I. What Did We Learn?
I will get to my predictions report card, but first I want to discuss a few things the midterms taught as about about where the voting public is.
1. Abortion Access is Very Popular.
Any serious analysis of these midterms has to begin with the simple fact that a clear and convincing majority of American voters want abortion to be generally legal. The Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade was an electoral disaster for the Republicans. It probably determined control of the senate and might have made the difference in at least two governor's races. (Wisconsin & Arizona.) The issues was on the ballot directly in at least five states and all five states voted in favor of keeping abortion legal.
Voters in Vermont voted to create a constitutional right to reproductive autonomy by more than three to one. California voted for something similar by two one and Michigan voted for one by 14 points. But even in Kentucky and Montana anti-abortion measures were defeated by five points.
The Republicans would be wise to let the Democrats codify Roe during the lame duck session. Murkowski and Collins could provide 2 votes if Manchin and Sinema are still hold outs. (Sinema, at least, would be wise to changer her mind on the that point anyway.)
But I don't think the Republicans are ready to cut ties to their hardcore base just yet.
2. State Political Parties Matter.
Democrats got amazing results in places like Michigan. They won close senate races in EVERY presidential battleground that had a contest this time. But they also got clobbered in Florida, lost some important house races in New York and (to a lesser extent) in California.
Ron DeSantis was expected to be re-elected governor of Florida. But no one had him winning by almost 20 points. There are three things that helped DeSantis here:
1. The FL Democratic Party is just not very good.
2. FL had a major hurricane in late summer and the response to it was pretty well organized and competent. Voters remember that.
3. Some independent and moderately conservative Republican voters probably wanted to build up DeSantis as an alternative to Donald Trump. (Trump v. DeSantis will be the subject of an upcoming post.)
Other governors with good ground games from both parties were rewarded with wins by larger than expected margins. This happened for Democrats in Wisconsin and Michigan and for Republicans in Georgia and New Hampshire. Worth noting that Wisconsin, Georgia and New Hampshire favored people from different parties to the senate and the governor's mansion. (Michigan did not have a senate race this year.)
One governor who did struggle a bit is Kathy Hochul in New York. It's worth noting that this is her first time running for Governor. The NYS Democratic party had a bad night. Hochul can expect to be governor for as long as she wants, but she will have to grow into the job a little bit and not let the narrative around crime dominate the discussion next time. But her bigger task is to reform the state Democratic party with an emphasis on getting the Cuomo holdouts to get on board and let go of what their boss did to himself. This will not be as easy as it should be. Control of the House of Representative just might depend on it.
It appears that the California Democratic party also underperformed in some House races. Two there and 2 in New York could have kept the House blue, but that was always a long shot.
3. Americans Like Democracy.
The most heart-warming story of election night is that election deniers lost in every secretary of state election across the country. Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada were all in real peril of nominating someone who was very unlikely to certify the presidential election if a Democrat carried their state. The 2024 election will be far from perfect but it seems likely that every state will certify whatever candidate gets the most votes. And that makes all the difference.
4. Biden's Favorability Ratings are Deceptive.
The biggest reason that most pundits expected a Red Wave is that Joe Biden's job approval numbers have been underwater ever since he made the decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.
The 538 average has him at 42 approval, 53 disapproval. That number should have meant disaster for Democrats. But they held their own.
I think some people disapprove of Joe Biden simply because he is old. They wish he was younger and snappier at press conferences. They suspect he has lost a step. But it is equally true that they like his policies. And I suspect in 2024 they will prefer him to the alternative, but more on that later.
II. What Does This Mean for 2024?
A. The Primaries.
The day after the election, two story lines sunk their hooks into the Zeitgeist: Biden was going to be the Democratic nominee (correct) and DeSantis was going to beat Trump for the GOP nomination. (unlikely).
1. Yes, Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee, assuming he is still alive and well. He is really fucking good at politics. The institutional party has figured this out. Look at the job he just did in keeping the Senate and nearly holding the house.
