Comment: Midterm guessing game is only getting weirder

By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion

Two political forecasting models delivered the perfect assessment of state of the 2022 midterm contests on Tuesday.

In the morning, the Decision Desk model for Senate elections tipped in favor of Republicans capturing a majority in that chamber. Later in the day, the FiveThirtyEight model tipped in the opposite direction for the first time, giving Democrats a tiny edge. Why is that perfect? Because economic performance metrics and political indicators are throwing up a mess of contradictory signals, making any analysis of what’s going to happen, or even what’s happening now, unusually difficult.

The basics haven’t changed since Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. From that point on, 2022 was likely to be a good year for Republicans simply because presidents’ parties usually lose congressional seats in midterm elections. Given the narrow majorities Democrats hold in both the Senate and House of Representatives, it seemed reasonable to expect Republicans to gain majorities in one or both chambers.

The other basic circumstance, however, was that the particular Senate seats up for election this November gave Democrats a fighting chance of holding on, or even gaining a seat or two, even in a good year for Republicans. All of that is still true, and it’s the context surrounding the uncertainty that remains; that is, the big questions are about just how well Republicans will do.

To answer, begin with what the numbers maven Nate Silver tweeted about recent shifts in the FiveThirtyEight forecast. He mentions the Supreme Court decision in June to overturn its landmark 1973 abortion rights precedent, and adds:

“Gas prices are down. Trump is back in the news because of the Jan. 6 hearings and for other reasons. Covid deaths remain toward the lower end since the pandemic began. Wacky GOP candidates are winning primaries.”

Here’s the problem: Just as each of those factors are breaking well for Democrats, Biden’s approval ratings continue their steady march south, reaching a new low of 37.5 percent last week before a mild recovery to 38 percent. Perhaps a few more weeks of relatively good news for Democrats will reverse the long decline, but perhaps not. And it’s hard to believe that a nation so down on its president will do anything other than severely punish his party in the midterms.

But it also seems that the range of plausible news environments that could emerge during the final weeks of the campaign is unusually wide.

Take economic news. By mid-October, it’s not hard to imagine gas prices falling further; a general sense that inflation has peaked; job creation continuing, giving Biden bragging rights to a low unemployment rate and two years of unusually good employment growth; and an overall economy that hasn’t tipped into recession and appears to be still going strong. It’s also not hard to imagine gas prices rising again, inflation defying predictions that it will reverse course; job losses; and economists declaring that a recession has begun. That’s an incredibly broad range of possibilities for 11 or 12 weeks from now.

There’s also the unknown course of the coronavirus. New cases seem to be pretty high (although no one seems to have a good estimate of exactly how high), but as Silver points out, the death rate has stayed relatively low during the current wave. Admissions to hospital intensive care units, too, have been moderate since spring. So even the current situation isn’t easy to assess. As for what comes next, once again it’s easy to imagine a wide range of how things will look by mid-October.

The political tea leaves, too, are harder to read than usual. By this point in most election cycles that end in landslides, the party that eventually won big had major advantages in resources; way fewer retirements, better candidate recruitment, better fundraising. There’s some of that during this cycle, but a lot less than one might have expected. Part of that is about those “wacky” Republican candidates, winning nominations at all levels, not just for Senate seats. Part of it may just be that during this era of campaign-finance abundance, even parties destined to lose could still have huge war chests.

There’s another significant oddity. Normally, policy moves toward the preferences of the president’s party, especially when it has majorities in both chambers of Congress, as Democrats have since 2021. Consequently, public opinion about policy tends to swing towards the positions of the out-party; indeed, that may be a big part of why out-parties do well in midterm elections.

But this time, not only have Democrats suffered defeats for many of their partisan initiatives in the Senate, but high-profile Supreme Court decisions have moved policy outcomes away from Democratic preferences, perhaps enough to affect public opinion and, subsequently, election results. The problem is that this circumstance is so unusual that expectations about the effects are just guesses. Which adds to the overall uncertainty of a peculiar midterm-election environment.

Barring something startling, Biden won’t be popular on Nov. 8, even if his approval ratings begin to reverse course soon. On the other hand, he appears to be leading former President Donald Trump in polling for the 2024 contest. Normally I’d say that test ballots matching a president against potential opponents in an election two years away provide no useful information, but, yeah, Trump isn’t exactly a normal potential nominee.

All this confusion comes in the context of what should be a good year for Republicans, which means that the probabilities range from a huge Republican landslide to a more-or-less break-even year (although I find it hard to believe that the Democrats really have the 16 percent chance of holding their House majority that the FiveThirtyEight House model suggests). But within that range? I’m just not going to be surprised.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.