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American politics has been a stalemate between the two parties for nearly 30 years. Every time it looks as though one party gains a lasting upper hand — Democrats after 2008 and 2020, Republicans after 1994 and 2010 — its legislative overreach sends it back to parity.
Tuesday’s midterm elections could be a continuation of that political trench warfare. Inflation, crime, progressive attempts at overreach and a general sense that President Biden is not up to the job will likely deliver a surprisingly large victory to Republicans. I predict the GOP will win the national popular vote by about 5.5 points, likely gaining between 31 and 40 House seats in the process. I also expect it will retake control of the Senate, gaining two to four seats.
But the GOP’s victory could also represent a chance for the United States to finally end its political quagmire. Republicans will gain support in almost every voter demographic, but they will make especially large inroads among Hispanics and middle-income suburbanites. These voters are not yet Republicans, but they increasingly recognize they are not modern Democrats.
If the GOP plays its cards right and avoids base-pleasing partisan overreach, it could finally break our country’s stalemate. The White working class’s abandonment of Democrats in the 2010 midterms foreshadowed its movement into the GOP as Donald Trump broke Republican orthodoxy. A similar unorthodox move in 2024 could turn the tables on the Democrats, creating the foundation for a long-term Republican resurgence.
Senate forecast
46
54
50
republican
Democratic
10
25
36 Dems.
not up
for election
29 Reps.
not up
for election
Seats up
for election
Republicans will flip Nevada and
Georgia. New Hampshire and
Arizona are also potential flips.
Republican-held
Democratic-held
Flipped to Republican
Not up for election
NH
WA
VT
ME
MT
ND
MN
OR
ID
SD
NY
WI
MI
WY
PA
IA
NE
OH
NV
IL
IN
UT
CO
WV
CA
KS
MO
KY
NC
TN
OK
AZ
NM
SC
AR
MA
GA
MS
AL
RI
TX
LA
CT
FL
NJ
AK
DE
MD
HI
VA
House forecast
246
189
218 to win
republican
Democratic
2020 results
Democratic
222
Republican
213
Source: Author’s calculations
HENRY OLSEN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Senate forecast
46
54
50
republican
Democratic
10
25
36 Dems. not up
for election
29 Reps. not up
for election
Seats up for election
Republicans will flip Nevada and Georgia.
Arizona and New Hampshire are also
potential flips.
Republican-held
Democratic-held
Flipped to Republican
Not up for election
NH
WA
VT
ME
MT
ND
MN
OR
ID
SD
NY
WI
MI
WY
PA
IA
NE
OH
NV
IL
IN
UT
CO
WV
CA
KS
MO
KY
MA
NC
TN
OK
AZ
RI
NM
SC
AR
GA
MS
AL
CT
TX
LA
NJ
FL
AK
DE
MD
HI
VA
House forecast
246
189
218 to win
republican
Democratic
2020 results
Democratic
222
Republican
213
Source: Author’s calculations
HENRY OLSEN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Senate forecast
46
54
50
republican
Democratic
10
25
36 Dems. not up
for election
29 Reps. not up
for election
Seats up for election
Republicans will flip Nevada and Georgia. Arizona and
New Hampshire are also potential flips.
Democratic-held
Republican-held
Flips to Republican
Not up for election
N.H.
Wash.
Vt.
Maine
Mont.
N.D.
Minn.
Ore.
Idaho
N.Y.
Wis.
S.D.
Mich.
Wyo.
Pa.
Iowa
Mass.
Neb.
Nev.
Ohio
R.I.
Ind.
Ill.
Utah
Conn.
Colo.
W.Va.
Calif.
Va.
N.J.
Kan.
Mo.
Ky.
Del.
N.C.
Md.
Tenn.
Ariz.
Okla.
Ark.
S.C.
N.M.
Ala.
Ga.
Miss.
Tex.
La.
Fla.
Alaska
Hawaii
House forecast
246
189
218 to win
republican
Democratic
2020 results
Democratic
222
Republican
213
Source: Author’s calculations
HENRY OLSEN/THE WASHINGTON POST
My predictions are more optimistic for Republicans than those of most other prognosticators. The Cook Political Report, for example, predicts the GOP will win between 12 and 25 House seats, and FiveThirtyEight’s model forecasts the Senate as a dead heat. Those estimates and others underestimate the effect of a political truism: Midterms are always a referendum on the president.
Biden is a historically unpopular president. Compared with every other president since World War II, Biden’s job approval rating at this point in his tenure is slightly ahead of the approval of only two presidents: Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Since Republicans lost 26 House seats in Reagan’s first midterm and 40 in Trump’s, that does not bode well for Democrats.
