it. If we came to a point when we were facing down a financial collapse, then I could see 3-5 "moderate" Republicans jump ship and support a discharge petition to avert the crisis. However, I certainly don't believe in any kind of Grand Bargain or a party switch that would allow Pelosi or a moderate Dem to stay in charge. It goes against everyone's deeply ingrained political instincts, and the past few years have shown us just how hard it is to overcome these instincts. Finally, I do hope however that enough Republicans would similarly be willing to bypass McCarthy in order to keep aid to Ukraine flowing (although I still think Dems need to approve a huge aid package during the lame duck just to be safe).

[Antonio the Sixth]

Okay, so the GOP has 219 seats in the bag, and more likely 220 or 221 with an outside shot at 222. That's a small spread but it actually could make a big difference. Having 1 vote to spare would make McCarthy's leadership virtually nonexistent - having 4 to spare gets him in much more comfortable territory given the Speaker's powers.

That being the case, it's hard to overstate just how pathetic my old home state is at counting votes. You can throw out all the usual excuses you want, but at the end of the day they're just that - excuses. The state has simply not been willing to put in the resources needed to properly run its elections (just as it doesn't put in the resources needed to run schools or infrastructural projects). The old saying goes that you have to pick two between getting something done well, getting it done cheap, and getting it done fast. It's clear that California has chosen the first two, and while that's not as bad as if it had chosen the last two, it's still utterly shameful. Democracy is not something to be done "on the cheap" - it should be afforded all the funding necessary to effectively count votes on the very day in which they are received. California's failure to do so is further proof that it is barely above failed-state status, and the idea that it would make a functional country in its own right sure seems fanciful.

Anyway, I've heard a lot of mixed reporting as to why today's Kern drop was so terrible for Salas. I really hope it was an outlier and the next ones will deliver the margins to overtake Valadao, but I haven't really seen anything to convince me that it will, so I'm going to try to temper my expectations. Hopefully at least CA-13 holds strong. It would be ridiculous if Republicans swept the Central Valley all of a sudden.

[Antonio the Sixth]

On another note, MacDonald hasn't updated his estimate of the turnout in a week. Do you know if he's planning to? I feel like we should have a much better sense of the final figure now than we did then.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Is there any reason to expect those military ballots to hurt Boebert? Military is heavily GOP.

This is a common misconception.  What is often called "military ballots" are actually overseas & military ballots.  While active duty service members generally lean GOP (although less so than veterans), they have become less so since Trump; there are some exit polls that suggest Biden actually carried them narrowly.  And the non-military overseas ballots, which usually are a majority of them, tend to be strongly Democratic (typically 60% or more).

Do we have any idea how many of these votes there actually are? If we assume a 60-40 split there would need to be at least 6000 to make a difference, and probably more if some end up discarded.

[Antonio the Sixth]

So, if we're completely in the dark about what the last vote batches in the Central Valley districts are like, it genuinely looks like Republicans will take both seats. Purely based on county-level data and following the CA SoS report of uncounted ballots, even Duarte appears to have more room to grow his margin than Gray. The outstanding ballots would need to be substantially more D-leaning than their respective counties in order to change that.

Do we have any actual reason to believe that's the case? Because it hasn't panned out in the last few dumps and now it's really starting to feel like AZ-Gov in reverse. Except we don't seem to have any clue what we're supposed to expect from these batches unlike in AZ where we got a clear sense of which ones were supposed to be good for the GOP.

[Antonio the Sixth]

So my previous tally of close wins was completely wrong because I stupidly assumed that NYT's uncalled races tracker defaulted to showing the closest ones when they were called. Now I actually looked through across the country, and here are all the races decided by less than 5 points (of course, those at the very edge might still move out of reach, or new ones could close up slightly, but I think this is largely close to final). The three races still somewhat up in the air are not included.

OH-01 +4.9
NV-04 +4.9
FL-23 +4.7
VA-07 +4.7
NC-01 +4.5
NV-03 +4
RI-02 +3.7
IL-17 +3.5
CA-47 +3.2
NC-13 +2.8
PA-08 +2.5
OR-06 +2.2
PA-07 +2
NY-18 +1
WA-03 +0.9
CT-05 +0.8
CO-08 +0.7
NM-02 +0.7

MI-10 -0.5
IA-03 -0.7
NY-17 -0.8
AZ-01 -0.9
NY-22 -1
AZ-06 -1.4
NY-19 -2.2
OR-05 -2.3
MT-01 -3
NE-02 -3
CA-41 -3.4
VA-02 -3.4
WI-03 -3.7
NJ-07 -3.7
NY-04 -3.8
CA-03 -4.8

So, so far, we have 10 races decided by less than 1 point, which broke exactly 5-5. With the cutoff at 2 points, that adds one seat to each side, so 6-6. And if we count all the races decided by 5 points or less, 18 of them were won by Democrats so far, and 16 by Republicans.

