Labor Day marked the unofficial end to summer — and the start of the final countdown to the 2022 midterms.
With just 63 days to go until Election Day on November 8, Republicans are laser-focused on efforts to take back the House and Senate.
Democrats currently control the House with just a nine-vote majority, while Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote in the Senate has given Democrats control of the evenly divided upper chamber.
The party on the outside looking into the White House typically does better in the midterms, and political analysts have long expected a red wave this November. However, recent events have given Democrats hope that they may fare better than expected, particularly in the Senate. Democrats are hoping the passage of their massive reconciliation bill, along with President Biden’s student-loan “forgiveness” and falling gas prices, can help court voters.
Democrats’ hopes have also been buoyed by two recent U.S. House special-election wins in New York and Alaska.
“It feels to me to be more like a shallow red puddle that we’re walking through, rather than a tsunami of sorts,” Republican strategist John Thomas recently told CNN.
FiveThirtyEight has Democrats “slightly favored” to retain control of the Senate.
The Cook Political Report currently has four Senate races designated as “toss-ups”: Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. Democrats currently hold three of those seats, including Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona, Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia, and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada. Republican Senator Ron Johnson currently holds the seat in Wisconsin.
Other Senate races to watch include the battle for three open seats, one each in North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. All three seats are currently filled by Republicans.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell suggested there’s “probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate” in the November elections.
“Senate races are just different; they’re statewide. Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome,” McConnell explained.
“Right now, we have a 50-50 Senate and a 50-50 country, but I think when all is said and done this fall, we’re likely to have an extremely close Senate. Either our side up slightly or their side up slightly,” he added.
Former president Donald Trump lashed out McConnell over the comments, calling him a “broken down hack.”
“Why do Republicans Senators allow a broken down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hard working Republican candidates for the United States Senate,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, adding that McConnell should spend more time and money trying to help Republican candidates get elected.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight similarly noted that “weak candidates” are hurting the GOP’s chance of taking the chamber in November. However, the analyst noted that Republicans still have “plenty of opportunities for pick-ups,” adding that Republicans’ best chance is currently in Georgia, where former pro football player Herschel Walker is taking on Senator Warnock.
An Emerson College poll conducted on August 28 and 29 showed Walker leading his incumbent opponent with support from 46 percent of very likely general-election voters to Warnock’s 44 percent support. Walker, who was endorsed by Trump and easily won his primary, also had a 50 percent favorability rating compared with Warnock’s 47 percent.
Walker, Blake Masters in Arizona, and J. D. Vance in Ohio were considered by some pundits to be “weaker candidates.” However, a FiveThirtyEight average of polls shows Vance neck-and-neck with U.S. Representative Tim Ryan. A similar average shows Masters trailing his opponent by eight points.
Meanwhile, FiveThirtyEight has Republicans “favored” to win the House.
A recent CBS News poll came to the same conclusion but found the GOP’s projected gains in the House shrinking. Republicans are expected to control the House with 226 seats after a 12-seat gain, according to the new poll. In July, the same poll suggested Republicans could win 230 seats.
The CBS News poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 18 seats. A House majority would be 218 seats.
CBS News attributed the shift to voters’ attention on abortion rights, falling gas prices, and the “Donald Trump factor” as Trump was once again the source of significant media attention last month after the FBI searched his residence at Mar-a-Lago.
However, it is unclear what issues of the recent tumultuous news cycle will stick in voters’ minds as they settle on their candidate of choice in the next two months.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last week revealed that Americans believe the economy is the most pressing concern. Republicans cited immigration and crime as major concerns as well.
Biden, seemingly hoping to boost his abysmal approval ratings ahead of the midterm, recently chose to “forgive” up to $10,000 in student debt via an executive order. While the initial announcement came months before the midterms, Biden plans to open applications for the “forgiveness” in early October, after which the applicants can expect to hear whether they were approved in four to six weeks. That this falls right around the midterms appears to be no accident.
However, the Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted days after the loan “forgiveness” announcement showed Biden’s approval rating falling to 38 percent, after hitting 41 percent one week earlier. Biden’s approval rating has largely fallen below 40 percent since mid June, according to Reuters.
Some Democrats have sought to distance themselves from Biden ahead of the midterms, including Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat who is up for reelection in November. He said in August that Biden “doesn’t need to come” to Colorado and that his campaign is “going to do just fine” without the president’s assistance.
Bennet was one of several moderate Democrats who criticized Biden’s student loan plan, saying the administration should have further targeted the relief toward borrowers who are in greater need and proposed a way to pay for the plan.
“While immediate relief to families is important, one-time debt cancellation does not solve the underlying problem,” he said. However, his statement seems to tone down his earlier criticism from June that there “was no reason to” cancel student-loan debt without reform.
Ryan, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio, warned that the move could alienate Ohioans without a degree.
“While there’s no doubt that a college education should be about opening opportunities, waiving debt for those already on a trajectory to financial security sends the wrong message to the millions of Ohioans without a degree working just as hard to make ends meet,” Ryan said.
Cortez Masto of Nevada said she doesn’t agree with the move “because it doesn’t address the root problems that make college unaffordable.”
“We should be focusing on passing my legislation to expand Pell Grants for lower income students, target loan forgiveness to those in need, and actually make college more affordable for working families,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden of Maine called the order “out of touch with what the majority of the American people want from the White House, which is leadership to address the most immediate challenges the country is facing.”