US Midterm Recap: What The Fuck Happened?

Long May You Run

In some ways, what happened last week is very fucking weird – Democrats beat expectations? Republicans are sad? Democrats won the Senate without Georgia? – which is why this column has been delayed and delayed. I’m generally much better in the abstract, but trying to find a cohesive take from an election that has been as weird and wild as it has been is a hard task.

This column could just be me dunking on the fact that I did better at predicting these midterms that Nate Silver, Sabato, Cook, and every other big named US forecasting agency, but frankly that is too close to 2020 Scrimshaw for my liking and I won’t do it. The thing nobody who does well in an election cycle will ever say is there is luck involved in getting it right, and there certainly was some luck in being right about Nevada (which will come down to ~10000 ballots) and Georgia (where I was clear Warnock would win *in the way every other state uses the term*, despite pretty mediocre Black turnout on the day). Fetterman winning and me being strident in the take was skill, as was never buying the hype on New Hampshire or Arizona, but to deny that I also ran hot is the sort of thing that prior versions of me would never do.

The thing is, the lesson of this midterm is actually pretty simple – the Midterm Penalty is dying, if it’s not already dead.

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I know what a lot of people are going to say – there’s gonna be around a 5-6% swing against Joe Biden, and that’s after the effects of the GOP tossing abortion rights in the trash, but the midterm penalty is dead? I get it, but listen.

The GOP managed to barely win the House popular vote – I’m using the Economist’s projection of an R+1 here – with near record inflation and a President who’s been deeply unpopular for the last 15 months. The GOP should have fucking annihilated this year, and they didn’t because of two things – SCOTUS’ decision in Dobbs and the fact they’re generally running nutters. But the thing is, all that this did was even the playing field.

Let’s play a quick game here – Biden wins again in 2024 with a Democratic House and a Republican Senate, a plausible (but by no means guaranteed!) outcome. The conventional wisdom is that would be a disaster for Democrats, but there’s no actual reason to think that it will be. What we do know is that the economy is probably going to be a lot better in ’26 than ’22, and if so, then there’s little to suggest that this is going to be immediate death.

When Nathaniel Rakich of 538 blithely tweeted in November 2020 his pompous tweet congratulating the GOP on winning the 2022 midterms, he assumed that history would just blindly repeat. What he didn’t know was that the economy was going to have two negative quarters of GDP and inflation would be roaring back afterwards, two things that should have fucking soared the GOP to new heights. And yet, that tweet was still wrong, because the idea that there would be an automatic and guaranteed backlash regardless of circumstances was bullshit.

In the UK, the penalty paid to governments at yearly local elections has essentially evaporated independent of national polling. The UK Tories have gained seats in the locals three times since the end of the Coalition, and lost seats three times – two landslides, and one essentially a no change result. Shockingly, the two elections held when the party was in meltdown in the polls (2019 and 2022) were disasters. When the party was polling well? They gained seats or held their own. In the past, even when the government was polling well they’d get wiped out, because that was just what happened. Now, the midterm penalty is declining over there. None of this is to say that the Tories won’t get wiped out next year – they assuredly will – but the reason for that is that they’re in the 20s on vote intention, not some mythical pull of “thermostatic public opinion”.

Most of my 2021 optimism for this site was dogshit, and I’m not here to claim it wasn’t – I was way too optimistic about the House and of the stretch Senate targets – but the thing I did get right is that the new Democratic coalition has put a floor on our performances that didn’t exist in the Obama era. The Global Fucking Realignment (drink, for those of you who play the drinking game) has given Democrats a meaningful protection against wipeout, because they have traded lower propensity voters for higher propensity ones.

You know why the county maps show a lot of Democratic gains in rural areas, compared to 2020? In some parts it’s meaningful persuasion, but it’s also a decent amount because Republicans don’t turn out to the same level when a Presidential election isn’t happening. That trade is valuable in Presidential years for the GOP, but in a midterm it’s a bad one, and this helped us immensely. Without Warnock being able to hold educated whites to Biden’s level in 2020, he would have lost outright. The GFR got us to a runoff.

In terms of where Democrats did well versus where they tanked, it all makes sense – Democrats have not governed New York well in recent years. I’m not saying I would have voted for Lee Zeldin, but the New York Democrats have governed as atrocious cowards, the mayor of the City is going around trying to tell everyone his city is a hellhole, and there’s been more strife the last two years internally than needed. It’s not a shock a Governor who’s been trying, and frankly failing, to get anywhere on actual reforms is blamed for the sense of stagnation that’s looming.

In the Rust Belt, Democrats ran good campaigns and were rewarded for it, with Whitmer and Shapiro running good campaigns designed to tell voters what they wanted to do as Governor. John Fetterman was vocal about why he wanted to go to DC, and he was rewarded for it. Was a decent chunk of it the horrible candidates the GOP ran? Yes, of course, but it’s also the fact that Democrats won with vision, and where they shit the bed, it was complacency that did it.

What does it mean for 2024? Nothing. Until we know the state of the US economy, we know nothing about what might happen there. But this midterm did show two things – one, that contrary to a lot of my haters I am actually good at this, and two, that the midterm curse is dead.

Long may it die.