On the menu today: From the FiveThirtyEight forecast to the big-picture stories in the mainstream newspapers, the story is that Republicans have enjoyed a late burst of momentum in this year’s midterm elections. What doesn’t quite smell right to me is that the dynamics changed so dramatically in a span of three weeks or so. Not that much has changed in the country in the past month, suggesting that this was always a GOP wave year, and it’s just that a lot of people who cover and analyze the campaigns just didn’t want to see it.
Is This a Late Surge to the GOP? Or Was It Always There?
I understand that in the final weeks of a campaign, polls are conducted more frequently and by a wider range of organizations, opportunities for a trailing candidate to turn everything around dwindle, early votes get cast, and “the cement dries.”
I’m neither a Nate Silver superfan nor a hater; I think he calls them as he sees them. FiveThirtyEight runs a model that calculates the likelihood of each party to control the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. As of this morning, that model says there is a 55 percent chance that Republicans win control of the Senate, and an 85 percent chance that Republicans win control of the House. That’s a perfectly logical sentiment in line with polling, the political and economic environment, gut feeling, etc.
But about three weeks ago, on October 13, the same model showed that Democrats had a 66 percent chance of holding the Senate and a 31 percent chance of holding the House. That’s a dramatic swing. In fact, this past Sunday, the Democrats were still projected to hold the Senate, at 52 percent.
Does it feel as if the political environment changed that much in the past six days, or the past three weeks? What is the biggest thing that happened in the past three weeks? The John Fetterman–Mehmet Oz debate? Don Bolduc’s rise in New Hampshire? Maybe if you squint, the outlook for Blake Masters in Arizona’s Senate race has gotten a little better?
The state of the country hasn’t changed much in the past three weeks. The inflation rate, the unemployment rate, and other major economic indicators are updated monthly. The national average unleaded gas price is about one cent lower than it was a month ago.
But some big national polls did shift dramatically within the span of a month. Ed Morrissey noticed that CNN’s generic-ballot survey shifted seven percentage points toward the Republicans in a month, and Marist’s survey saw a similar six-point shift. Ed speculates that the prospects for Democrats were held aloft for months by polls of registered voters in the mix. As I pointed out in late September:
Once you sort out the pollsters using registered voters from the pollsters using likely voters, a clear pattern emerges. CBS, Emerson, Rasmussen, ABC, and Trafalgar are using likely voters, and their results average out to Republicans leading by 2.8 percentage points.
Economist/YouGov, Politico/Morning Consult, NBC News, Fox News, New York Times/Siena, and Harvard-Harris are using registered voters, and their results average out to Democrats leading by 2.83 percentage points.
As I also noted then, some pollsters’ definition of a “likely voter” probably includes people who aren’t likely to vote but who don’t want to admit that to a stranger on the phone. In the latest CBS News Battleground Tracker poll, which has Republicans ahead by one point on the generic House ballot, 74 percent of registered-voter respondents said they would definitely vote, and another 13 percent said they probably would vote. Based upon history, it seems exceptionally improbable that 87 percent of registered voters will actually turn out and vote this year.
Your mileage may vary, but from where I sit, a lot of people who cover races wanted to believe that Democrats would defy the odds and the historical pattern. They wanted to believe that Democrats would overcome a president with low job-approval ratings, utterly abysmal right-track/wrong-direction numbers, high inflation, high rates of illegal immigration, high crime rates, and a record drop in school test scores. Overcoming all of that requires remarkably charismatic and skilled candidates — and as I warned last month, Democrats have their own share of significantly flawed candidates. It turns out that Fetterman really couldn’t debate, Katie Hobbs won’t debate, and Mandela Barnes is far too liberal a candidate to beat a two-term incumbent in a purple state. The fact that Democrats didn’t want to hear it didn’t make it any less true.