Presidential job approval has long been a sturdy predictor of the share of the vote that president’s party will receive in House elections. In the past four midterms, the president’s party received on average only one point above the president’s job approval rating in the national exit poll. With Biden polling so low, that dooms Democrats to a terrible performance.
Another reliable predictor is the generic congressional ballot, which measures which party voters plan to support for House seats without mentioning specific candidates. One prominent political science model shows that losing the generic House ballot by six points results in, on average, a loss of 26 seats.
These two indicators show Democrats are in a deep hole. RealClearPolitics’s average puts Biden’s job approval at 42.3 percent. Even if we round that up to 43 and assume Democrats will exceed that number by two points, as presidential parties did in the 2006 and 2014 midterms, Democrats would take only 45 percent of the national House vote. That would be an awful outcome.
The Republican margin of victory will depend in part on the share of the vote taken by third-party candidates. Between 2006 and 2016, that averaged about 3.5 percent and dropped slightly under 2 percent during the Trump years. Even if that number were to rise back to 3 percent, that would mean Republicans receive 52 percent of the vote — a seven-point lead.
To err on the side of caution, I’m projecting a slightly lower margin of 5.5 percent. These are extremely partisan times, which could suppress third-party voting and raise the amount by which a party can exceed the president’s approval rating. If Democrats respond to their party’s pleas and turn out to vote and more independents back Democrats despite misgivings about Biden, the party could win as much as 47 percent. So I’m taking a mildly optimistic view for Democrats and projecting they receive 46 percent of the vote. I’m also projecting that third-party voting rises to 2.5 percent.
But even that would give Republicans a larger seat gain than many political science models predict. A 5.5-point margin for Republicans would be a 10-point shift from 2020’s outcome, when Biden won by 4.5 points. That means every seat Biden won by 10 points or less is theoretically up for grabs. History also tells us that some seats above that level will fall, either because an incumbent is caught napping or a strong opposition party candidate puts the seat in play.
How many seats are vulnerable to flip? Fourteen are Democratic-held seats that Trump won, while Republicans hold 12 seats that Biden won. Democrats hold an additional 24 seats that Biden won by 10 points or less, yielding 50 seats below the line. The parties are seriously contesting an additional six seats that Biden won by 10 or more. That’s 56 House seats seriously in play.
Midterm history suggests Republicans will win the overwhelming share of these districts. During the 2010 GOP wave and the 2018 Democratic tsunami, the party not in control of the White House captured between 70 and 80 percent of similar vulnerable seats. Applying that to 2022 means Democrats should lose between 35 and 40 of the 50 seats at the mercy of the swing against Democrats. Subtract the 12 seats Republicans already control and add in the six others they are seriously contesting, and that means Democrats could lose up to 34 seats.
And remember: This is based on assumptions that are generous to Democrats. Unless this year is unlike every other prior midterm cycle, it is much likelier that Republicans win by more than my prediction. If, for example, Republicans win by seven points, that would mean every seat Biden won by 11.5 points or less is vulnerable.
That is exactly what happened in the 2021 elections in Virginia and New Jersey. Biden’s job approval then was 43 percent, close to his current standing. Democrats in those states lost every state legislative seat that Biden carried by 11.75 points or less in 2020, and a couple more above that mark. Repeating that dismal performance this year would cost the Democrats nearly 50 House seats.
Remember also that Republicans tend to overperform their final showing on the generic congressional ballot average. They outperformed their final 2014 polling average, for example, by 3.3 points.
These trends will also drag down the Democrats’ Senate nominees, despite Republicans’ slew of weak candidates. The vote shares of Senate candidates have typically tracked the approval rating of their party’s president. With the notable exceptions of Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), no Senate candidate since 2014 has run more than five points ahead of the job approval rating of their party’s president.
The GOP’s weak crop of candidates this year has boosted Democrats’ chances. But Biden carried the most closely contested states — Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania — by 2.4 points at most in 2020. It’s inconceivable that Biden’s approval ratings in these states has since improved. It’s likely they mirror or are worse than his national average.
Because Democratic Senate candidates are unlikely to achieve more than five points above Biden’s approval ratings, that means they face a ceiling of roughly 48 percent of the vote — and again, that’s being generous. That might be enough to eke out a win in Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania, since there are third-party candidates on the ballot there. But if Biden is running even slightly below his national approval average in those states, Democrats there are almost certain to lose.
That’s what state-level polls are showing: A New Hampshire poll, for example, shows Biden with a 43 percent favorability rating and Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan with 47 percent, a four-point difference. A Pennsylvania poll gives Biden a 42.6 favorability rating in the state and puts Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman at 46.6 percent — again, a four-point gap. And a Nevada poll gives Biden 40 percent job approval, whereas Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto earns 45 percent — a five-point gap.
