2022 Election Analysis: The National Picture
Don’t Assume You Know
The biggest question to be answered for the direction of the country in the short term is just how little damage can Republicans do IF they gain control of Congress?
The big question with regard to the long term is whether or not the Gen Z vote (18-30) will continue to show up. The kids are alright, and kept back the Red tide in many contests.
No matter what the final numbers are in House and Senate races, I can safely say there won’t be big legislative accomplishments in the next two years. There is even a long-shot possibility that Republicans won’t get a majority in either chamber.
Republicans need to win two races (Nevada, Arizona, or Georgia) to control the Senate, and that possibility is fading.
Here’s the shocking news, based on an analysis of uncounted votes, as I write this:
The Senate race in Georgia could actually give Democrats a Senate Majority.
Arizona and Nevada are both trending toward Democrat victory. Uncounted votes in Nevada are primarily from Dem-leaning urban areas, and Sen. Mark Kelly’s 5 point lead in Arizona (76% counted) should be enough to withstand a late surge for libertarian tech bro acolyte Blake Masters...
Although the Georgia GOP shortened the time frame for run-off elections since 2020, hoping to dull Democratic turn-out-the-vote efforts, their general election marquee candidate (Gov. Brian Kemp) isn’t going to be the draw for right-leaning voters. The 200,000 or so Kemp voters who opted out of voting in the Senate race tells me there are some Republicans who care about candidate quality enough to stay home and not vote for Herschel Walker.
Democratic nationwide activists are already sending postcards to their likely Peach State voters, hoping to boost turnout for Sen. Raphael Warnock.
What this could mean is Democrats maintaining control of committees and the possibility of WVa’s Joe Manchin not being such a dick.
The generally accepted analysis of the results for House of Representatives contests is that Republicans will end up with a single digit majority. Although Speaker wannabe Kevin McCarthy has out-organized and/or co-opted his rivals, the nutters in the House –aka the Freedom Caucus– have some demands.
Mainly this is about committee assignments, with Jewish Space Laser lady Marjorie Taylor-Green and other fame seekers getting highly visible positions so they can prove once and for all that Hunter Biden and the Chinese Communists are behind whatever flavor of conspiracy QAnon is favoring this month.
Hold that thought!
There is a path, albeit a very narrow one, to a world where Democrats win 220 seats in the House. The net effect of such a scenario would be that Republicans wouldn’t be able to crank up the drama with show-trials and shutting down the government as their leverage to counter President Biden’s expected slew of executive orders. (As soon as I hit the publish button on this post, this possibility for Dems will evaporate.)
Much has been (and should be!) written about the failure of the mainstream media regarding election predictions. Democrats were all but drawn and quartered with headlines and stories predicting a Red Tsunami.
And then there were the shameless hussies at Fox News:
The biggest failure by a political faction award should be given the former White House advisor Stephen Miller, whose savagely racist anti-immigrant ad campaign fell flat.
Via Greg Sargent at the Washington Post:
House Republicans poured enormous sums into ads depicting the migrant “invasion” in the vilest of terms. Republicans have long enjoyed a presumption of a major advantage on this issue, but aside from Trump’s 2016 victory, it keeps failing to deliver. The border was central in the 2018 and 2020 elections, and Republicans lost both (though with House pickups in the latter).
This doesn’t mean racism didn’t have a role to play in this election. It just means that those images of “illegals” no longer trigger an emotional response. One need look no further than Georgia, where only 29% of all white voters thought their incumbent Senator should be replaced by a blithering idiot.
The “common sense” arguments being made about voters losing interest in the abortion question and being unconcerned about the treat to democracy underlying the MAGA movement showed the danger in letting simpletons dictate what issues we should care about.
In states where the future of a woman’s right to choose rested on the outcome of legislative elections, voters explained to exit pollsters that they were fully capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. Virginia, Minnesota, New Mexico, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were all states where the themes advocated by Democrats swayed the election results.
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic Daily:
If you want to know how bad a night it was for Republicans, check Trump’s temperature, which apparently zoomed last night past “boiling,” through “molten lead,” and is now somewhere near “the surface of the sun.” And rightly so: Some in the GOP are holding Trump responsible for their party’s losses and are now trying to push him out of the way. Even Trump’s conservative hometown paper, the New York Post, twisted the knife this morning with a cover photo of Governor Ron DeSantis and a one word caption: “DeFuture.”
The best news in all of this is that the pundits and advisers who told Democrats to talk only about the economy and inflation and avoid any boring yakety-yak about democracy were wrong. As my colleague McKay Coppins tweeted after looking at an AP VoteCast poll, “it’s striking how many voters were motivated by concern for American democracy.” I have been arguing for months that voters are in fact capable of thinking about more than one thing at a time, but I admit that I also was starting to wonder whether fears about GOP authoritarianism could break through the noise.
It just kills me that “inflation” is an issue worthy of partisan rancor. If Biden is to be held accountable for a world-wide phenomenon, Republicans should tell voters what they would do differently. They can’t, mainly because there is no miracle cure.
One item worth noting, since there were those who decried the Dem party’s sorta sub-rosa meddling in Republican primaries: every single candidate who won their primary with help from Democratic meddling has lost in the general election. If these far right characters want to run on how crazy they are, the voters ought to know about it.
I’ll close with Judd Legum’s argument against horse-race election reporting. It’s not that polls shouldn’t be mentioned, it’s that elections (should) have more meaning than a sporting contest.
In 2016, the same publications that predicted a Republican "red wave" on Tuesday predicted that Hillary Clinton would easily win the presidency. More and more political coverage treats elections like a horse race, even though this approach has repeatedly proven useless.
Prediction-based coverage comes at a high cost because it crowds out the coverage that voters actually need. To make an informed decision, voters need to know the practical impact of voting for each candidate.
In the case of the 2022 midterms, if Republicans regain control of the House, they will use the threat of a global economic collapse to try to force benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare. We don't have to speculate about this. We know it is true because Republican leaders have said it publicly. But, as Popular Information previously reported, major publications almost completely ignored the potential impact of the election on Social Security and Medicare.
The political media has substituted polling analysis, which is something only people managing campaigns really need, with substantive analysis of the positions of the candidates, something that voters need.
I’ll be posting more election analysis as fast as I can digest all the data, meaning that there will be extra stories into the weekend.
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Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com