Saturday night, when Nevada had counted enough votes to declare Catherine Cortez Masto re-elected, we learned that the Democrats would hold onto the Senate. They may even gain a seat, if Raphael Warnock can win the December 6 run-off in Georgia.
As of this morning, almost a week after election day, Republicans are leading in the House, but still have not nailed down a majority. 212 races have been called for Republican candidates, 204 for Democrats. 218 are needed for a majority. NBC is estimating that when all the counting is complete, the GOP will have a slim 219-216 majority. (So assuming Lauren Boebert hangs on to her current slim lead, Speaker McCarthy will lose any vote in which he can’t get Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Green’s support.)
In the states, Florida went very red, but both Michigan and Minnesota very blue. Democrats flipped governorships in Massachusetts and Maryland, Republicans in Nevada. Arizona is still undecided.
There’s probably a lot to learn from these results that I haven’t deciphered yet. But here are a few conclusions that seem obvious.
Voters in swing states don’t believe the Big Lie about 2020, and want to continue having democratic elections. My biggest fear about the midterms was that they would herald the end of democratic elections in the United States. But that didn’t happen. Yesterday, the NYT’s home page included the headline “Every election denier who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls“.
During the 2020 election, it was secretaries of state — both Democrats and Republicans — who stood up to efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results. State election officials certified vote tallies over Republican objections, protected election workers from aggressive partisan poll watchers and, in at least one case, refused a personal entreaty from the president.
The next spring, several candidates pushing the false narrative that the 2020 election had been stolen announced their intention to run to be the top election officials in critical states.
Republican candidates for secretary of state in places like Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico claimed the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump, without basing that belief on the slightest bit of evidence. In Pennsylvania the secretary of state is appointed by the governor, and gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano was running as a rabid election denier (in addition to being a Christian nationalist and a barely-in-the-closet antisemite). In Georgia, incumbent Republican Brad Raffensperger had beaten back an election-denier challenge in the primary.
Victories by election-denying candidates would have opened the possibility that in 2024, MAGA secretaries of state might refuse to recognize a Democrat’s victory. If they needed no evidence beyond Trump’s say-so to declare fraud in 2020, why wouldn’t they do the same in 2024?
Fortunately, all those candidates lost. Some of the races were disturbingly close — though Mastriano got soundly thrashed — but they lost. Only Indiana chose an election-denying secretary of state. That could be a problem locally, but it’s unlikely to affect a national election, since a Democratic presidential candidate could only carry Indiana in a national landslide. (Barack Obama barely did in 2008.)
Sweeping abortion bans are unpopular. A lot of Americans have conflicted views about abortion, so the wording of a proposal matters. But if you put a broad abortion ban in front of the voters, they’ll reject it even in some pretty conservative states.
We saw that already in August, when Kansas (which Trump carried 56%-42% in 2020) held a referendum that would have given the legislature the power to ban abortion. (The state’s supreme court had found a Roe-like right to abortion in the state’s constitution. This proposed amendment would have removed that right.) The legislature scheduled the vote to coincide with a primary election that was likely to draw more Republicans than Democrats, but it didn’t matter: Turnout was huge and the proposal failed 59%-41%.
Tuesday, proposals to protect reproductive rights were on the ballot in Vermont, California, and Michigan, while voters had a chance to restrict abortion rights in Kentucky and Montana. The pro-choice side won all five.
The abortion issue is also getting credit for the Democrats avoiding the typical midterm-election-collapse of a party in power. It’s hard to say precisely why voters decide to show up and lean one way or another, but the turnout of young voters was high and heavily Democratic, and Democrats won 68%-31% among single women. Chances are that abortion had something to do with that.
[BTW, it has been hilarious to watch conservative pundits struggle not to grasp that single women don’t want the Republic of Gilead controlling their bodies and making major life decisions for them. Fox News’ Jesse Watters noted that married women tend to vote Republican, so he had a solution: “We need these ladies to get married. And it’s time to fall in love and just settle down. Guys, go put a ring on it.” One America News’ Addison Smith went even further down the patriarchal rabbit hole: “Secular progressivism has turned people into masochists. … 68% of single women voted for people who vowed to let them legally murder their children and continue on living miserable single lives without purpose, without responsibility or meaning.” Attention single women: After a quick search, I wasn’t able to determine whether Addison Smith is married, so he might still be available to bring purpose and meaning to your otherwise pointless life.]
Trump is hurting the Republican Party. He wasn’t losing any races himself this time, but he screwed up the GOP in two other ways. First, the unqualified and too extreme candidates he pushed to victory in the Republican primaries went on to lose winnable elections.
