2022 MIDTERM PREDICTIONS PROFESSIONAL

It used to be that Republicans could count on the comparatively comfortable high-propensity homeowners who voted in every election and knew their city councilors by name, while Democrats had to turn out all the least reliable voters.

2022 MIDTERM PREDICTIONS PROFESSIONAL

By trading away professional and middle-class suburban voters in exchange for lower-trust, less frequent exurban and rural voters–and by polarizing their own electorate against mail voting–Republicans have also given up their advantage among the most reliable voters. This may not be a short-term trend, either. But it’s remarkable nonetheless that liberals and progressives were excited and enthusiastic to turn out (and conservatives comparatively depressed) in a comparatively minor spring special election even when Democrats have a trifecta of control at the federal level. Obviously, one should only cautiously extrapolate too much from any non-partisan downballot race. But GOP woes continued most recently in Wisconsin: a school superintendent race that was nominally non-partisan but widely seen as a Democrat-Republican proxy battle saw the more liberal candidate trounce the conservative by a whopping 16 points. Much blame has fallen on Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him for depressing base Republicans from believing that their vote would matter, particularly in hard-fought Georgia where so many of those false accusations were made. GOP turnout was disappointing at best in Georgia, allowing Democrats to recapture the Senate. More recently, the Senate runoffs in Georgia and the most recent school superintendent race in Wisconsin should be a cause for grave concern for Republicans.

Trump’s base was not so eager to turn out for his defenders in Congress when he wasn’t there. But that attraction did not extend to Republican candidates in the 2018 midterms, where Democrats made gains largely in line with public polling. Trump undeniably had the power to turn out infrequent conservative voters in 2016 and especially in 2020, upending pollsters’ models and shocking most analysts. The price for those advantages was irrevocably alienating large segments of America’s growing electorate: young voters, suburbanites and (despite Trump’s modest gains) most non-whites.Ĭrucially, those changes may also cost his party heavily when Trump is not on the ballot. Most of the changes have been to the benefit of Republicans when Trump was on the ballot: Trump activated a new base of infrequent conservative voters, and accelerated a realignment that has maximized the geographic efficiency of the GOP coalition.

The Trump era has recalibrated much of American politics in ways that may have profound, long-term and unexpected consequences–including for the upcoming midterm elections. It’s easy to see why Republicans would be licking their chops as 2022 approaches, and why House Republican candidate recruitment is having a bonanza year.īut there are also reasons to believe that Republican optimism may be misplaced. The last two Democratic presidents have been hit especially hard in their first midterm, with Democrats suffering historic defeats in both 1994 under Clinton and 2010 under Obama. The president’s party usually loses ground in Congress in the succeeding midterm, due in part to the complacency of their own voters, the disempowered rage of their opponents, and inevitable elements of scandal or malaise in the new administration. Predictions markets are favoring both of those outcomes, and past history suggests they will be right. The reasoning is simple: conventional wisdom says that conservatives are likely to win the House and retake the Senate in under two years. Listen to most conservatives–and a great many Democrats–and they’ll say they’re looking forward to 2022.

2022 midterm predictions