He end our longest war. He rallied the world to the cause of Ukraine. And our economy is better off than most of the world. Some of these things may change in time to hurt him in the general election, but they will not prevent him from sailing to the nomination.
2. Ron DeSantis is the biggest threat to Trump in the Republican primary but he is a clear underdog.
DeSantis can probably convince a whole bunch of rich people that he is Trumpism without Trump. They will write him large checks because most of those guys (and all of their wives) find Trump to be personally ridiculous. They also now know that he's not terribly popular with swing voters and has terrible political instincts. (The GOP might have won GA and PA senate seats if Trump didn't big foot on behalf of terrible candidates there.)
3. Beating Trump in the 2024 Primary is a Booby Prize. Does anyone think that Trump will graciously accept losing the nomination to DeSantis? If so, you have not been paying attention for the past seven years. He will either try to mount a desperate third party campaign or merely discourage his followers from supporting whoever "stole" the nomination from him.
If Ron DeSantis wants to be president, he should wait for 2028. He can serve out the rest of his term, nominally support Trump from the sidelines and then enter the presidential race to be held two months after he turns 50. He can be a rich ex-two term president before he is 60. So the real question is, is Ron DeSantis smart enough to know this or too anxious for his own good? He has been awfully quiet since the election That's probably best for him. He can let Trump suck up some oxygen for a few months and decide in the spring.
I suspect he is getting a lot of calls from people telling him to announce or else they will declare for some other candidate. That will have some influence. But most of the field are light weights. He's not going to lose to Nikki Haley or Rick Scott. The only thing he has to worry about is a large field of 10 or 12 candidates forming and allowing Trump to get the nomination by winning pluralities in the key states.
4. Keep an eye on Brian Kemp of Georgia. He beat Stacey Abrams by eight points and got more than 200,000 more votes than Herschel Walker did in the senate race. He has a much more credible story to tell as a post-Trump candidate than Ron DeSantis will. If I'm a Republican primary voter in 2024, I might just decide that any Republican can win Florida but Kemp is the best chance of picking up Georgia.
B. The General Election.
A lot can change in 100 weeks, but I expect the election will probably be won or lost in just four states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin. Of course it's possible that either party could have a good or terrible campaign and the election will be a modest blowout. But we are still mostly working with a hybrid of the 2012 and 2016 maps.
1. The Trump 2016 States.
a. Florida, Iowa and Ohio have been pretty consistently Republican since then. I think they are likely go Republican in a close 2024 election.
b. Pennsylvania and Michigan have been trending blue since then. I think they will probably go Democratic in a close 2024 election.
c. Wisconsin has been a swing state, including an incumbent Democratic governor and an incumbent Republican senator just a few weeks ago-both by close margins. It could go either way in a close 2024 election.
2. The Biden 2020 States.
Biden won back PA, MI & WI in 2020. He also hung on to NV and flipped Georgia and Arizona.
d. Georgia and Arizona are closely divided states. This year the Republican party squandered good opportunities in AZ-Gov, AZ-Ssen and GA-Sen by running terrible candidates. Brian Kemp trounced Stacy Adams in GA-Gov. And he will easily carry the state if he is the Republican nominee in 2024. But the state is moving leftward and will be competitive in 2024. (Kemp being on the ticket as vice-president would help the GOP too, but not by as much as him being at the top of the ticket.) Arizona will be competitive in 2024 no matter who is on the respective tickets.
e. Nevada.
Nevada elected a Republican governor this years but stayed blue in the senate. The Dems have won NV four straight times. But the margin in each of the last two presidential elections was 2.4%. This state will be competitive but because it only has six electoral votes, it is less likely to be decisive than the others.
3. Electoral College Math.
The picture at the top of this post is what I think the map will probably look like going into election night 2024. I give MI and PA to the Dems. FL, OH, IA & NC to the Republicans. The second congressional districts of Maine and Nebraska are both in play.