New Hampshire is a good example. Republican Governor Chris Sununu, who kept his distance from Trump, cruised to a 57%-42% victory. But Trump-endorsed election-denying Don Bolduc lost to incumbent Senator Maggie Hassan 54%-44%. Those two results are from the same voters on the same day, so about 1 NH voter in 8 must have voted a Sununu/Hassan split ticket.
Similarly in Georgia, Brian Kemp (who defeated a Trumpist challenger in the GOP primary after certifying Biden’s 2020 victory) won the governorship 53%-46%, while Trump’s handpicked senate candidate Herschel Walker faces a run-off after trailing 49%-48% Tuesday.
The second way Trump undercut the GOP was to divert attention towards himself, his petty grievances, and his backward-looking complaints about 2020, and away from issues like inflation that were working for Republicans. He doesn’t seem to realize that if the 2020 election were run again, he would get his butt kicked again. Most unpopular presidents see their images improve in hindsight, but not Trump. 54% of the public still views him unfavorably.
Conservative power brokers like Rupert Murdoch and mainstream Republican politicians like Paul Ryan see what’s going on and would like to free the party from Trump’s destructive influence, but I’m betting against them. There’s a lot of Trump-blaming in conservative media right now, but that just means it’s January 7 again. Before long, the would-be rebels will be crawling to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, as they did only weeks after January 6. The NYT’s Jamelle Bouie agrees with me:
The idea that Republican elites could simply swap Trump for another candidate without incurring any serious damage rests on two assumptions: First, that Trump’s supporters are more committed to the Republican Party than they are to him, and second, that Trump himself will give up the fight if he isn’t able to win the party’s nomination.
I think these assumptions show a fundamental misunderstanding of the world Republican elites brought into being when they finally bent the knee to Trump in the summer and fall of 2016.
But Jonathan Chait disagrees. It’s different this time, he says, because Ron DeSantis provides a real alternative.
Either way, it’s going to be ugly. Trump has already shown that he will try to burn down a democracy that won’t re-elect him. No one should be surprised if he burns down a party that won’t re-nominate him.
Gerrymandering matters. For years, voters in Michigan have voted for Democratic candidates for the legislature, only to see Republicans keep control. But in 2018, Michigan voters reestablished democracy in their state by overwhelmingly passing Proposal 2, which created a nonpartisan redistricting commission. Tuesday was the first election held under the new nonpartisan maps, and Democrats won majorities in both houses for the first time in almost 40 years.
Compare Michigan to Wisconsin, which is still heavily gerrymandered in Republicans’ favor. Democratic Governor Tony Evers was re-elected with 51% of the vote, and Republican Senator Ron Johnson was re-elected with just over 50%, suggesting an evenly divided electorate. But Democrats narrowly avoided a veto-proof Republican supermajority in both houses of the legislature, which would have made Governor Evers virtually powerless.
Both parties gerrymander when they can, because it’s political suicide to let the other side play by different rules. (Though no Democratic-controlled state mirrors Michigan, with an entrenched Democratic legislature thwarting a Republican majority in the electorate.) But Democrats want to end this game: An anti-gerrymandering provision was part of the For the People Act, which has passed the House in 2019, 2020, and 2021, only to be blocked by Republican filibusters in the Senate. A scaled-down proposal, the Freedom to Vote Act, was put together by Senators Manchin and Klobuchar. But it also was blocked by a filibuster.
The stuff Biden did is way more popular than Biden himself. The pundits predicting a red wave were fooled by Biden’s low approval rating: 41.5% in the latest 538 average, barely higher than Trump’s 39.9%. Normally, a president with numbers like that sees his party get clobbered in the midterm elections.
But Friday, Chris Hayes made an interesting comparison to 2010, when there really was a red wave. In 2010, the Democratic Congress had just passed ObamaCare, and it was very unpopular. (Since it hadn’t taken effect yet, Republicans could claim anything they wanted about it, and they did.) The way Republicans ran against Democratic incumbents that year was simply to point to that vote.
Nothing in this cycle played that same role of connecting Biden’s unpopularity to specific votes in Congress. If Democrats got criticized for voting for the Inflation Reduction Act, they could say, “Yes, I lowered your prescription drug costs, invested in renewable energy, and created jobs for American workers.” The bipartisan infrastructure bill? “Yes, I voted to rebuild America’s roads and bridges, bring broadband internet to rural areas, and replace lead water pipes that have been poisoning our children.” American Rescue Plan? “I voted to get Americans vaccinated, send money to people who couldn’t work during the pandemic, and give loans to businesses so they wouldn’t have to fire people.”
