2022 Reset: What’s The Case The GOP Are Favoured?
Why Is Everyone Convinced Of This?
Most of my attention has been focused on Canada in recent days and weeks, and I feel like I’ve been neglecting the US (which, in fairness, I have been), so I wanted to write about the midterms today with a bit of detachment from all the noise that people who follow events by the hour don’t have. And now that I’m here, I’m stuck with one question: why is everyone convinced the GOP are favoured to win the House?
Let’s start with what that sentence isn’t, which is in any way saying that they can’t win or that they won’t win - or even that they won't end up as favourites by November 2022 - that’s decidedly not what I’m saying. What I am asking is very simple - what’s the case for it?
Redistricting was always supposed to be the GOP’s silver bullet, but Indiana didn’t crack the Gary seat, Texas is giving Democrats a much better map for 2022 than we expected (which will dummymander later in the decade, if at all, which is why they’re doing it), and the conventional wisdom - or, at least, Dave Wasserman’s opinion - is that redistricting will now be a wash, as the GOP takes a much less aggressive path forward than the most aggressive mappers would hope for, and as Democrats in New York and Illinois take their plans forward as gerrymanders for Democrats. So, that’s one argument down.
The next one is history, where the average President’s party loses X number of seats in their midterms and I’m supposed to give a shit about this number for reasons - or actually bother to look what the number is, which I’m not bothering to do - but that’s a fanciful notion. The GOP have this historical advantage, which sounds a lot like their historical advantage in those Georgia runoffs, where 8/8 races had been more GOP in the runoffs than the previous election. I mean, that was rock-solid history, so clearly Mitch McConnell is still Majority Leader, right? Oh, and if you want some non-snarky opinions too, the “Midterm Penalty” is going down and down in UK local elections, too. Australian Labor suffered a swing against it in Eden-Monaro last year from opposition in a byelection, Justin Trudeau has made net gains in byelections in office as Liberal PM, and all of these things would have been unspeakable nonsense 10 years ago.
The generic ballot looks fine, with a D+2.9 average on 538 right now, as compared to a House Democratic margin of D+3.1 last time - and it’s highly unlikely because of how redistricting is going that the GOP would be able to win the House at a D+2.9 popular vote lead. Ah, but the polls could be high on Democrats again, right? Well, probably not, because the national polls were fine in 2018, and generally speaking polling misses go the opposite way after a miss - the instinct is to overcompensate for the miss. It’s pretty clear that’s what happened in Virginia in 2017 after the Trump miss, after all. None of this is to say it’s really a D+5, but if you’re looking at the Generic Ballot for your GOP confidence, that ain’t it.
What about other elections? Well, California was a better result than 2018 for Democrats, and while we lost the Connecticut race, we won the Bedford, NH House seat off the GOP and we ran that Iowa special earlier this month closer than the 2020 result, so that sounds like a draw to me - oh, and Nathaniel Rakich’s handy spreadsheet of all special elections has the median swing at D+2 and the mean swing R+0.2, both consistent with a wash. So what do we have left? Oh, of course, Biden’s approval.
So, I don’t want to be glib about this one, because Biden’s approval is down, and down substantially - that’s an undeniable fact. What is more arguable is whether it matters, and I’m not sure it does, because there’s no similar decline in the Generic Ballot since the approval slide started? Biden was +8 on approval on August 1st, and he’s now -4. Democrats have seen their positions weaken a bit since then - down from D+4.8 to D+2.9. That’s some movement, but even then, it’s not in any way on the scale of the movement on approvals - and, to the extent that the slide was real, there’s some evidence it’s reversed, with Quinnipiac showing a D+1 in early August and a D+4 earlier this month. (Do not point out that Quinnipiac are shit - the relevance is the shift.) There’s a pretty clear case that Biden’s approval is falling because Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents are disapproving of the job he’s doing without wanting the GOP in office - which makes some sense.
The point I always make about the midterms is not that we know the result right now - we decidedly don’t. My point always was and always will be that we don’t know, and that overconfidence is death. I’m literally the avatar of overconfidence, and maybe just maybe everyone should learn some lessons from my clusterfuck of a 2020 cycle and adopt some fucking humility about the course of events. Gun to my head, right now, Democrats are favourites to win the House. That might change between now and 2022, but if it does, it will do so because the facts on the ground change - and right now, the case that the GOP are clear or obvious favourites to win in 2022 doesn’t exist.