Analysis: How Joe Biden and the Democrats Challenged the Midterm Story

US President Joe Biden and the Democrats landed a midterm election to enter the record books: They retained a majority of the Senate – with 50 seats and the potential to win one more – and it looks likely to keep any loss net interest in the Clearinghouse in single digits.

The midterms should be the time for the opposition party to shine, especially when there is once-in-a-generation inflation and the vast majority of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

However, Biden and the Democrats are poised to have one of the four best midterms results for the party that has controlled the White House since the last century.

But in the end, what happened? It is quite clear that voters punished Republican candidates they considered too extremist – on issues such as abortion and (or) for being too attached to former President Donald Trump.

Still, the election results were extremely unusual. I consulted the record books: since 1922, there have been three cases of the president’s party winning (or not losing) seats in the Senate and losing less than 10 seats in the House in the president’s first term.

All of them – 1934, 1962 and 2002 – are considered monumental achievements for the president’s party and major exceptions to the rule, which suggests that the party that controls the White House often loses seats in the midterms.

The Democrats’ good performance this year also occurred at the state level. We already know from projected runs that this will be the first time since 1934 that the president’s party has had a net gain of governors in a president’s first term.

Since 1934, the only term in which a president has won governors was in 1986. However, Ronald Reagan’s Republican party had massive losses in the Senate that year.

The shocking thing about 2022 (assuming current trends hold) is that Biden is pretty unpopular. Her approval rating was 44% in exit polls.

There is no poll from 1934, although considering that Franklin Roosevelt won two landslide victories at either end of that midterm, he was probably quite popular. Polls from 1962 and 2002 show the presidents at the time, John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, respectively, with approval ratings above 60%.

The Republican Candidate Problem

The Democrats’ ability to defy expectations this year starts simply with who Republicans nominate for state elections. Analysts, myself included, noted that Republicans appeared to have a sympathy problem with the candidate. Pre-election polls showed that Republicans in every major race had negative support ratings. In virtually every major race, the Democrats were more liked than their opponents.

Many of these Republicans were endorsed by Trump and said – at least at one point – that they believed he had won the 2020 election. This, of course, is false as Biden won the election.

Exit polls confirm Republicans’ “candidate problem” in midterms. In every Senate election (except Georgia) that Inside Elections classified the outcome as either incognito or just leaning toward one party before the election, more voters said the Republican candidate’s views were too extreme than they said the same about the Republican candidate. democrat.

We also see this in the elections for governors. Republicans have nominated 2020 election deniers to run for governor of several Democratic or swing states. None of them are projected as a winner and only Arizona Republican Kari Lake has any chance of winning.

Perhaps the lack of success of these candidates shouldn’t come as a surprise, as about 60% of voters — in both pre-election polls and exit polls — believe Biden was legitimately elected.

Two presidents in the running

Of course, bad candidates for Senate or governors weren’t the only reason Republicans had a disappointing midterm election.

At the national level, there are two prominent presidents: the current one, Biden, and the previous one, Trump. Both men boasted rejection rates, according to exit polls.

The fact that you have a current president and a former president who are both unpopular is not uncommon. Both Obama and George W. Bush were unpopular before the 2010 midterms.

What is unusual is that of the 18% who did not view either Biden or Trump favorably in exit polls, 40% of them voted Democrat. The backlash against one president this year may have been overruled by the backlash against the other.

In 2010, a CNN poll in September showed that Democrats won just 21% of those who did not view either Bush or Obama favorably.

The reason for the difference between 2010 and 2022 is pretty obvious. I had pointed out before the election that Trump was getting more Google search traffic than Biden (ie, the former president was on voters’ minds). Bush wasn’t getting nearly as much search traffic as Obama in 2010, however.

‘Abortion First’ Voters

Arguably, what really made this election unique was the issue of abortion. Despite high inflation, only 31% of voters in the exit poll said rising prices were the most important issue for their vote. An almost identical percentage, 27%, said abortion, and those voters overwhelmingly chose Democratic candidates for Congress.

This matches the dynamic we saw in the House special elections following the overthrow of Roe v Wade in June. Democrats began to do considerably better than they had before the Supreme Court decision.

And despite Republicans regaining positions in House national polls in the final weeks of the campaign, the party never returned to where they were during the spring.

The fact that abortion-first voters overwhelmingly chose Democrats makes sense, given that 60% of respondents said the procedure should be legal in all or most cases.

When you put it all together, Biden and the Democrats seem to have done something that others have tried — and failed — in previous midterms: they turned the election into a two-party choice rather than the usual referendum on the president’s party.