Are Democrats destined to lose the 2022 midterms?
Winning 50 Senate seats was one of the very few election results that would result in Democrats taking control of the Senate but not killing the filibuster. This extremely narrow margin has caused the speculation around the 2022 midterms to arrive even earlier than it usually does - the election is still 21 months away, after all. But the takes have already started in earnest.
Before we get into any seat by seat details, let’s take a 50,000 foot view. The most common observation about 2022 is that the president’s party traditionally does poorly in midterms, so Republicans are going to take control of Congress. And it’s true that the president’s party does usually lose seats in midterm elections. But it’s worth looking into exactly why that is and whether those conditions are in place for 2022.
Why does the president’s party lose seats in midterms?
Conceptually, midterms are an opportunity for voters to render a verdict on how the president and their party have governed in the first two years of their term. As opposed to a presidential election where there’s a stark choice, the option in a midterm is to keep the president’s party in power or provide a check on that power by making the government more divided.
In practice, this results in many middle-of-the-road voters supporting the party out of power, confident that it can’t actually take control without the presidency. And partisan, low-turnout voters on both sides tend to vote in midterms when they’re angry, but stay home if they’re content.
A good way to see this in concrete terms is to examine how the president’s approval correlates with midterms outcomes. This 2014 paper shows a moderate correlation between the president’s approval and midterm results going back to 1946. An example average scenario given the data would be the president having a 51% approval rating and losing 25 seats.
In fact, the only time a president’s party has gained seats in a midterm since 1946 was when the president’s approval was over 63%. There’s also been a number of other instances in which the president’s party lost only a handful of seats when presidential approval was in the high 50s or low 60s. Now this isn’t a huge sample size (17 elections in the paper, plus 2014 and 2018), but it’s fairly clear that presidents around 50% approval or below consistently lose seats.
Another problem that the party in power often faces is an over-extended political landscape, having won seats due to the president’s coattails that they would not hold during a more even election. The Democrats winning 59 Senate seats in 2008 is an example - a regression to the mean after such success was inevitable. A similar situation occurred after Reagan’s Senate coattails in 1980, which led to Democrats picking up 8 Senate seats (defeating seven freshmen) in 1986 despite high presidential popularity and few changes in the House.
The degree to which a party is over-extended can affect how many seats it might lose. The 63 seat loss Democrats faced in 2010 was larger than one would expect given Obama’s 45% approval rating. But Democrats had 257 seats in 2009, having picked up 52 in the past two elections, and as a result the losses in 2010 had the potential to be much greater.
What does this mean for 2022 specifically?
The obvious good news is that the Democratic Party is not over-extended after 2020. Due to Republican over-performance compared to Trump, the Democrats are arguably the least overextended they’ve been in decades. There are only three Democratic Senators in states that Trump won and none are up in 2022. There are only seven Democratic House members in seats that Trump won (potentially one or two others pending final data). As opposed to midterms of the past thirty years, there aren’t scores of Democratic incumbents looking over their shoulder at a heavily Republican electorate.
If Democrats aren’t over-extended and if they can manage to go into 2022 with Biden’s approval rating high, they would be in as good a position as any to avoid the common midterms losses. Now there’s no easy answer for how to keep presidential approval high (if there was, the last three presidents would have found it). But we know that presidential approval is highly correlated to various economic indicators (particularly unemployment) as well as large national security events such as wars or an attack like 9/11. While the latter is difficult to predict, a booming economy in 2022 would give Democrats a real opportunity to avoid the historical midterm losses that are so common.
The reality is that the extremely narrow margins Democrats face make 2022 a challenge under almost any circumstances. Democrats could limit their losses to five House seats and just one Senate seat, which would be a really good outcome in historical context. It would still lose them both chambers. Democrats don’t need to do good in 2022, they need to do great.
This is all a very early and theoretical look at 2022. As we get closer, there will be plenty of specific details about the midterms we can examine. On the Senate side some of those are already clear, such as which seats are up, who’s retiring, etc. Due to redistricting and House retirements occurring much later, that chamber is extremely hard to examine this early. But there’ll be plenty more to cover for both chambers in the months ahead.
COVID Outlook Follow-up
Since I wrote about the COVID outlook for the next 90 days last week, a couple of updates have occurred. The much awaited Johnson and Johnson data has come out and it’s very good, if not as good as Pfizer’s and Moderna’s grand slams.
You can read all about the vaccine here but the important thing to know is that it is just as effective at preventing hospitalization and death from COVID as the other two vaccines (100% effective for all three). Yes, a small percentage of people who get the J&J vaccine could later come down with cold/flu like symptoms due to COVID-19. But they will be safe from the more serious symptoms that have ravaged so many.
“Maybe you are 15 or 20 percent more likely to feel symptoms, to get a cough, to run a fever,” Goldstein says, “Which is a huge bummer, for sure. But you still are completely protected from ending up in the hospital or dying.”
The other good news is that the Biden administration, which just upped the weekly vaccine shipments to 10 million last week, is upping them again to 10.5 million going forward. Those weekly shipments will continue to slowly increase throughout the next few months as manufacturing capacity increases and the J&J vaccine joins the fight.