Our starting point is Democrats 259, Republicans 234. To win, the Democrats will need:
1. Georgia (16 electoral votes)
~or~
2. Arizona (11 EV).
~or~
3. Wisconsin (10 EV) plus Nevada (6 EV)
~or~
4. Wisconsin (10 EV) plus NV-2 and/or ME-2.
That's what a close election looks like. Joe Biden needs to string together 11 EV from the 45 EV available in competitive races. Here's my first crack of the probability of winning for various likely match-ups.
1. Biden beats Trump 80%.
2. Biden beats DeSantis 65%.
3. Biden beats Kemp 52%.
4. Harris beats Trump 55%.
5. DeSantis beats Harris 55%.
6. Kemp beats Harris 75%.
III. Predictions Report Card.
Allow me to be a little wonky and to review the predictions I made just before the midterms. Accountability and all-that.
First Prediction: The House Will Go Republican but By a Small Majority.
To be specific, I said the house would turn out 228R, 207D. (Republicans gain 14 seats.)
It looks like the final result will be 222R, 213D. That's a gain of eight instead of 14. But I think I got the gist of it.
I mostly avoided talking about specific house races, although this one will haunt me for a while:
"Lauren Boebert had a couple close polls but she too is a heavy favorite." Oh, how I wish I was wrong about that. But it looks like she will pull out this race by about 500 votes. And her opponent will be swimming in money next time around.
For the record, I do expect Kevin McCarthy to be the next Speaker. A few hardliners are talking him down but I don't think they can convince a majority to rally behind some other nutter.
GRADE: B+
Second Prediction: Dems Will Keep the Senate-Barely.
To be specific, I said the Senat would be 50D, 49R, with GA going to a runoff.
Here I did get specific on a few races.
a. Arizona: Dems win. Kelly 51, Masters47. (Nailed it!)
b. Georgia goes to a runoff. Let's call it Walker 49, Warnock 48. (Nearly nailed it. It wound up Warnock 49, Walker 48.)
c. Nevada: Cortez Masto 50, Laxalt 49, (Another virtual bullseye. The result was 49-48. I'll take it.)
d. Pennsylvania Fetterman 49.5, Oz 49.1. (Well I got the result right, but the margin was much larger than I expected, 51 to 46.)
e. Wisconsin Johnson (R) 50.4, Barnes 48.6. (Actual result 50.5 to 49.5. So Barnes did about a point better than I expected.)
f. Ohio. Vance 51.4, Ryan 48.6. (Actual result 53-47. So Vance did a couple points better than I expected but I wasn't too far off. And Ryan did well enough to drag a couple House seats over the line for the Democrats there. They were only supposed to get three or four seats. They got five.)
g. North Carolina. Budd 51, Beasley 47. (Actual result: Nailed it! Bullseye! Huzzah!)
h. New Hampshire. Hassan 51.1, Bolduc 47.5 (Actual result, 54 to 44. My biggest miss in margin. I should have known Bolduc was going to do poorly but I still think of NH as vaguely right wing. The Boston Exurbs may have finally fixed this.)
So I was Eight for Eight in Results. My Democratic margins were off by 0, -2, -4, -1, +3, 0, -6. That's an average bias of 1.25 points in favor of the GOP. (Can't accuse me of Homerism this year.)
I was also right in saying that IA, CO & WA would not be as close as some polls suggested.
GRADE: A.
Third Prediction: Governor Races: Treading Water, But Look at the Margin.
a. "The incumbent or incumbent party will win in all seven of the biggest states-CA, TX, FL, NY, IL, PA and OH. Those polls showing Hochul in a tight race a week or two ago will be fodder for jokes."
(Actual Result- 7 for 7 although the Hochul polls don't seem quite so funny now. She won by six and the Dems underperformed down ballot in NYS.)
b. Democrats gain Maryland and Massachusetts easily. They gain OK narrowly. They hold OR & WI very narrowly. (Actual Results: Four out of five ain't bad but I have to own up to missing OK big.)
c. Republicans gain Kansas and Nevada. They will also probably hold Arizona, which just might have dire consequences on a lot of fronts.
(Actual Results: Happy to say I was only one for three here. Holding on to Kansas was great news, and it makes up for the loss in OK. Nevada was close)
GRADE: B.
