On the menu today: Democrats are claiming that the red wave is canceled, and are even whispering that they have a shot of keeping control of the House of Representatives. You can over-interpret a late-August special House election or two, but there are definite signs that Republicans’ momentum has slowed — or maybe even stalled. The big question now is: How well can this crop of GOP candidates perform if they don’t have a strong wind at their backs?
Stay Alert, Republicans
Yes, you can over-interpret a special-election result. When you hold an election on a day besides the first Tuesday in November, turnout is usually significantly lower. Only the diehards are interested, the process of selecting candidates is dependent upon a smaller group of party regulars, and odd things can happen as a result.
In special elections, parties can win seats that they would never win under normal circumstances. Back in 2010, Republican Charles Djou won a seat in an exceptionally Democratic-leaning district in Hawaii, in part because it was an unusual three-way race. Back in 2011, Republican Bob Turner won Anthony Weiner’s district, where Democrats had a 3–1 registration advantage. In the 2017 Alabama special Senate election against Roy Moore, Democrat Doug Jones garnered 50 percent of the vote and won. In the 2020 general election, Jones got 39.7 percent of the vote and lost to Republican Tommy Tuberville.
The past year and a half brought a lot of unexpected vacancies to the House of Representatives. Fifteen members of the House have resigned or left their seats because they took jobs in the Biden administration or the private sector, retired, or passed away. We’ve had a steady stream of special House elections, including five since mid June. FiveThirtyEight ran the numbers and concluded that, “There have been four first-past-the-post special House elections since [the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade], and Democrats have outperformed their expected margins in those elections by an average of 9 points.”
A wise mind recently observed in an email chain that Republicans could explain away any one of these results as a quirk of local factors, a lousy state or local party, weak candidates, etc., but that all four together painted a clear signal that Republican enthusiasm is probably not as high as the party hopes, and that Democratic enthusiasm is not as low as the GOP expected, either.
Way back in 2010, when another Democratic president was in his first term and the GOP was hoping to win back the House, the then-political director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Brian Walsh, characterized the importance of a good national political environment and good candidates and campaigns who are prepared to take advantage of those opportunities: “Environment matters, but you have to have all your ships in the sea, with their sails up, and pointed in the right direction.”
Right now, it’s not clear that Republicans have all their ships at sea, pointed in the right direction, with their sails up.
As of this moment, there are 212 Republicans in the House. (Indiana’s solidly Republican second district does not currently have a representative in the House, as a result of Representative Jackie Walorski’s recent death.) Republicans need to reelect all of their current members and pick up five seats to reach 218 and win control of the chamber. Keep in mind, right now, RealClearPolitics classifies 219 seats as safe, likely, or leaning Republican, so in their assessment, the Republicans have effectively already won control of the House; the only question now is how large their majority is. If Republicans even split the 34 seats categorized as toss-ups by RCP, they would enjoy a House majority of 236 seats — slightly smaller than their majority at the start of the Trump presidency, but around the size of their majority during the later Obama years.
Republicans still hold the thinnest of leads on the generic ballot, and most cycles Democrats are a few points ahead on that measure. This is probably our least useful metric for seeing which party is likely to win control of the chamber, because Americans don’t vote for generic Republicans or generic Democrats, and the district lines have a big say in which candidate has the advantage in a given race. In California back in 2014, 39.9 percent of the total cast votes in House elections went to Republican candidates, but Republicans won just 14 of the 53 seats — just 26 percent of the 53 seats.
Here and there, you can find some bits of good news for Republicans. An independent survey in Michigan’s tenth district showed Republican John James, who has run some close-but-no-cigar statewide races, ahead of Democrat Carl Marlinga by nine points; another recent poll put Marlinga ahead by two.
While it appears that Ohio’s GOP Senate candidate, J. D. Vance, is going to run way behind Ohio governor Mike DeWine, the arrival of Vance’s ads to Buckeye State television screens has made his race with Democrat Tim Ryan closer to the contest Republicans expected. Trafalgar puts Vance up by five over Ryan, Emerson puts him up by three, and USA Today/Suffolk puts him up by three. If and when resources start to get tight for Democrats, they may decide that trying to put Ryan over the top is too steep a climb.
It is somewhat encouraging to see Colorado Republican Senate candidate John O’Dea within six percentage points of incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet. (Forget what I said earlier about Americans’ not voting for generic Democrats. Michael Bennet is a generic Democrat.) If Bennet’s support really is around 47 percent, that’s a somewhat-ominous-but-not-quite-dire sign; he’s got limited room for error in his reelection bid.
