A good night for incumbents, few poll surprises, Republican recruiting woes, and the outlook for 2024 are all part of the midterm story.
A good night for incumbents, few poll surprises, Republican recruiting woes, and the outlook for 2024 are all part of the midterm story.
W hat happened? That’s always the question after an election, but especially after one that didn’t go as many people expected. It will take some time to pore through the data and consider what worked and what didn’t, but here are some key early takeaways on what happened and what it means going forward.
A good night for incumbents: With 68 percent of voters’ thinking the country was on the wrong track and only 24 percent saying otherwise, you might have thought that the difference between a good Republican night and a mediocre one would be that Democrats succeeded in turning a sour mood into a bipartisan anti-incumbent outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. At this writing, it appears that all the incumbents in both parties in the Senate and gubernatorial races won, with the possible exceptions of Nevada governor Steve Sisolak, Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Georgia senator Raphael Warnock, and Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski. Those are far from certain losses: Neither Nevada race has been called yet, Warnock currently leads and will go to a runoff against Herschel Walker, and the Alaska race is nowhere near counted.
The good news on the Republican side is thumping, landslide victories for stars such as Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Brian Kemp, Greg Abbott, Kim Reynolds, Chris Sununu, and Kristi Noem. Ron Johnson seems to have survived yet another close race, and for all the hype and fretting after some ugly local polling, Mike Lee is winning by 14 points at this counting, and so is Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt. The wins for incumbents even justified Charles Grassley’s decision to seek yet another term at age 89 when he had a ready-made heir lined up in his grandson, Pat, the speaker of the Iowa House.
The bad news is that Republicans failed to take out top target Mark Kelly in the Senate, fell far short of beating Maggie Hassan, Patty Murray, or Michael Bennet, and failed across the board in a lot of seemingly close races against incumbent governors such as Laura Kelly, Tony Evers, Gretchen Whitmer, Michelle Lujan Grisham, Tim Walz, Kathy Hochul, Daniel McKee, and Janet Mills. The same pattern could be seen in a lot of House races, where Republicans targeted apparently endangered Democrats and came up agonizingly short.
One thing that means is that maybe we did have the much-derided “amnesty” for Covid and the George Floyd riots. Governors who fought the lockdowns, such as DeSantis and Kemp, were rewarded. But so were the most overzealous lockdowners, and so were Republicans such as Mike DeWine who took a lot of grief from their base for being pro-lockdown. Evers suffered no consequences for the Kenosha riots, nor Walz for how things went down in Minneapolis.
The polls beat the polls plus anything: My own analysis relied not only on blindly following the poll averages but on historic patterns and trends in how polls tend to break at the end in “wave” conditions, when the president’s approval rating and the generic ballot are pointing in the same direction. I also noted some cautions regarding recent trends in polling errors and the tendency to have a few upsets every year.
There is more to be said about particular polls, the poll averages, and the polling industry as a whole, but as it turned out, you would have been better off just betting on the poll-average leaders than expecting historic trends to hold. If Tina Kotek hangs onto her lead in Oregon, Democrats will have won every single race in which they had a poll lead heading into Election Day, no matter how narrow that lead was or how many undecideds remained. The upsets were nearly all losses for Republicans with minuscule leads. Mehmet Oz led by 0.1 points, Blake Masters led by 0.3, Tim Michels led by 0.6. Walker led by 1.4 points, but the final polling had both candidates short of the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. It appears that the lone significant upset was in Arizona, where Kari Lake trails after leading by 3.5 points in the final polling average.
Tickets matter, but they can be split: In states with blowout races in one of the top two offices, others reaped the benefit. The size of Kemp’s win undoubtedly helped keep Walker in the game, but there were also enough ticket-splitters that Walker couldn’t duplicate Kemp’s strength. Doug Mastriano’s catastrophic loss was too heavy a weight to be carried by Dr. Oz, a candidate with his own flaws. Sisolak may have taken Cortez Masto down with him, or at least the combined strength of Joe Lombardo and Adam Laxalt kept either one from being a drag on the other, while Lake and Masters look like they will lose together. DeWine’s thumping win helped J. D. Vance. On the other hand, the obvious distance between Sununu and Don Bolduc meant that Bolduc got nothing out of Sununu’s coattails.
Maybe the biggest coattail effect was from a loser: Lee Zeldin. Zeldin, as I expected, won Long Island and Staten Island, but appears to have lost the race mainly in Westchester. A five-point loss statewide in New York is more than a moral victory for Republicans: They may have gained enough House seats just in the Empire State to retake the House. Less consequentially, Joe Pinion cut Chuck Schumer’s margin of victory to 13 points, down from 42 in Schumer’s last victory — a sign of how much redder New York was this year, even if it was still too blue to flip statewide.