So if Republicans sweep the three remaining contested seats they will have once again lucked out in terms of House seats. If Dems win just one, though, they will have more or less evened the odds.

[Antonio the Sixth]

So it looks like all that's left in CA-13 is Stanislaus and San Joaquin, but there isn't that much of it. Probably 11-12k votes, which means Gray would need to win in the vicinity of 54% in those votes. I don't think that's been the case for any of the batches he's gotten so far. Maybe that changes, but I don't see a reason to expect it.

In the end, looks like the GOP really did get lucky in the final stretch. What a letdown.

[Antonio the Sixth]

So it looks like all that's left in CA-13 is Stanislaus and San Joaquin, but there isn't that much of it. Probably 11-12k votes, which means Gray would need to win in the vicinity of 54% in those votes. I don't think that's been the case for any of the batches he's gotten so far. Maybe that changes, but I don't see a reason to expect it.

In the end, looks like the GOP really did get lucky in the final stretch. What a letdown.

This election turned out really, really well.  Historically so, in fact (given the circumstances).  Assuming Warnock wins his run-off, we should be celebrating the overall results rather than zeroing in on a small handful of races where we came up just short (Walker beating Warnock would obviously be an absolutely horrible outcome).  Everyone and their mother was insisting this would be a Republican tsunami and we more than held our own.  Overall and given the circumstances, 2022 was a pretty clearcut win.  Things could have obviously gone even better, but that’s always true. 

Yeah, of course. I didn't mean to say the whole election was a letdown. Of course we overperformed all expectations and historical priors and we have every right to be happy with the results.

Still though, a 222-213 Republican House majority will be a problem. It's not big enough for an incompetent buffoon like McCarthy to do anything effective with it, of course, but it is big enough to potentially cause massive headaches for Biden. We really don't need a bunch debt ceiling standoffs in the next 2 years, and with Manchin being a f**king moron we're almost guaranteed to get some. If the GOP was around 219 or 220 you could see a situation where 2 or 3 Republicans get cold feet and all but force him to cave, but when you need 5 or 6 Republicans that gets a lot harder. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see.

[Antonio the Sixth]

https://twitter.com/lxeagle17/status/1594222062087729153
https://twitter.com/lxeagle17/status/1594223104611745792

I don't think it's a good idea to read too much about 2024 from these numbers. Clearly if the past 4 cycles have taught us anything it's that extrapolating too much from the previous cycle is a bad idea.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Interesting.

https://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1594468801470308352

How the f**k was this list made lol. Some of these candidates underperformed UNS.

[Antonio the Sixth]

So it really ends up at 222-213 with two seats decided by less than 1000 votes, both for Republicans. Once again the GOP gets lucky with close House races (although tbf both sides had their share of narrow wins). McCarthy can't lose more than 4 votes, which tbf I'm sure he'll be able to keep on really critical things. Still, I hope this somewhat defuses the possibility of a debt ceiling standoff or similar shenanigans.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Alaska predictions

Senate:
Murkowski (R) 54%
Tshibaka (R)   46%


House:
Peltola (D) 58%
Palin (R)   42%

I wanna see it

The fact that it actually seems likely that Peltola wins by more than Murkowski is truly wild.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Here's the actual first and final round results, counting exhausted votes as should be best practice in ranked-choice elections.

Peltola 48.64% -> 51.86% (+3.22)
Palin 25.83% -> 42.53% (+16.7)
Begich 23.64% -> ELIMINATED
Bye 1.89% -> ELIMINATED
Exhausted NA -> 5.62%

Peltola won 12.6% of transfers, while Palin won 65.41%, and 22% were exhausted. The margin of victory went from 22.82 to 9.33 (-13.48).


Comparing this with the August special election:

Peltola 40.19% -> 48.4% (+8.2)
Palin 31.27% -> 45.62% (+14.35)
Begich 28.53% -> ELIMINATED
Exhausted NA -> 5.99%

Peltola won 28.74% of transfers, while Palin won 50.28%, and 20.98% were exhausted. The margin of victory went from 8.92 to 2.78 (-6.14).


