On the menu today: Welcome to Election Day! if you have not voted already, you should go out and vote. Good men and women died to preserve that right. (Correction: You should look up who’s running, try to develop an informed opinion, and then vote.)
In my neck of the woods, the only office on the ballot is the U.S. House of Representatives, and incumbent Democrat Gerry Connolly is likely to beat Republican Jim Myles by about a bazillion to one, but I’ll go out and be that one. Yesterday, I made my final predictions for the House and Senate races. Today, I’ll make my final calls in the governor’s races and one key local race.
Gubernatorial Predictions
Just as we are unlikely to know which party will control the Senate as Tuesday evening turns into Wednesday morning, we will likely be waiting a long time for the results in several key governor’s races.
“We won’t have unofficial results from all parts of the state and all valid counting done until Wednesday night,” Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan secretary of state’s office, told the New York Times in late October. “There may be counties that report far earlier than that, and there may also be races that, you know, therefore, are called prior to that.”
Michigan’s incumbent Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer does not deserve a second term, but I notice that she’s at 48.7 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, usually a sign of an incumbent being right at the threshold. (One ominous indicator for Whitmer: Turnout in Detroit is projected to be down significantly from 2018.) I think Republican Tudor Dixon comes close but no cigar, but apparently, we won’t know who won for a while.
In New York State, polls don’t close until 9 p.m., and the state is notoriously slow in its counting of ballots and releasing results. The good news is that mailed ballots should be a much smaller slice of the total this year; according to the Associated Press, “About 552,000 absentee ballots have been sent out with more than 188,000 returned so far.”
My head says panicking New York Democrats have done enough in the past week or two to save Kathy Hochul against the late surge from Lee Zeldin. My head also notices that Hochul is still leading by a bunch in several of the final polls. Remember, in the last good midterm year for Republicans in 2014, Andrew Cuomo won, 54 percent to 40 percent. My heart says that the issue environment is about as bad for Democrats and good for Republicans as the GOP could ever hope for, Hochul has terrible retail skills, and Zeldin is running with the passion of a man who nearly got stabbed because of his rival’s atrocious policies on crime. My heart wins out: I’m picking Zeldin.
You know which state counts its votes really quickly? Florida. After the national embarrassment of the 2000 recount — hanging chads, etc. — the state invested in all kinds of technologies designed to make the process run smoothly, quickly, and transparently.
This means that shortly — probably very shortly — after 7 p.m., the networks will declare that Florida governor Ron DeSantis has won reelection, an early indicator that he has won by a very wide margin. DeSantis’s win, and what it means for any 2024 presidential bid, may well be the only interesting thing for the network talking heads to discuss for a while as they wait for the other polls to close and results to trickle in from the other key states.
DeSantis is going to romp, winning by at least ten percentage points — and maybe closer to 15.
All cycle long, I’ve been fascinated by the more-or-less doomed sequels in the forms of Stacey Abrams’s gubernatorial bid in Georgia and Beto O’Rourke’s gubernatorial bid in Texas.
As mentioned yesterday, it is hard to beat an incumbent in general, it is hard to beat a GOP incumbent in a GOP-leaning state such as Georgia and Texas, and it is just about impossible to beat a GOP incumbent in a GOP-leaning state in a GOP wave year. This has been clear since the beginning of the cycle. This basic dynamic of politics does not change if the Supreme Court ends Roe v. Wade, or because of the terrible school shooting in Uvalde, or even if there’s a lot of enthusiasm for Beto at an Austin music festival. All cycle long, Democrats have insisted — and spent close to $170 million — in a counterargument that amounts to, “Nuh-uhh!”
In life, what is most effective and what feels good are rarely the same thing; if they were, none of us would ever have to go on diets. If Democrats really wanted to win a governor’s race in a southern state, what would be most effective would be to run a relatively pro-life, relatively pro-gun candidate such as Louisiana governor Jon Bel Edwards. (Edwards gets to pass a lot of progressive legislation on other issues by not antagonizing social conservatives on those two issues!) What feels good to Democrats is to run candidates who are way too far to the left for their states — such as Abrams and O’Rourke — but who get gushing profiles in publications such as Vanity Fair and Vogue.
For those who wonder why Abrams and O’Rourke inspire such passionate enthusiasm from the progressive grassroots and those seemingly endless swooning articles in glossy magazines, I liked this observation from Jacob Stern over in The Atlantic:
Winners have to deal with the unglamorous minutiae of actual governance. They have to figure out how to translate campaign promises into concrete policies. They make mistakes, and people get disillusioned, and approval ratings decline. Losers are spared these indignities. Politically speaking, they don’t survive long enough to let anyone down. Unsullied by compromise, losers can be made into lodestars.
Abrams and O’Rourke retain their starry-eyed fan bases because it’s been a long time since either one has had to actually do anything; their time in office is long forgotten.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp will win by at least eight percentage points, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will win by at least ten percentage points.
In Arizona, Kari Lake will win over Katie Hobbs, and the finger-pointing among Arizona Democrats will be delicious. Hobbs’s decision not to debate Lake may be seen as the most consequential, self-inflicted political wound since Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley contended that Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling was a Yankees fan in the 2010 special Senate election in Massachusetts. Look, John Fetterman got up on stage, had maybe the worst debate performance of any Senate candidate in decades, and barely lost any ground in the polls. Surely, Hobbs could have turned in a better performance than him!
