That’s the grade of political hurricane that pollster Dave Wasserman of Cook’s Political Report says will strike the Democrats in the midterm elections in this interview by Benjamin Hart in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer:
I think Nate Silver, my friend and fellow prognosticator, asked the right question over the summer when he wondered whether this would be an asterisk election. Today, we’re somewhere between an asterisk year, in which there’s a minimal wave, and a classic midterm election, where Republicans do quite well. I think this is probably a Category 2 or 3 hurricane headed Democrats’ way, just not a Category 4 or 5.
Biden’s approval ratings have sucked all year. That hasn’t changed much. Democrats have come home a bit to him since Dobbs, gas prices have come down a little bit, and he’s been able to pass an agenda during an election year, which is impressive — but that’s only gotten him to between 42 and 43 percent. Historically, that’s still a very rough place to be. The silver lining for congressional Democrats is that their approvals are still outpacing Biden’s. And the main reason is that the Democratic incumbents had the luxury of stockpiling cash all year while Republicans were locked in bitter primaries. That allowed Democrats a head start to communicate what benevolent bipartisan people they were, and to run as moderates, whereas the Republicans were stuck running to the right.
Basically, he’s predicting that Democrats will lose the House and have a good chance of capturing the Senate as well. That would only require the net gain of one additional senator.
Matt Yglesias has a similar prediction:
My big picture expectation is that polls and poll-based forecasts are overestimating Democrats’ odds, so a result that is actually pretty good by the normal standards of midterms is going to play as a crushing disappointment.
According to 538, Republicans have a 72 percent chance of taking the House, while Democrats have a 64 percent chance of holding the Senate. Those forecasts seem D-skewed to me. I will be genuinely shocked if Democrats hold the House. The only precedents for that happening in remotely recent history are the 9/11 election and the 1962 midterms held right after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m not saying it’s impossible — we do have those two examples — but it’s difficult to understand why that would happen this fall. By contrast, Republicans picking up a net of one Senate seat would be a completely banal outcome. The fact that polling is giving it only a 1-in-3 chance of happening is, I believe, a consequence of the polling being skewed.
In response to that I will leap fearlessly into the fray to predict some things that won’t happen.
The Democrats won’t extend their majority in the House. Given gas prices, food prices, and President Biden’s lackluster popularity, doing that is not credible.
The Republicans won’t end up with veto-proof majorities in both houses. That would take a net gain of more than 70 seats in the House and 10 in the Senate. Biden isn’t that unpopular and the economic conditions aren’t that dire.
So what does that mean? I think that depends entirely on how angry the incoming Republicans are in the House.
Most of these predictions are little more than guesses. Polling was the only semi-objective analytical metric we had, which is unreliable now. So I wouldn’t trust predictions very deeply, given the uncertainty. But if I had to pick something, my biases and analysis would put me in general agreement with Yglesias.
Polling was the only semi-objective analytical metric we had, which is unreliable now.
I am surprised there wasn’t a bigger notice when the New York Times wrote in some of the polls they are doing; the response rate to a phone call is now 0.4%. They have to call 250 people to get a single response.
To get 1000 responses, they need to make 250,000 calls.
Its very unlikely you can get a representative random sampling of the population if response rates are that low.
I think the GOP takes both houses. Dont expect large margins but who knows.
In PA Mastriano is a true whackadoodle. Oz might win. Fetterman’s stroke has hurt him.
Odd note. We have been inundated with campaign stuff from both sides. In the GOP stuff there are ads with Oz promoting his miracle memory cures. I would have thought that would be seen as a negative and they would want to minimize that but apparently the miracle cures are seen positively by most Republicans.
Steve
I don’t know what the kerfuffle is about his having had a stroke. Being inarticulate and not understanding what’s spoken to him unless it’s displayed on a teleprompter? In the Senate he’ll fit right in.
I don’t think that is a new phenomenon, at least not if my own experience here in Chicago is any gauge.
I used to do in-person canvassing here in Chicago. One Republican and one Democrat (me) would go from house to house and verify the number of voters who lived there. We used the poll list which included party affiliation as a reference. I don’t think they do that any more.
I noticed a distinct difference in temperament between Democratic households and Republicans. A lot of the time the Republicans wouldn’t even answer the bell. That’s something that could easily cause Democrats to be over-sampled.