So it looks like what happened is that Peltola consolidated support from normally Republican-leaning voters (from both Begich and Palin!) who had ranked her second in August but ranked her first this time. This meant that the remaining pool of Begich voters were more party-line Republicans and consolidated more strongly around Palin, but that didn't prevent Peltola from significantly expanding her margin in the final round. Crucially, she won an absolute majority of the final round, meaning that this isn't just an issue of poor Republican transfers. A majority of Alaskan voters clearly wants her in office, and we can expect this majority to solidify as she builds up incumbency.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Same deal for the Senate race.

Murkowski 43.37% -> 51.82% (+8.45)
Tshibaka 42.64% -> 44.7% (+2.06)
Chesbro 10.74% -> ELIMINATED
Kelley 3.25% -> ELIMINATED
Exhausted NA -> 3.48%

Murkowski won 60.37% of transfers, while Tshibaka won 14.74%, and 24.89% were exhausted. The margin of victory went from 0.73 to 7.12 (+6.39).

Murkowski's final round percentage is actually almost identical to Peltola's - it's just that there were much fewer exhausted votes, given that the first-round vote was a lot more concentrated. Still a solid victory for Murkowski, as expected the Democrats' votes came overwhelmingly in her support (specifically, she won 70.65% of the redistributed Chesbro votes, compared to just 7.6% for Tshibaka) meaning that even if she'd trailed the first count by 5 points or so she could still had pulled through. The RCV system is going to make it a lot harder for conservative Republicans to unseat her, so she can probably rest easy even if she plans to run again in 2028.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Here's the actual first and final round results, counting exhausted votes as should be best practice in ranked-choice elections.

Peltola 48.64% -> 51.86% (+3.22)
Palin 25.83% -> 42.53% (+16.7)
Begich 23.64% -> ELIMINATED
Bye 1.89% -> ELIMINATED
Exhausted NA -> 5.62%

Peltola won 12.6% of transfers, while Palin won 65.41%, and 22% were exhausted. The margin of victory went from 22.82 to 9.33 (-13.48).

Would it be possible to present the result in the same way as Ireland's ranked ballot system?
Here's an example in the local elections this year: East Antrim (2022)

What's nice is that it quickly allows us to see who gains votes and who doesn't (especially with visualisations such as this)

Not sure whether we have that data though, e.g. whether we know who Buzz Kelley's voters plumped for in the second count, third count...

Yes, the AK SoS has redistribution details for each round:
Senate
House

I didn't bother with Round 2 details since the amounts of votes are fairly small and inconsequential, but fwiw, Kelley's votes broke down 19.07% Murkowski, 37.52% Tshibaka, 10.46% Chesbro, 32.95% exhausted. Bye's votes, meanwhile, went 20.66% Peltola, 21.34% Palin, 39.87% Begich, 18.13% exhausted. Weirdly, the Libertarian had better transfers for the Republican candidates than the fellow Republican.

[Antonio the Sixth]

So Murkowski and Petola got the same percentage it appears. That kind of suggests the new ideological divide line in Alaska.

Yup, though it was unfortunate Dunleavy won again.

It looks like coalition governments in the state house and senate are still very likely, so he'll still have to work with a bipartisan legislature:

https://www.adn.com/politics/2022/11/23/mixed-results-in-legislative-races-complicate-path-to-alaska-house-majority/

If the current House results hold, it looks like the outgoing bipartisan coalition is down 1 seat at exactly 20/40 (Democrats and Independents held their ground, but it looks like one of the two Coalition Republicans retired and was replaced by a standard Republican). It would still end up at 21 if the recount flips that district, but either way, it also seems possible that more Republicans join the coalition. It seems that many have been open to doing so in the past.

And it looks like something similar might happen in the Senate too? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

[Antonio the Sixth]

https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/1595893477048557581

Inshallah. The problem with winning federal elections in a state that's completely GOP-controlled is that you're never safe from election meddling. We've seen Georgia pass voting restrictions just last year, and if Warnock wins I'm dreading that they'll do something even worse next time. That's why there's really no substitute for flipping state legislatures to safeguard American democracy. The fact that Democrats did well in that respect is probably their greatest triumph this year, especially compared to 2018 which was generally a disappointment. Still, we remain shut out in plenty of swing states: GA, NC, WI, and even AZ albeit by a hair. Starting to win state legislatures there (while defending control of PA, MI, MN etc.) should be a top priority.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Fetterman up to +4.9, Shapiro +14.8, and DeLuzio +6.8 on NYT with Allegheny provisionals added.