Now, with just days until the election, the evidence is mounting that not only are we not going to see a surprising Democratic comeback, but we’re in for the kind of wave year where usually safe Democratic incumbents who looked okay find themselves defeated. All around, you can see big-picture roundups in mainstream publications, warning readers to brace themselves for a large-scale red wave.
In the first major election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the debate over abortion rights has not emerged as a political silver bullet for Democrats, who have largely abandoned hopes that a surge of voter outrage over the decision alone would lift them over obstacles they face in the midterms.
Democrats across the country scrambled Thursday to bolster candidates in places President Biden carried safely in 2020, the latest sign of panic that they could face major losses in next week’s midterm elections. Vice President Harris and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton held a joint rally in an effort to rescue New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who faces a close race in a state Republicans haven’t won in two decades.
The battle for control of the House has been spreading into bluer and bluer turf as Election Day creeps nearer, with more than 60 percent of ad spending the past two months flowing into districts President Joe Biden won by 5 or more points just two years ago.
The spending landscape illustrates the challenging pattern for Democrats and their slim majority: Many of their most vulnerable seats have already slid off the edge of the map, and Republicans are pushing them back even further, forcing an expensive defense of many seats that they and Biden both carried in the last election.
Our old friend Tim Alberta, writing in The Atlantic, laid out how Democrats are losing their traditional advantage among Hispanic voters. At The American Prospect, Democratic pollster and consultant Stanley Greenberg warns his party that it has completely mishandled the issue of crime, even alienating a chunk of its own base voters:
While Democrats were still competitive in the congressional ballot throughout the fall, they trailed Republicans by 13 points on which party would do better on crime. A quarter of Democrats in October said Republicans would do a better job. That included a quarter of Blacks and a stunning half of Hispanics and Asian Americans.
While Republicans have led on the ‘parents’ rights’ mantra — and have been interweaving their rights rhetoric with plans to promote private school vouchers — even Democrats have been leaning in, including Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who recently formed a new “parents’ council” to advise lawmakers on education policy. Democratic gubernatorial candidates Josh Shapiro and J.B. Pritzker also recently came out to back private school voucher programs, among other entreaties to parents.”
Again, your mileage may vary, but I look at the tone of the coverage in recent days and see a subtext of, “Dear readers, it turns out that that big Democratic comeback isn’t going to happen after all. Sorry for getting your hopes up. Better luck next time.”
It’s not just me; this morning, longtime GOP strategist Brad Todd writes that, “Lots of ink being spilled about polls turning in Republican favor, as if it is a surprise shift — it was not. The fundamentals have not changed — but the wish-casting of the journalists & media pollsters reading the data has eroded.”
The only minor downside to your party enjoying a wave year is that it often wins at least a couple, and sometimes a bunch, of seats that it would never win in regular circumstances. For a new senator, they’ve got six years to ingratiate themselves to an electorate in a state that rarely favors their party. But for a new representative, the clock is ticking, and it’s likely that in 2024, Republicans will have a lot of freshman representatives trying to hang on in usually blue districts in a year with presidential-election-level turnout. Still, political parties would rather have the problem of too many seats to defend than too few.
ADDENDUM: You’re going to hear a lot of Democrats who are very excited about Oprah Winfrey endorsing John Fetterman — and effectively turning her back on her old friend Mehmet Oz.
It’s entirely possible Oz falls short; Pennsylvania is not the easiest state for a Republican to win, and Fetterman has the fourth-best fundraising of any Senate candidate this cycle at $56 million. Oz isn’t too far behind, ranking seventh at $40 million.
But if there’s any race in which it would not surprise me to see the final numbers dramatically different than the polls, it’s this one. It could well be that Pennsylvanians watched the debate — or more likely, the coverage of the debate — and came away not with sympathy for Fetterman, but instead with a sense that he and his campaign had misled everyone about the progress of his recovery from a stroke.
But I could also see Pennsylvanians not wanting to tell a pollster or anyone else that they’re voting for Oz and against Fetterman, lest others think of them as being mean or unsympathetic by voting against the guy who’s still recovering from a stroke.