At FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver projects that Republicans are favored to hold the majority in the 2022 House and the majority in the 2022 Senate is a toss-up. Here are his remarks about the House:
Overall, the Deluxe forecast expects Democrats to eventually lose the popular vote for the House by closer to 6 points, about the margin that they lost it by in 2014. And it expects Republicans to wind up with 237 seats in an average outcome, a gain of 24 seats from the 213 they had at the start of the current Congress.
While these are his remarks about the Senate:
Indeed, our forecast sees the overall Senate landscape to be about as competitive as it gets. The Deluxe forecast literally has Senate control as a 50-50 tossup. The Classic and Lite forecasts show Democrats as very slight favorites to keep the Senate, meanwhile, with a 59 and a 62 percent chance, respectively.
For comparison the Cook Political Report predicts that if all solid, likely and leaning Democratic seats go for Democrats, all solid, likely and leaning Republican seats go for Republicans, and the toss-ups split 3-2 for the Democrats that the present 50-50 split will be maintained. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, on the other hand, making the same assumptions as CPR, sees the Senate as being narrowly carried by the Republicans. The difference is the the Crystal Ball see one less toss-up than CPR does.
In a normal election year, even a normal midterm election year, the Senate would be considered very unfavorable for the Republicans. In November’s election 14 seats held by Democrats while 21 seats held by Republicans will be decided. That’s a lot more seats that need to be defended.
However, this is not a normal midterm election. President Biden’s approval rating is much worse today than Obama’s was on election day 2014 or Trump’s on election day 2018. And all three of those projections are steady-state. IMO a significant number of factors need to break in the Democrats favor for the election results to be merely bad rather than apocalyptic:
- Inflation can get no worse.
- Crime can get no worse—in particular it can’t be a “long, hot summer”.
- We can’t be more at war than at present.
- Abortion needs to be a more significant voting motivator than present polls suggest.
- Black and Hispanic voters must vote Democratic in numbers no smaller than they did in 2020.
just to name a few.
President Biden started his term likening himself to Franklin Roosevelt, indeed trying to be the next FDR. The comparisons with Carter have been numerous. Carter is beginning to look like a best case scenario. If things continue along their present trajectory Biden will be lucky not to be a Democratic Hoover.
I’ve heard Biden being compared more and more to Hoover than to Carter. The disdain and discouragement people have for his domestic/foreign policy judgments far outweigh any tribal affiliation they may have for one party alone. That’s why he has such a low approval rating with Independents, of course Republicans, and even with growing swaths of democrats. My predictions, however, about the midterm outcomes remain unsettled, as I really don’t trust the election process to produce accurate results, especially with voting machines having at least 9 security issues.
One thing you don’t mention is the potential for a recession and/or stagflation. The potential timing of both could be this fall just before the election. There’s some speculation we may be in a technical recession now, or about to enter one.
Regardless, we’ll have divided government. I don’t see much difference between the GOP getting the House only or the House and Senate except for nominations which I personally don’t care much about. We’ll have two years of partisan preening and no substantive legislation followed by a shit-show of a 2024 Election year.
538 projections align with what I said for a while; Republicans are favored in the House; but Democrats have very good odds in the Senate given the favorable terrain.
One thing I should note in the House projections is while the mode projection has leaned slightly more Republican after the last 6 months but quite normal (matching 2014); the variance is extraordinarily high — like a realistic possibility Republicans win 215 (and fail to win a majority) all the way to 260.
As for the economy; With GDP nowcast dropping off a cliff (-2.0%); I believe the US is already in a recession. Which helps Biden because the CPI rate may finally head down; the downside is a recession…. with limited stimulus possible.