And so on.
So sure, Americans are frustrated with inflation, and Republicans were able to fan people’s fears about rising crime and a few other issues. But how could challengers pin those problems on the incumbent senators or representatives they were trying to replace? And while 2010 Republicans could promise to repeal ObamaCare, what exactly were 2022 Republicans proposing to do about inflation, crime, or anything else?
Polls are more-or-less accurate if you don’t expect too much out of them. I’ve seen a lot of the-polls-were-wrong-again punditry, but I don’t think it’s deserved.
Take the Georgia Senate race, for example. 538’s final pre-election analysis said that Herschel Walker had a 63% chance of winning, with a predicted margin of 1.2%. But now that the votes have been counted, Warnock holds a .9% lead. (Warnock is still short of 50%, so a run-off is happening December 6.)
So Nate Silver’s prediction was off by 2.1%. You can’t really expect pre-election polling to be more accurate than that.
At best, a poll is a snapshot of where the electorate was a day or two before the election, accurate to within some margin of error. Averaging a bunch of polls (as 538 does) should shrink that margin, but not to zero. And as for people who decide at the last minute to vote (or not vote), or who change their minds in the booth — there’s really no accounting for them.
In short, the right response to the Georgia outcome is not “538 was wrong to say Walker would get more votes, because Warnock did”, but “538 said the race was going to be close and it was.”
That’s why the model said “63% chance”. Just for reference, NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo is currently hitting 65% of his free throws (well below the league average of around 78%). That’s better than a coin flip, but when he steps to the line, Bucks fans are holding their breath rather than counting the points.
Is a more accurate system possible? Well, maybe, but you won’t like it. I suspect that somewhere in the basement of Meta headquarters, somebody has developed an algorithm that predicts how each of Facebook’s tens of millions of users will vote. (For most of us, it wouldn’t be that hard.) Facebook users may not be absolutely typical of the electorate, but the differences are probably not difficult to model and compensate for after you review the data from a few election cycles. And on election day, if the app on your phone is tracking your location, it knows whether you went to the polls.
Facebook’s huge sample base would eliminate nearly all the statistical error. Since it’s a spying algorithm rather than a request for information, you couldn’t just refuse to answer, eliminating another source of polling error. And in order to lie to the algorithm, you’d have to change your whole online behavior, which hardly anybody is going to do. The algorithm’s estimates would always be up to the minute, and in the end it would know a lot about who voted.
I’ll bet that system could be pretty accurate.
Expert speculation, on the other hand, isn’t worth the attention it gets. All that talk of a “red wave” didn’t come from the polls. 538’s generic-ballot polling average finished with a Republican advantage of 1.2%, which would lead a person to expect a Republican Congress, but not a sweeping rejection of Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats. (Compare that margin to true wave elections: In 2010, Republican House candidates got 6.8% more votes than Democratic candidates. In 2018, Democrats did 8.6% better than Republicans.)
The red-wave speculation came from pundits, both too-optimistic Republicans and too-pessimistic Democrats.
The right lesson to draw is that we spend way too much time listening to people speculate about stuff they don’t really know. Psychologically, it’s understandable: We get anxious leading up to an election or some other big event, so we want to believe that someone can tell us what’s going to happen. Even hearing that things are going to go badly can be more comforting than facing life’s real uncertainty.
It’s also understandable from the networks’ point of view: Actual reporting is hard and can be expensive, but gathering a panel of talking heads in the studio is easy and cheap. (A lot of them have a book to sell, a candidate to push, or some other reason they want to be on your show. So you may not have to pay them at all.) By air time, an investigative reporter may or may not have cracked whatever story she/he/they has been working on, but a pundit can be guaranteed to have a speculation ready on demand.
Unfortunately, those speculations aren’t worth much. If listening to them makes you feel better, fine. But don’t kid yourself that you’re receiving valuable information. Life really is terrifyingly uncertain.
So in the end, I wind up agreeing with the conclusion of the editorial I linked to about the polls being wrong again, if you change “study polls” to “try to prognosticate”:
Voters would do well to study the issues more than they [try to prognosticate], and media would do well to provide valuable issue-oriented reporting instead of reporting on a horse race that can change minute to minute.
[BTW: If political predictions were intended to be accurate, networks would keep detailed statistics on which pundits were right or wrong, and there would be bidding wars over the ones with the best records. That doesn’t happen, does it? The red-wave predictors aren’t going to lose their jobs, and somebody who got it right isn’t going to suddenly vault to the top of the profession the way a market-beating hedge-fund manager would.]
The Weekly Sift 