There’s been an ominous turn for Oregon Republicans, where left-of-center voters appear to no longer be quite so evenly split between Democrat Tina Kotek and progressive independent Betsy Johnson — a dynamic that put the GOP’s Christine Drazan in a great spot for much of the race. Once again, I’m going to follow my heart over my head and pick Drazan to hang on in a close one.
Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, seems like the classic kind of candidate who gets swept in by a wave year for his party and gets swept out by a wave year for Republicans. Tim Michels won’t win by a lot, but it will be enough.
In Nevada, GOP challenger Joe Lombardo has enjoyed a small but stable lead over incumbent Democrat Steve Sisolak almost all year, and I expect that lead to hold when all the votes are counted.
In a couple of blue states, Republicans who looked like longshots closed the gap a lot in the final weeks of the cycle, but just ran out of momentum toward the end. I look at the numbers and see New Mexico Republican Mark Ronchetti coming close but then losing to incumbent Michelle Lujan Grisham. My Three Martini Lunch podcast cohost Greg Corombos thinks Ronchetti can pull it off, so if this turns out to be a GOP win, I should listen to Greg more often.
I had hopes that Republican attorney general Derek Schmidt would knock off Kansas’s incumbent governor, Democrat Laura Kelly, but it looks like Kelly will hang on.
Minnesota is another state that deserves a respite from its current subpar governance under an overwhelmed Democratic incumbent, but it looks like Tim Walz will hang on over Republican Scott Jensen there.
In Maine, former governor Paul LePage’s big comeback bid against incumbent Democrat Janet Mills never turned into much.
As in the Senate races, there are some gubernatorial races featuring GOP incumbents that just never got competitive, despite Democrats’ hopes. Iowa’s Kim Reynolds looks set to win reelection in landslide, as do Ohio’s Mike DeWine and New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu. Publications such as Vanity Fair quoted South Dakota Democrats’ contending that the gubernatorial race featuring GOP incumbent Kristi Noem was “very, very tight,” and I guess I have a different definition of “tight,” because the last Emerson poll had Noem up, 56 percent to 37 percent. No one has even bothered to poll South Carolina since early September; Republican Henry McMaster will cruise to another term there.
Then there are the gubernatorial races in which Republicans were never all that competitive, and the party can and should ask themselves if there are ways to prevent primary voters from leaving them stuck with fundamentally unserious, uncompetitive nominees. In Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro will mop the floor with Doug Mastriano, and local Republicans will fairly ask if Mastriano was dead weight, making Mehmet Oz’s effort in the Senate race more difficult. In Maryland, departing governor Larry Hogan will turn over the governor’s mansion to Democrat Wes Moore; there’s no indication that Republican Dan Cox ever made Moore even break a sweat. In Illinois, incumbent Democrat J. B. Pritzker was always going to have a gargantuan financial advantage, but Republican Darren Bailey barely amounted to much more than a speedbump. Come on, Illinois Republicans; Jeff Blehar deserves a competitive race one of these cycles.
Yes, these are all states where Democrats spent millions during the GOP primary to promote the Republican candidate that Democrats deemed least electable. But GOP primary voters don’t always have to take the bait, you know?
One Big Local Race with National Implications
In the Los Angeles mayor’s race, I think Rick Caruso — the closest thing the city has to a conservative — will pull off the upset victory over Democratic congresswoman Karen Bass. The news is not that Katie Perry, Kim Kardashian, Chris Pratt, Gwenyth Paltrow, or Snoop Dogg voted for Caruso. The news is that Perry, Kardashian, Pratt, Paltrow, and Dogg felt comfortable sharing that fact on social media, an indicator that in heavily liberal Hollywood, it is now acceptable to acknowledge that L.A. has serious and worsening problems, and that the city’s usual Democratic leaders aren’t getting the job done.
Some cities hit bottom so hard, they’ll try anything, even deviating from the standard Democratic machine politics and going with a guy who’s in the neighborhood of being a Republican. (Yes, Caruso changed his party registration to the Democrats, but he’s still on the board of trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.) Oddly enough, Vox wrote about this race as if Bass were the underdog, which may prove prescient.
ADDENDA: Tonight, I will be joining Megyn Kelly on her program, at various points between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., along with RealClearPolitics’ Tom Bevan and a host of other guests.
In case you missed it, yesterday in the Washington Post, some guy examined what House Republicans will do on Day One of their House majority and in the weeks that follow.
I’m used to being torn to shreds in the comments; what was striking was how many Post commentaters were absolutely livid that a column in that newspaper would treat a GOP House majority in 2023 as if it were a given. This says to me that a lot of grassroots progressives have chosen to believe that Democrats will hold the majority — which the numbers indicate was always a longshot, and is now looking like the longest of longshots.
Those commenters were not merely hoping that Democrat eke out a 218-seat majority, they contended that I was being irresponsible and ridiculous for writing about what Republicans will do if — and let’s face it, when — they win the majority. There are going to be a lot of shocked progressives staring at their screens tomorrow morning.