In that sense, if no other, Zeldin’s campaign resembled that of Beto O’Rourke in 2018, when Texas Democrats lost both the governor’s race and Beto’s bid against Ted Cruz, but picked up a bunch of down-ticket races driven by better turnout. Like Beto, Zeldin might get recruited to run again, but where Texas Democrats deluded themselves into seeing an ascendant coalition in their state, Zeldin won’t be getting any glossy Vanity Fair profiles or plotting a presidential bid, and his supporters are more likely to be packing their bags for Florida than dreaming of a Red New York. It will be many years before New York Republicans can be talked into believing again as they did with Zeldin this year.
There will be no Republican agenda: A major question often posed during the campaign was what Republicans would do when they retook Congress. This was always a bit of an unfair question: Republicans were never going to get close to 60 votes in the Senate, and there was no chance that Joe Biden would sign anything they passed — or at least anything of any consequence — even if they did. Now, however, Kevin McCarthy is likely to inherit a majority as narrow as the one Nancy Pelosi currently has, and even if Laxalt wins and Walker can deliver a Republican Senate in the Georgia runoff, these will be paper-thin majorities with little power except to say no to more Democratic proposals, block Democratic nominees, and investigate Democratic excesses. A Republican House can put some imprint on the budget, but it is likely to have margins too small to withstand a lengthy game of chicken with the White House.
No catharsis, no backlash: Last night was a vast disappointment compared with the smashing Republican midterm wins in 1994 and 2010, or even the Democratic wave in 1982, when Republicans lost 26 House seats and seven governorships. But recall what followed after all three of those waves: The party that got crushed came back and reelected the president two years later. Republicans got catharsis in 1994 and 2010 (even with some disappointing Senate results in the latter year), while Democrats came away scared and chastised, and built a case that Republicans had overreached. None of that is likely to happen this time around: Republicans will be the ones doing recriminations and soul-searching, and Democrats will be complacent, confident that if Biden’s approval ratings are still terrible and the economy still bad in two years, they’ll just need to recite the same slogans and play the same mischief in Republican primaries, and all will be fine. They may well conclude from watching John Fetterman and Katie Hobbs that they don’t even need candidates who can complete a sentence in public. And in the same vein, Biden is likely to take these results as a signal that he should run again at age 82.
By contrast, even with a big wave in the House and in the midwestern governor’s races, Democrats were still thwarted in 2018 after they lost four incumbent Senators (which actually expanded the Republican majority in the Senate) as well as key governors’ races in Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Republicans did not change course, and went down to defeat in 2020. In 1990, there was a status-quo midterm as the country slid into recession: Democrats gained just seven House seats and one Senate seat while the gubernatorial map remained largely unchanged. Two years later, George H. W. Bush went down with just 37.5 percent of the vote. In 1978, Republicans had a very mild “red trickle” midterm wave in a bad economy, gaining 15 House and three Senate seats (but six governorships); two years later, with more distance from Watergate, the party won a 44-state presidential landslide and gained twelve Senate seats to boot.
One could point to contrasting examples in which the incumbent’s party won a big midterm victory followed by reelection in 1962–64 or 2002–04, but both of those involved popular presidents buoyed by national-security crises (the Cuban Missile Crisis came ten days before the midterms). Otherwise, it is necessary to go back to Richard Nixon to find a president who suffered minimal damage in his first midterm and got reelected.
The prognosis for Democrats on Capitol Hill is also not so rosy. Harry Truman is the only president in American history to lose the House and see his party get it back before he left office. In the Senate, the map in 2024 is ghastly for Democrats, who will be defending 23 seats compared to Republicans’ ten. The bluest states Republicans will be defending are Florida and Texas, while Democrats will be defending seats in West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio, plus potential swing states such as Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan. That doesn’t mean Republican losses in 2022 are not costly; hopes of claiming a 60-seat Republican majority in 2024 would have been realistic if Republicans had awoken this morning to 54 senators, but now that would require a colossal 1980-style landslide two years from now.
Pro-lifers were not ready for their closeup: Democrats poured vast sums into litigating the abortion issue, and it not only appears to have helped them sustain turnout among their voting base, it also won them some popular referenda, most notably the awful Proposition 3 in Michigan. This does not mean that the Dobbs decision wasn’t worth it, any more than winning the Cold War wasn’t worth seeing Bush lose in 1992 when the people held in the Republican coalition by anti-Communism began to desert the party, or than beating Hitler was a bad deal for Winston Churchill because he lost to Clement Atlee in 1945. Some things are worth a bad election cycle. But those of us engaged in pro-life issues were screaming from the rooftops for much of 2021 and early 2022 that Republicans had to be ready to enact defensible abortion policy and justify it to voters.