Out in Nevada, a Republican-affiliated poll put GOP Senate challenger Adam Laxalt up by three points ahead of incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, but an independent poll put Cortez Masto up by seven. If you’re looking for a good sign for Laxalt, Cortez Masto has fairly consistently polled in the low- to mid-40s, which is not a great spot for an incumbent.
A Republican pollster’s finding a tie in the open-seat Senate race in North Carolina is not good news for the GOP.
Discussing the problems of Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign in Pennsylvania, the sharp Liam Donovan observed that Oz’s mediocre numbers among Pennsylvania Republicans is a vivid illustration of a common problem for GOP candidates this cycle:
Extreme version of the primary melees that have dug a big hole for [Republicans] in all but a few states. Big fields with lots of cash sloshing around and no clear heavyweight, spitting out a [nominee] without the resources or standing to quickly unify the party and pivot to the general.
You must wonder if, earlier this year, some GOP candidates concluded that, “We have to win this hard-fought primary now, and we’ll worry about unifying the party later.” Well, it’s later, and echoing my observation from yesterday, calling for unity is not the same as creating unity.
We also must wonder if certain Republican candidates counted on frustration with the state of the country to be enough to lift them to victory. In the just-published new issue of NR, Yuval Levin lays out a particularly compelling case that, for too many cycles now, Republicans have been afraid of putting forth a concrete policy agenda:
A would-be legislative majority . . . should propose a forthright agenda that puts forward its vision of how some significant public problems might be mitigated, and should then be prepared to negotiate with legislators who have different but reconcilable approaches to the same problems. That sort of work is not for everyone, but people who are not up for it should not run for seats in Congress, because such work is what that institution exists to do. Our economy affords plenty of other employment opportunities for capable, ambitious men and women.
The reluctance of would-be Republican legislators to take the first step toward this kind of political action — to lay out some ideas for how our laws could better serve our country — makes every further step harder too, and so deforms the political arena. In the absence of genuine political speech (that is, speech directed to common action), we are left with empty partisan rhetoric. Such rhetoric can be heated and confrontational, but it cannot be productive of real legislative activity. For members of Congress, it is not a way to fight for victory; it is a way to lose. . . .
To win by more than just the barest of majorities, which is what it takes to govern in our republic, you have to not just maximize your team’s engagement but also appeal beyond your devoted partisans and take a serious bite out of the other party’s coalition. That is very hard to do by focusing only on the villainy of that coalition, or by cleverly refraining from giving voters who aren’t already on your side any reason to join it.
The common complaint might be particularly accurate this year — that it’s not enough to give people reasons to vote against the other guy; you need to give them reasons to vote for you.
ADDENDA: Thanks to the illustrious Michele Tafoya — formerly the sideline reporter on NBC’s Sunday Night Football; sports journalism’s loss is political and cultural journalism’s gain — for having me on her show this week. We had an excellent and wide-ranging discussion about topics ranging from the midterm elections to Hunter Biden to Chinese sweatshops to, yes, the thriller series. (Plus, this is a rare chance to check out my family room behind me, where the Internet connection is better.)
Moe Lane, one of the original gangsters of RedState.com who claims he’s “out of the game” now, offers some kind words about Gathering Five Storms:
If you haven’t, these books are technothriller counterespionage novels where the characters act like real people. That’s not the usual “crippling neuroses and substance abuse problems” trick that a lazier author might use. Instead, the members of the Dangerous Clique are extremely skilled and violence-adapted operatives who also happen to have normal family lives, and who will worry about normal problems when they’re not unapologetically sending extremely bad people to Hell. GATHERING FIVE STORMS is a stylish and sometimes urgent addition to this series, and I look forward to Jim Geraghty’s next entry in the series.
Also: it’s a shame that this series won’t get picked up by Hollywood, because there’s one scene that would be *hysterical* to see on the big screen. You’ll know it when you read it.
And I should take the opportunity to remind fans of the fantasy and noir genres to check out Moe’s series featuring Tom Vargas. After reading the first one, I tried to summarize the tone and style, saying it’s “as if Mickey Spillane and J.R.R. Tolkien went out drinking and merged their mindsets in a buzzed brainstorming session. Snarky, smart, and fast-moving, all served up in rat-a-tat-tat tough guy patter. If Sam Spade played Dungeons and Dragons, it would turn out something like Frozen Dreams.”