Midterm Reset: Could Democrats Win The House?

On An Underrated Possibility

Right after the Virginia disaster, I tweeted at one point that the chance that Democrats hold the House in 2022 was right around 5%, a take which was probably an overcorrection because I’m an idiot and I was sick of overstating Democrats, but was directionally correct, in a sense. With the information we had at the time, the chance was that bad, genuinely it was, and given I had my head up my ass in the run-up to Virginia, I was firmly trying to get it out of my rectum with haste.

What’s happened since is a series of good news for Democrats, even as Joe Biden has shown himself to have almost no ability to recover his approval ratings that are, plainly, in the toilet. That said, today saw a Marist poll come out with an almost comical spike in Joe Biden’s approval (from 39-55 approve/disapprove to 47/50 in a week), and then I spent the afternoon doing House of Reps math, so let’s actually go through this – do House Democrats have a chance, and if so, how?

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The current 538 Generic Ballot tracker has the GOP with a 2.1% edge, which would be a 6.55% swing since the 2020 President election towards the Republicans. If that were the number on election day 2022, my model would have the GOP winning 220 seats, give or take a couple because of map uncertainty in a few remaining states. How is that possible? Well, the GOP have had the worst redistricting cycle they realistically could have had, and their much vaunted edge from the 2010s maps is now gone, at least for two years.

Think about all the breaks Democrats have gotten in the map-drawing process this year, and you see what I mean. From getting Republican gerrymanders tossed in both Ohio and North Carolina to the Indiana and Kentucky state legislatures both not drawing out vulnerable Democrats to Kansas making their left-trending 3rd district redder, but still a Biden +4 district, to Virginia’s courts drawing a 7-4 Biden map with left-trending seats for the state’s two vulnerable Democrats, to Pennsylvania and New Jersey both having maps that were the preference of Democrats drawn, and you see how badly this has gone.

Oh, and I forgot – California’s “Independent” “Commission” was a farce which drew two of the state’s 11 Republicans into districts in which they need to run perfect campaigns to win, and like, even if they win in 2022 they’re dead in 2024, with an additional Biden-won seat that could also soon flip, especially if the California party keeps its shit together after a fairly impressive 2021. New York also drew out 4 Republicans, and Illinois drew out another 2, meaning that what gains the GOP did make in Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee are gone.

Washington and Minnesota drew mostly no-change maps with one single seat resembling anything interesting or competitive, and both are Biden +7 seats that are zooming left at a Presidential level. Now, does “left-trending” guarantee they’ll stay blue in 2022? God no, but I’d much rather be having to defend a series of well-off white suburbs like suburban Seattle and suburban Minneapolis than, say, rural Tennessee, where Democrats had to defend seats in the first Obama midterm. Democrats in New Mexico and Maryland drew bluer seats for their lone Federal Republicans, and while neither are all that likely to flip this year, both are probably gone sometime this decade, and even in Texas and Georgia, the GOP didn’t go nearly as far as they could have in gerrymandering their states, and focused on protecting the long term viability of their maps over maximizing their short term interests.

None of this in any way means Democrats are favoured to win the House in 2022 – plainly, they’re not. But what has happened in the last few months is simple – the number of things that had to break right for Democrats to win the House has gone down, because so many things have gone right for them, and the one that hasn’t – Joe Biden’s approval – is the thing with the longest time to (at least theoretically) get right. None of this is a guarantee of the sum of jack and shit, but if I’m the GOP, I’m not nearly as happy as I should be for a political party with a President 10% underwater on average.

I’ve held off writing this column for a while, for one simple reason – I’m not the person to make an argument for Democratic optimism because I’m the guy who keeps being high on Democratic chances and being wrong. I’m the 413 guy, I’m the “Dems are winning Texas” guy, I’m the TMac was gonna cruise guy. I get it, and I’m fully aware of both my reputation and what my reputation necessarily means. I know that anything good I ever say about the Democrats chances will be dismissed by a number of people as the words of a pro-Democratic hack who just hates the GOP, and while I think that’s unfair, I can’t really argue against it, with my track record of the last two years. In Canada, I have full confidence I can tell whoever the fuck challenges to sit down and shut up, because my track record there through two federal elections is immaculate. In the US, I got nothing except some good will of people who think I’m smart despite the lack of real results showing I show shit from a whole in the ground. That said, here, the GOP need to be a little worried.

Again, the GOP are clear and obvious favourites to win the House, and I expect to produce a forecast showing them winning the House in 2022. Genuinely, I will be shocked if the forecast I tweet on whatever day in November is Election Day is not a GOP House gain, and I will expect as much unless Joe Biden really gets his head out of his ass. That said, the chances of a Democratic House have gone from “not gonna happen” to “shit, it might” real fast, and that difference matters.

In 2016, Nate Silver’s whole argument for why the 538 model was right was that Donald Trump was right was that Trump was one standard polling error away from winning, and then we had a standard polling error and he won. The reason everyone ended with Biden at ~90% to win and 538 only had Clinton at 70% is because Biden was 2 standard errors away from losing and then the polling error was much bigger in 2020 than in 2016, and in 2020, Biden had a big enough lead to withstand that kind of polling error. That idea – how far are you from losing – is worth repurposing here.

Think about it in sports terms, and the idea makes even more sense. How many things did the Montreal Canadiens need to go right for them to beat the Leafs last year? They needed Tavares to get hurt in Game 1, they needed Carey Price to go fucking insane in nets in Games 5, 6, and 7, and they needed the Hyman-Matthews-Marner line to go cold – oh, and they needed to somehow get outshot 13-2 in the Overtime of Game 6 but somehow to win. They were huge underdogs to win that series,  and while they won, it doesn’t mean they weren’t huge underdogs to win, it just means a wild series of shit needed to happen.

Take it to basketball – think of all the shit the Cavs needed to go right against the Warriors in 2016. They needed the NBA to give Draymond a Technical to suspend him in Game 5, they needed legendary performances from LeBron and Kyrie, and they needed every Warrior except Draymond to shit the bed in Game 7 back at Oracle, and still, they barely won. The Cavs needed everything to break right to pull off the comeback, and they got it, but boy did they need a lot.

In November 2021, the Democrats needed a whole hell of a lot to go right to even be in a position to be competitive in the House this cycle, and one by one, they’ve happened. From favourable court rulings to Dem states gerrymandering aggressively to getting every coinflip to go their way, Democrats have been running hotter than the sun this winter with redistricting, and it has led them to being one more favourable bounce from winning the House again. Will they get it? Probably not. But the GOP’s hold on the House has gone from solid to slightly less so, and it’s time people realized it.

Democrats probably won’t win the House. But it’s real bad news for the GOP that I need to add the probably.