All these data point in the same direction: a big GOP win in both chambers.
Considering the data, it’s relatively easy to predict most Senate seats. Republican incumbents will easily win in Wisconsin and Florida, as will GOP nominees J.D. Vance and Ted Budd in Ohio and North Carolina, respectively. All of these candidates lead their polls. Trump also carried three of these states in 2020 (and lost Wisconsin by less than a point).
It’s also easy to predict that Republican Adam Laxalt will comfortably win Nevada. Biden is consistently less popular there than he is nationwide. The state’s Republican Senate nominees won an average of 45 percent in 2016 and 2018, and Laxalt will likely improve upon that by a few points in this much more pro-GOP environment. That’s more than enough for him to win.
I also think Republican Mehmet Oz will narrowly carry Pennsylvania. His lack of ties to the state and his past as a television doctor have damaged his campaign, and his Muslim faith might prevent some Christian Republicans from supporting him. But Fetterman’s halting debate performance has likely given independents reason to pause. In this pro-GOP year, that should mean a late break for Oz.
Herschel Walker will also win Georgia for the GOP, although the election might need to go to a runoff for him to prevail. His personal weaknesses are clearly holding him back; Republican Gov. Brian Kemp regularly outpolls him by a significant margin. But Democrat Raphael G. Warnock won the traditionally red state’s Senate seat by only two points in a 2021 runoff that saw lower GOP voter turnout because of Trump’s false claim that Georgia’s election was rigged. Republican turnout will be sky-high this year, and Warnock can run only so far ahead of Biden.
Arizona and New Hampshire will be the closest races. Both feature Trump-endorsed candidates who have struggled. Arizona’s Republican nominee, Blake Masters, continues to trail Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. He also runs far behind the more telegenic GOP gubernatorial nominee, Kari Lake. But the only third-party candidate on the ballot, Libertarian Marc Victor, has now dropped out and endorsed Masters. That plus the late break toward Republicans will likely propel Masters to an extremely close win, perhaps by as little as a point.
Don Bolduc will also narrowly capture New Hampshire’s Senate seat. The Granite State is heavily White, with a large number of college-educated voters, and that demographic has been least susceptible to the GOP lure in polls. But Biden won the state by only a shade more than seven points in 2020, and all the momentum has been for Bolduc in recent weeks. The fact that the House Majority PAC, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s primary campaign arm, just dropped $1 million to protect New Hampshire Rep. Ann Kuster in the more Democratic of the state’s two districts suggests they see a sharply deteriorating environment. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s PAC also just added more than $1 million to protect Hassan, even though the PAC aligned with Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell pulled out of the state. This is a tough race to call, but I’m going with momentum and Bolduc.
Republican challenges in Colorado and Washington will likely fall just short. Tiffany Smiley (Washington) and Joe O’Dea (Colorado) have run excellent, well-funded races, but their states went for Biden by 19 and 13 points, respectively. That’s likely too large a hill to climb for both, despite their efforts.
The House elections will break sharply toward the GOP, but the effects will differ significantly depending upon important demographics in each seat. The districts in play fall into five discrete categories:
As mentioned above, Democrats hold 14 House seats that Trump carried in 2020. Democrats should hold only a couple of these after election night as Trump voters and independents topple the incumbents. The two Democrats likeliest to hold on are Alaska’s Mary Peltola, who will benefit from the state’s ranked-choice voting system, and Ohio’s Marcy Kaptur, whose Republican foe has been cut off from national party support. Democrats might also hold on to one or two of the following: Iowa’s 3rd District, Maine’s 2nd and Pennsylvania’s 8th. Overall, I expect Republicans to gain 12 of these seats.
Even though this is a bad year for Democrats, they should be able to pick up a few Republican seats. For example, they are favored to win Illinois’s gerrymandered 13th District and Michigan’s 3rd, where Democrats elevated Trump-endorsed John Gibbs over moderate incumbent Peter Meijer in the GOP primary. Democrats are also seriously challenging Republican Reps. David G. Valadao (Calif.) and Steve Chabot (Ohio). And in Texas’s 34th District, Republican Rep. Mayra Flores is under threat from Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who decided to run for Flores’s seat after redistricting. Overall, Democrats should win two to three seats from this list.
Here’s where it starts to get interesting. Latinos have historically been a Democratic bedrock, but they have been slipping away from the party in the Trump era. They do not share the Democratic base’s cultural progressivism, as Democratic analysts Ruy Teixeira and David Shor have extensively documented, and Latinos are the hardest hit by the massive immigration that the Biden administration has permitted. Republicans are running many Latino candidates in seats on the U.S.-Mexico border and are running strong candidates in other Latino-heavy seats in California and in the Las Vegas and Denver metro areas. Republicans should pick up at least seven seats in this group.