So he gained a full point in the weeks after election night. For all the talk about AZ, NV and CA, Pennsylvania's vote counting process means that if the election had been as close as some of those races out West, it would have taken a while to be able call it. It might have gone on even longer than NV-SEN or AZ-GOV, which would have been nerve-wracking. Luckily, Big John just crushed the snake oil salesman, so we didn't have to worry about that. Still worth keeping in mind for 2024 if things get tight, though.

[Antonio the Sixth]

A prediction should be judged based on its underlying logic, not based on unrelated circumstances contriving into producing the outcome is called.

People somehow defending this garbage take is really indicative of the gambler brainrot that's taken over a lot of election prediction spaces. This is the same logic that led people to idolize Trafalgar because it made up numbers to get pro-GOP results in a few cycles where it turned out that real polls had a pro-Dem bias. And it's why this place is full of blowhards making overconfident predictions and then the half of them who get it wrong crawl into a hole for a few weeks and the half who got it right brags about it for the next 2 years. It's making these boards unbearable and it needs to stop.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Putting in perspective the geographic changes in House makeup over the last 20 years-

https://twitter.com/amyewalter/status/1597992368195907585

Shameless plug:

[Antonio the Sixth]

https://twitter.com/LoganR2WH/status/1598055171158061057

Republicans had lower turnout than Democrats in 2010? Good lord, Dems must've gotten destroyed by independents.

The statistic he used isn't actually turnout difference - it's the difference between Democratic and Republican ID in the midterm electorate. The way he presented it is deeply misleading and makes his analysis seem rather shallow (although the point about independents is well taken).

[Antonio the Sixth]

Susan Wild actually got a few more votes and a higher % than Fetterman did in PA-07!

https://twitter.com/blockedfreq/status/1600670635860033536

What's wild (ahem) to me is that Wild and Fetterman got essentially the same number of votes (a 52-vote difference), but Oz got over 7,000 fewer than Scheller.

I mean, one race had third-party candidates running and the other didn't.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Susan Wild actually got a few more votes and a higher % than Fetterman did in PA-07!

https://twitter.com/blockedfreq/status/1600670635860033536

What's wild (ahem) to me is that Wild and Fetterman got essentially the same number of votes (a 52-vote difference), but Oz got over 7,000 fewer than Scheller.

I mean, one race had third-party candidates running and the other didn't.

I know, but the corollary is that a huge part of that third-party vote was apparently Republicans who couldn't stomach voting for Oz.

Probably true for the Libertarian and "Keystone" (lol) candidates. There was also a Green candidate, so it's hard to see those voters ever considering Oz.

[Antonio the Sixth]

https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/status/1602730875715723268

I f**king hate how in every close election some moron has to calculate this meaningless statistic. Same thing as when people kept screaming that "Biden was just 40k votes from losing". No, that's not how elections work. Sure, if you had # votes all optimally localized in the right states/districts, then it doesn't take many voters to flip ANY election. However, there's no alternate reality where that would ever happen. Uniform national swing is not a perfect metric either, but at least it understand that voters in carefully selected swing areas aren't isolated islands that can freely move independently from broader trends.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Completely disagree. If Trump had barely won Wisconsin/Arizona/Georgia, or if those 5 House races had barely gone the other way, with ALL other vote count results literally exactly the same, we wouldn't say "This is all wrong. From the way elections work, these other results imply Biden should have won Wisconsin/Arizona/Georgia and Reps should have won the House." We would have just accepted it. Those margins are close enough that just local weather could have swung things. So given that, it's completely fair to say Biden won by the skin of his teeth. And if things were imperceptibly different ("luck"), Dems could have won the House.

What kind of weather event would impact specifically Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia, but none of the states nearby? Or all the specific CDs that happened to be close R wins scattered across the country from NY to CA but none of those in between? And impact them all in a very specific way that would result in Democrats doing better and/or Republicans doing worse? No, this wouldn't be "random luck" - it's beyond implausible.

And it's completely nonsensical to go "well, if those were the actual results we would just accept them". Of course we would, because then they would be actual results. You can justify every single hypothetical with this logic. But sound hypotheticals are those that are grounded in reality and make plausible assumptions about what would need to change to produce a different outcome. "All the right votes shift in just the right direction by just the right amount in just the right places to happen to produce a D house majority" is not a plausible assumption. It's reverse-engineering a result from the benefit of hindsight.