A lot of attacks against Honorable Sir Woodbury, but Harry Enten (former 538) kind of agrees with him.
Never change, Woodbury.
There's just no valid claim to say from the results that the environment has shifted. CA may be a poor indicator for that in the 1st place, regardless of the result. Just a quick reminder that the 2010 and 2014 R waves basically stopped in CA. So people shouldn't base any 2022 prediction off these results. If it tells us anything, then that county flips from HRC and Biden in 2016 and 2020, respectively, weren't flukes at all. Just like IA statewide races in 2018 confirmed Trump's 2016 victory and rural shifts weren't a fluke either.
The problem for Biden is that the exit poll indicates clear leakage in his support from a year ago. In the 2020 general election exit poll, his favorable rating stood at 64% to an unfavorable rating of 34%.
Put another way, his net favorability (favorable minus unfavorable) rating of +30 points a year ago became a +19-point net approval rating this year. Similarly, the exit poll itself showed that recall voters said they voted for Biden by a 26-point margin last year, which is 7 points higher than his net approval rating.
This is largely consistent with what we see in national polling. Biden's net approval rating nationally stands somewhere around -3 points to -4 points. Last year's national exit poll had Biden's net favorability rating at +6 points. He beat Trump by 4.5 points in the popular vote.
That is, Biden's net ratings nationally seem to have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of a high-single digit to a 10-point drop since the election.
Nothing in the California results indicates that the national polls are greatly underestimating Biden's popularity.
It's important to keep in mind, too, that the California results mirror what we've been seeing in special state legislative and federal elections. Democrats have been underperforming Biden's baseline, and by more so recently. So this is not a one-off.
To put this in some historical perspective, California and a lot of the special elections this year look somewhat like what we witnessed in 2017 ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, except in reverse. There were a lot of elections that year in which Republicans won, but Democrats kept doing better than Hillary Clinton did in the same places a year earlier. On a national scale, this translated to Democrats easily winning the House in 2018.
Again, this general pattern matches with what we saw in 2018. Democrats won back the House because more voters disapproved than approved of Trump's job as president, and about 90% of voters cast ballots that reflected either their approval or disapproval of him.
Ahead of 2022, Republicans need only a five-seat gain in the House to win control, and they lost the national House vote by 3 points in 2020. Even the slightest movement toward the Republicans from 2020 would likely mean good things for them.