Democrats have been losing these seats for years, and they will be clobbered in many of the remaining seats they hold. Republican polling firm Echelon Insights recently published its estimates of the turnout and voting demographics for each House district. It found that Democrats hold 12 seats that Biden carried where working-class Whites are both at least 45 percent of Echelon’s estimated turnout and at least 10 percent larger than the next-largest demographic. Republicans should win the lion’s share of these seats. My best guess is that they will win 10 of the 12.
These will likely be the Democratic Party’s only relative bright spot on election night. College-educated White voters remain more resistant to the GOP, and polls show they are less likely to switch parties than Latinos or non-college-educated White voters. Despite this, Republicans are seriously challenging many seats where White college-educated voters are either a plurality of voters or the second-largest demographic. Democrats hold 11 seats in this category that are being seriously contested and hold a few more that are quickly moving onto prognosticators’ target lists, such as Illinois’s 6th District and Connecticut’s 2nd. If my projections are accurate, Democrats will likely hold a large share of these, but they could lose almost all of them if the GOP’s margin of victory surges to seven points or more. My best estimate is that the GOP will capture five of these seats.
The GOP will gain a few other seats in multiethnic districts that don’t fall neatly into any of these categories, as well as a couple of new seats created by reapportionment that Trump carried in 2020. Altogether, I predict the GOP will gain about 33 seats.
Overall, these losses would portend a Democratic Party shrinking back into elite, urban redoubts. It is increasingly becoming the party of Black voters as well as White and Asian voters who are doing well into today’s globalized, culturally progressive world. Those people hold economic and institutional power, but they are a minority of American voters.
In other words, today’s Democratic Party increasingly looks like the Depression-era Republican Party, which consisted of powerful elites who lost touch with the working-class majority. The 1932 election was one of the most important in U.S. history. After four years of worsening economic conditions, America’s beleaguered working and middle classes were ready for a change. Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover warned furiously that the path urged by Franklin D. Roosevelt would end America’s system of ordered liberty. But tired and despairing Americans ignored Hoover and took the plunge anyway.
Republicans could make 2024 a similarly historic election — if they are willing to break old norms. With no signs that inflation is abating and the likelihood of a recession rising rapidly, Americans of all backgrounds seem ready to cast aside their prior loyalties and back a party that offers them a new New Deal.
Such a party would be built on the understanding that the Latinos and middle-class White suburbanites who gave Republicans their midterm victory are not interested in the GOP’s old-time religion. There’s a reason these people backed Hillary Clinton and Biden in the Trump era. They will not vote for a party that prioritizes budget control over entitlement spending. Nor will they vote for a party that emphasizes free trade over jobs for Americans, or evangelical Christianity as a default American moral code.
FDR faced a similar challenge. Democrats had long opposed an active federal government, but the demands of the times and preferences of the voters he needed ran against that. Thus, FDR embraced a moderate progressivism that backed unprecedented federal government intervention in the economy. He was careful not to go too far, and to his shame, he failed to abandon the racist Jim Crow system that tied the South to his party. But his new Democratic Party swept all before it, becoming the dominant party for nearly 50 years.
For Republicans to manage the same feat, they must resist the temptation to renominate Trump. The fact is that Trump remains unpopular nationwide and is especially disliked by the voters the GOP needs for victory. Renominating Trump would make him, not the party’s new agenda or Democratic failure, the main issue in 2024. The GOP should ignore his siren song and pick a new leader to herald its new message.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis could be that new leader. He will handily win reelection this year in what is normally a closely fought state. He will attract new Latino and suburban White voters, exactly the constituencies the party needs to appeal to nationwide. And he will be able to point to his actions as governor as a template for broad national action.
A DeSantis-led party that promulgates a new populist-conservative synthesis could do more than just win the White House in 2024. Done right, it could sow the seeds for a realignment that finally gives Republicans what they have dreamed of for decades: a secure governing majority.
The map is set for such a historic move. In 2024, nine Democratic senators will be up for reelection in states that either Trump carried in 2020 or that Republican candidates will likely win this year. If Republicans manage a five-point victory on Tuesday and then manage to do it again in 2024, the GOP could attain a filibuster-proof majority for the first time in the party’s history.
Republicans thus sit on the precipice of a historic moment. Time and again, Americans have voted for someone who pledged to unite them but ended up dividing them, creating a crisis of national confidence. Republicans this midterm cycle could change that pattern and finally begin to end our political stalemate.
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