Kerry Eleveld, who I greatly respect, makes some very important points that I agree with and one which I don’t. Let’s begin with his formula for doing political prognostication.
No journalist, reporter, or analyst is going to get everything right all the time. Your best hope is that your body of work generally holds up when the dust settles, though it will inevitably include a few outliers. And in the event that your body of work falters, you hang on to the knowledge that you honestly did your best to follow the facts…
…The truth is no one knew exactly what Election Day would bring, but pundits, analysts, and reporters rarely exhibited the humility to acknowledge that very simple fact. If they had more boldly and honestly declared their own uncertainty, the body of work they produced would have looked far less one-sided—dare I say, biased—in the wrong the direction.
In this midterm cycle, there was simply too much uncertainty and noise to make confident predictions. That’s what the available facts told me, and it’s why I decided not to, as I have done in the past, provide estimates of how many House and Senate seats would change hands.
What I focused on instead was the dire stakes. What mattered was not the absolute numbers but that the Republicans not win control of either chamber of Congress. What the available facts told me was that it was extremely unlikely that the Democrats would hold the House and that holding the Senate was a complete toss-up. To me, that was catastrophic, and I wasn’t interested in setting an expectations game.
Doing much better than expected and still losing wasn’t going to be good enough, and once I realized the slim possibility of a good enough result, my outlook turned extremely sour.
There were two things that stood out that really concerned me. The first was not the absolute numbers in the average of polls, because I was well aware that they were potentially being skewed by the mass inclusion of Republican-sponsored or aligned surveys. Rather, what had me spooked was the overall drift or momentum of the polls, which showed the Democrats moving from a strong position in early September to a very unhappy one by early November. In my experience, momentum often carries into Election Day and overruns the last polls. For this reason, I assessed that there was a possibility that things could be even worse than they appeared.
The second thing that freaked me out was the consistency of issue polling that showed abortion and democracy as significantly lower on voters’ list of priorities than inflation and the economy. These issue polls were the only data points on this I had, and they were incredibly disappointing. When the Exit Polls were published on Election Day, they told a different story, and one that aligned more with what I had hoped and initially expected. Abortion, in particular, rated much higher, and this difference probably explains the bulk of the disparity between expectations and actual results.
By the way, my wife fairly consistently tried to buck up my spirits on this topic by insisting that the issue surveys must be wrong, but since she had nothing more than her intuition to base this on, I could hardly incorporate it into my analysis.
So, I really had two problems. The first was the even the best case prognosis appeared catastrophic, and the second was that everything I had to look at pointed away from the best case.
Now, in a sense, all the bullishness on the Republicans’ chances that was pushed by the media and by the Republicans themselves, wound up being a gift to the Democrats. As of right now, the odds heavily favor the Republicans winning the House, even if it’s by a much smaller margin than many anticipated. And depending on results from Nevada and Arizona, there’s a possibility that control of the Senate will depend on the winner of the December 6 runoff between Sen. Raphael Warnock and challenger Herschel Walker in Georgia. This is a disaster for the country, and the only question is how big of a disaster. Yet, Democrats are mostly gleeful because they’d already internalized much bigger losses.
To be sure, there is plenty to celebrate, from successful gubernatorial races in Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the election of John Fetterman, to flipping some state legislatures. A handful of particularly loathsome Republicans candidates lost, which is nice, and lots of good results came from ballot initiatives.
But President Biden is mostly left with a pile of shit. He needs to lead the West in a battle against fascism while depending on a fascist party to finance the effort. To avoid a worldwide economic meltdown, he has to find a way to pay the country’s bills on time, and the Republicans seem incapable of doing it. It’s quite possibly that having Republican foils in charge in Congress will help him win reelection, a la Harry Truman in 1948, but in the meantime he will be in an impossible situation.
That’s why when Eleveld says, “Freedom proved the biggest winner of the 2022 midterms,” I could not more strongly disagree.
A good, clear, and sobering post; thank-you.
