Growing evidence against a Republican wave
Concrete signs of GOP strength not so easy to find now
At the beginning of this year’s midterm campaign, analysts and political operatives had every reason to expect a strong Republican showing this November. President Joe Biden’s approval rating was in the low 40s, and the president’s party has a long history of struggling in midterm elections.
But as the start of the general election campaign nears, it’s becoming increasingly hard to find any concrete signs of Republican strength.
Tuesday’s strong Democratic showing in a special congressional election in New York’s 19th District is only the latest example. On paper, this classic battleground district in the Hudson Valley and Catskills is exactly where the Republicans would be expected to flip a seat in a so-called wave election. But Democrat Pat Ryan prevailed over a strong Republican nominee, Marc Molinaro, by about 2 percentage points, outperforming Biden’s narrow win in the district two years ago.
The result adds to a growing pile of evidence suggesting that Democrats have rebounded in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in late June to overturn Roe v. Wade. No matter the indicator, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage.
One special election would be easy to dismiss. But it’s not alone.
There have been five special congressional elections since the court’s Dobbs ruling overturned Roe, and Democrats have outperformed Biden’s 2020 showing in four of them. In the fifth district, Alaska’s
at-large House special, the ranked choice voting count is not complete, but they appear poised to outperform him there as well.
On average, Republicans carried the four completed districts by 3.7 percentage points, compared with Donald Trump’s 7.7-point edge in the same districts two years ago. The results aren’t merely worse than expected for Republicans; they’re straightforwardly poor. Republicans need to fare better than Trump, who lost the national vote by 4.5 points in 2020, to retake the House — let alone contemplate winning the Senate.
Special congressional elections are idiosyncratic low-turnout affairs; these races had a relatively higher share of white voters in mostly rural districts that were not representative of the country. The voters who turn out in primary or special elections aren’t
representative either, with highly educated and wellinformed voters usually making up an outsize share of the vote. Those two factors probably converged to the advantage of Democrats in all four completed districts. The results showed a superior turnout in highly educated liberal enclaves or college towns, like Ithaca in New York’s 23rd District, while turnout elsewhere in the districts lagged behind.
But strength among high-turnout white voters can get a party pretty far in low-turnout midterm elections. Perhaps in part for that reason, there is a decent historical relationship between special election results and midterm outcomes. And before Dobbs, Republicans were outrunning Trump in special congressional elections. Since then, the pattern has reversed.
While there’s plenty
of room for debate about exactly what the special election results mean for November, there’s no dispute that the results are positive for Democrats.
Another encouraging sign for Democrats is the party’s steady gains on the generic congressional ballot, a poll question asking voters whether they prefer Democrats or Republicans for Congress.
Overall, Democrats now have the slightest advantage on this measure, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. That represents about a 3-point swing toward the Democrats since mid-June, when Republicans led before the Dobbs ruling.
A tight generic ballot represents a real improvement for Democrats. If the polls are right — a big “if ” after the last few cycles — it suggests a fairly competitive district-by-district battle for control of the House, rather
than the expected GOP rout.
Realistically, Republicans would remain clearly favored — the House map is still modestly tilted in their favor, and Democrats would have to win an outsize share of the competitive races to hold the chamber. But the notion that Democrats can even dream about House control is a remarkable turn from earlier in the cycle, when the House was all but penciled into the Republican column.
Still, it’s a little early to look at polls pitting Democratic candidates against Republican ones in specific races. Many candidates remain unknown, and the general election campaign is just getting underway.
But the early state and district polls do look relatively promising for Democrats. That’s especially true in the Senate, where a simple polling average might even show Democrats poised to make gains.
The House polls are consistent with the generic ballot results. On average, Democrats are running about 4.7 points behind Biden’s performance across 40 nonpartisan polls taken since the Dobbs decision. That would be consistent with a close national vote.
After the last few cycles of polling misfires, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of state surveys — especially in the relatively white working-class battleground states where the polls seem to have consistently underestimated Republicans.
But here again, the longawaited “red wave” is nowhere to be found.
There’s still one measure that’s positive for Republicans: Biden’s approval rating.
It’s stuck in the low 40s, according to FiveThirtyEight, although it seems to have risen along with Democratic fortunes over the last few months.
It’s hard to think of any precedent for the president’s party to fare even half decently with such an unpopular president. The closest recent analogue might be President Jimmy Carter in 1978. He held control of Congress despite an approval rating around 50%. (His approval rating was similar to Biden’s in August, but it increased after the Camp David Accords in September.)
Perhaps someone could construe the Democratic hold in the House in the 1950 midterms as somewhat analogous, although Democrats lost 28 seats and saw a net 7-point shift toward Republicans.
Ultimately, it’s possible that Biden’s approval rating will drag down the Democrats. But for now, his approval rating stands apart as the only hard measurement that argues for a decisive Republican victory this fall.