US #ScrimshawSix: Six Midterm Thoughts

On The Wild US Landscape

I’m very sad about Seb Vettel retiring, so the department of coherent organization is off this week.

There’s No Case That It’s A Red Wave Right Now …

Right now.

If the midterms were next Tuesday, Democrats would win 51 Senate seats and something around 210 House seats. A Generic Ballot around neutral does not get you more than a dozen House gains for the GOP, and a neutral environment is one where the GOP nominating bad candidates and Democratic incumbency wins Democrats their three key defensive seats – and then, one where Fetterman doesn’t get run down by Oz (who we’ll get to in a minute).

The entire basis of both race raters’ choices and the 538 model is that the electorate will get redder between now and the fall, which is why Nate’s initial House model had a R+6 expected popular vote despite the 538 Generic Ballot average being in the 1.5 range when they launched. But again, right now, there’s no real math pointing to a red wave.

… But That Doesn’t Mean November Won’t Be One

If this sounds like pedantic bullshit, it’s not.

I’m writing this in response to a whole lot of liberals getting mad at Crystal Ball this morning for saying that the likely outcome in the House is a gain in the 20s for the GOP, and a lot of people started yelling about Roe and a shrinking Generic Ballot, because they utterly missed the point.

Do I agree that the likeliest outcome in November is the GOP gaining 20-30 seats? God no, but their argument is that Joe Biden’s approval is going to continue to be a drag and that the Generic Ballot will fall away from the “in” party, which has happened in the past.

You can take or leave that analysis, but what will happen in an election held now and what will happen in November are two very different questions, and getting them mixed up is only likely to make your analysis worse.

Joe Manchin, Progressive King?

Part of the reason Democrats have been on the back foot all year – or, certainly, until Dobbs – was because they had no message. It was “inflation is transitory” to “inflation is real but not our fault” to “inflation is Putin’s fault” to “inflation is the fault of corporate greed”, and it was inconsistent and useless. Now, Joe Manchin has given them a message, and it’s a potentially lucrative one.

Whatever the economic merits of the bill, “Let’s tame inflation by making sure corporates pay their share of taxes and making drugs cheaper for people and use some of that money to invest in American energy” is a damn better argument than culs-de-sac around the cause of inflation. Hell, if Republicans want to get into a debate about whether or not two consecutive quarters of economic contraction is a recession on its own, let them – and pivot back to how you’re going to bring down inflation while they’re arguing about words.

Is Dr. Oz This Bad Of A Candidate?

I’m stuck in between a rock and a hard place with Pennsylvania, because I either admit I was wrong that Oz was going to be a decent general election candidate and move my November Senate prediction to 51 Dems, or I have to defend the idea that Dr. Oz is actually going to win, which is getting increasingly difficult to do.

I think a lot of the Fetterman lead is artificial, in the sense that a decent chunk of it is Trump-voting Republicans who don’t like Oz because of a bitter primary, but it’s also the case that Fetterman making this campaign about Oz’s New Jerseyism is reducing the salience of Republican attacks and keeping Republicans off balance.

If the election was today, Oz is fucked. Given it isn’t, he still has time, but boy oh boy it is getting hard to defend the idea he’s a favourite in November.

Has Herschel Taken Georgia Off The Board?

To the extent that you can learn anything from state polls, I’m going to suggest that Georgia polls are probably a bit more reliable than, say, Midwestern ones – if only really because the 2020 polling miss in Georgia was so much smaller. And while it’s obviously laughably absurd to think that Herschel Walker is really down 9, like SurveyUSA had, it is fair to note that the polls in Georgia have a big enough lead for Raphael Warnock that you can probably be fairly certain he’s up in reality – even after adjusting for pollster biases and historical misses.

The problem for the GOP is there’s no clear way out of their self-imposed, undiagnosed CTE hell of Herschel, because they can’t do what traditional underdog campaigns do and have him show up at every event and talk as much as possible. David Perdue skipped TV debates because he thought he was winning and therefore Ossoff needed them more than he did – which was true in the General and contestable in the runoff. Ossoff understood his best path was to blitz the state with free media, and he showed up everywhere and talked his ass off. Herschel can’t do that, because every time he takes a media question he makes himself look less and less capable of doing the job.

If Herschel does debate Warnock, he’ll get destroyed. If he doesn’t, he’ll become an irrelevance. It’s not over unless and until the NRSC pulls the plug, but Raphael Warnock is the clear favourite in Georgia right now, and I don’t think it’s arguable.

Is Holding The House Totally Gone?

Not totally, but yes.

When I went on Px3 earlier this year, I said that Democrats were in an underratedly good position in the House, in that they had had such a good run in court and in redistricting in general that they were one break away from winning the House. Had the likely House map at that stage stayed the same, this level of Dobbs effect might have been enough to have people arguing that the House is still winnable.

And from that day, Democrats lost every break.

Florida Republicans bent the knee to DeSantis, New York’s Court tossed the Hochulmander, Ohio gets to use their lines that everyone knows aren’t legal (and are going to be redrawn by 2024, unless further court orders change the current legal status quo), and they couldn’t get lucky with a new Black seat in Louisiana. (In fairness, they did get to keep their Kansas City seat, but still.)

Had the maps that we expected in the early spring been the maps, it’s somewhere between possible and likely that I’d be in a massive conundrum, with my projections (which are always a “NowCast”, because I’m not going to guess at where the polls will be in the future) showing a Democratic majority and my gut telling me I’m an idiot and not to release it and incur the inevitable ridicule I would have received.

Now, the path does exist, but it’s extraordinarily narrow. It’s incumbency being worth more than it has been the last few years, left-trending suburban districts swing less than the nation as a whole, the GOP throw away some number of seats with horrible candidates who can’t talk about abortion and rape without sounding like Godless cretins, and a whole dose of luck.

Is it possible that they pull a very efficient double – hold their right trending seats because of incumbency, hold their left trending ones because of trends, and luck out to ~219 seats? Maybe, but it’s about as likely as having one specific card that can win you a hand in poker. It’s possible, but it ain’t happening unless you have a horseshoe up your ass.