I’m not here for an argument, but I do want to say that (imho) from an organizing perspective, your third-to-last paragraph may be the most important:
“To be sure, there is plenty to celebrate, from successful gubernatorial races in Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the election of John Fetterman, to flipping some state legislatures. A handful of particularly loathsome Republicans candidates lost, which is nice, and lots of good results came from ballot initiatives.”
People are, reasonably enough, more likely to organize and to take action for change when they believe (and have reason to believe) that their actions can make a difference. Flipping state legislatures, adding governor’s chairs (and possibly a Senate seat), winning progressive ballot questions, winning other local offices are all victories because people gave time and money and sweat and talent, and did so in an objectively difficult election. It was hard work; it made a difference; and more remains to be done.
Most folks I’ve talked with are less gleeful than relieved. There’s a recognition that it could have been a lot worse*, that even the victories were near things, that there were some important and damaging losses, and that there’s much more work to do ahead of us.
We’re in a better position to do that work both because the worst case scenario didn’t happen and because our folks have a concrete, recent experience of the truth that working for democratic change is both hard and worth the effort.
*Dems lost 54 House seats, 8 Senate seats, and 10 governorships in 1994 (Clinton’s first mid-term); they lost 63 House seats, 7 Senate seats, 6 governorships, and 20 legislative chambers in 2010 (Obama’s).
I’m surprised at your negativity.
To me the most important takeaway from the 2022 election is that Democrats appear to be finally recognizing the importance of down ballot races and how to win them.
For way too long the Ds have not put resources into state legislative races, conceding that ground early and often.
Yes, losing control of the US house hurts and does have the POTENTIAL for disaster. Alternatively, the narrowness of the GOP’s victory (if they do flip the house) and the seats it will be built on (4 house seats out of NY) means the GOP leadership will need to be even more savvy the Pelosi has proven to be should they want to be anything more then agents of chaos.
I think the House Jan 6th hearings has shown that the younger blood in the Democratic caucus has a better understanding of how to navigate current media. Joe Biden has been harder to demonize then either BO or HRC..
Two years of Benghazi type hearings will be a horrible waste of time and energy when there are real issues to be addressed, but I expect that they will be less effective on the political front and will, in fact, backfire.
So I am feeling more positive then you after Tuesday’s election.
I think I lean more towards the commenters sentiments than to your post Booman. I was basically right there with you on the day before the election, that this was going to be epically bad. It was going to be democracy end game. Instead, I feel like we saw democracy fight back with more resilience than I expected and to truly great effect.
Yes, we are going to have to deal with Congress and possibly even the Senate, but we have put in some real bastions of resistance across the country where we can continue to build into 2024.
And what the Republicans won does not look like a foundation for taking over the country. Instead they are reeling with multiple defeats and a narrow, likely ungovernable majority in Congress.
I find this post way too downbeat. My big takeaway is the threat of Secretaries of State not honoring election results, or state legislatures sending their own elector slates seems spent.
The GOP is looking like a spent force to me with its tide going out.
I am pretty elderly and do not expect to live long enough to ever see another GOP president. So I am feeling pretty good.
I’m with the crowd here. I will add that I was a Sophomore in college in 2002 living in Baltimore and watching the self-emoliation of Towns-Kennedy in her loss to Erlich/Steele in Maryland, adn that along with Bush not losing control of congress felt so much worse than this, even as the world itself feels much closer to perminant calamity than it did 20 years ago.
The one thing missing from your fantastic analysis is what happens if the Let’s Go Brandon/F*ck your Feelings/Trump cult become antagonistic to the GOP. Watching the convoy come through central Ohio this summer was genuinely scary to me as every overpass on I-70 had the brownshirts cheering and waving. About 6-8 weeks ago I started looking at the MAGA trucks and wondering if that is still going to be a republican vote in 2024, and while they will never vote for a Democrat, and my home is lost for the foreseeable future, the republican coalition is in real trouble of fracturing in the next 24 months (way more likely than in 2009 or 2013).
The level of hatred they have to maintain takes a lot of energy. And the Republicans are having a really hard time of depicting Biden, an old white guy, as scary–he comes across as a Grandfather or Mr. Rogers.