Incumbent Republican governors mostly did that and did fine, even as the pro-life laws they signed varied in restrictiveness; indeed, having a specific policy to defend made it harder for them to be forced to answer hypothetical questions. But many Republicans took months to get their feet under them, were haunted by past votes on purely symbolic bills, and tried to dismiss the issue as one of lesser importance rather than forthrightly taking a position and standing for it. In some states, notably Michigan, Republicans made no real effort to compromise by at least proposing an alternative to a complete ban on abortion that was enacted in 1931.
None of us thought that the end of Roe v. Wade would result in an easy or immediate nationwide pro-life victory. Persuading the public is hard and gradual work, just as it was in the decades-long battle against legal slavery. But with better preparation, the first step could have been less awkward.
The worst possible night for Trump: It is hard to see how things could have gone any worse for Donald Trump if he is looking at a potential battle with Ron DeSantis for the 2024 nomination. DeSantis comes out of these midterms looking not only like a political juggernaut, but like a man who has an answer that has eluded the national party. He stayed out of national primaries, was a good soldier campaigning for Zeldin, Lake, and Mastriano in places where Trump was not invited or didn’t go, and so dominated Florida that the perennially biggest swing state (won twice by Barack Obama) and third-largest state in the country is now being written off as a red state. DeSantis has, at this writing, a bigger margin of victory than Gavin Newsom’s in California. Trump’s taking a swipe at DeSantis on the eve of the election went over badly and looks even worse now.
Trump, by contrast, showed an unerring instinct for picking losers. Nearly everywhere on the map that his influence was important in choosing the Republican nominee, the nominee lost or ran well behind the rest of the ticket. Mastriano, Oz, Masters, Lake, and Bolduc all lost. Trump candidates got blown out in the gubernatorial races in Maryland and Illinois, and trail in the secretary of state races in Arizona, Michigan, and Minnesota. Vance and Walker ran well behind their states’ GOP gubernatorial candidates. In Michigan’s third district, Trump’s successful revenge against Peter Meijer for Meijer’s impeachment vote cost Republicans a House seat. Uber-Trumpy Lauren Boebert looks headed to defeat in Colorado’s third district.
Almost everywhere that Republicans ran political novices for statewide office, they lost or underperformed. Not all of those were Trump choices: Joe O’Dea in Colorado was a businessman running his first race as a more conventional Republican. But the inexperience of Oz, Masters, Bolduc, Vance, Walker, and Tim Michels was an obvious hindrance.
The races in which Trump endorsed against the ultimate Republican primary winner showed the emptiness of his threats to make a nomination without his blessing into a poisoned chalice. Kemp and Brad Raffensperger won handily in Georgia, with Trump meekly endorsing Kemp just before the election. Governor Brad Little in Idaho won after beating a Trump-backed primary challenger. In Alabama, Governor Kay Ivey lost nothing from Trump’s effort to recruit a primary challenger, and Katie Boyd Britt sailed to the Senate with Trump’s ultimate endorsement after the fiasco of his endorsing and then un-endorsing Mo Brooks. In Missouri, Eric Schmitt’s path to victory wasn’t hindered by Trump’s comical endorsement of “Eric” in his primary battle against Eric Greitens.
That’s not to say that every Trump-backed candidate was a total failure — Ted Budd, for example, won his Senate race in North Carolina, albeit hardly overwhelmingly, Jim Marchant seems to be winning the secretary of state race in Nevada, and former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders romped to the governorship of Arkansas. Nor is the problem of bad candidate recruitment solely Trump’s fault. But Trump’s track record this cycle lines up very closely with the races Republicans blew.
And that is before we even consider the role Trump played in deterring good candidates from running. Given the success of incumbents this cycle and the closeness of the Pennsylvania Senate race, it is difficult to picture Pat Toomey losing had he sought another term. Republicans would have burned tens of millions of dollars fewer in Ohio had Rob Portman run for reelection. Doug Ducey didn’t run for the Senate, and neither did Sununu or Larry Hogan. In several cases, the acrimony Trump directed these Republicans’ way or the unpleasant prospect of serving during a possible 2024 replay of January 6 clearly played a major role in spurring retirements or decisions to sit the cycle out.
Trump selected his endorsees due to one criterion: their willingness to support his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. That may have sealed the fate of some of them. Kari Lake, in particular, proved to be a remarkably talented campaigner, skilled on television and expert at pushing back at hostile media. That had more than a few observers talking her up as a national figure. But now, it appears she could not even beat a colorless Democratic functionary who was recommended for the governorship solely on the basis that she stood up for the integrity of Arizona’s conduct of that election.
Democrats still have an ideology problem, which they are unlikely now to fix, and they also still have a Joe Biden problem, which will also now prove harder for them to even acknowledge. But Republicans have a personnel problem and an organization problem, and it is screamingly obvious from 2022 that this will not be solved unless and until the party chooses a new leader who is not Donald Trump.