2022 Midterm Elections: Which Way Will They Break?
By Martin Burns
The conventional wisdom is that the party in power always loses seats in midterm elections. On average since 1946, the party in the White House has lost 23 seats in Congress. With redistricting added to the mix, Democratic losses in the House seem almost certain. The Cook Political Report, one of the best nonpartisan political barometers around, believes that the GOP will pick up four seats from redistricting alone.
As the Democrats have a slim margin in the House, the House flipping to the GOP seems a reasonable proposition. However, as recent history will testify, nothing is certain in politics. President George H.W. Bush survived his midterm with only modest losses: eight House seats and one Senate race. In 1998, the Democrats managed to pick up five seats in the House and broke even in the Senate.
At lot of what happens in 2022 will be determined by what political scientists call “differential turnout” that is to say your average member of the party that’s not in the White House is more likely to turn out than the average member of the president’s party. The 2020 midterms could come down to a question of enthusiasm and motivation. There is some evidence that Democrats might be more motivated than their GOP counterparts. Morning Consult reported back in April that:
“Democrats are beginning the budding 2022 election cycle with an enthusiasm advantage over Republicans as President Joe Biden and his party work to buck the traditional midterm curse of losing ground in Congress. At this early stage, Democratic voters, at 81 percent, are 9 percentage points more likely than Republican voters, at 72 percent, to say they’re at least “somewhat” enthusiastic about voting in the 2022 midterms, according to a new Morning Consult/Politico poll.”
One thing that may break in the Democrats is that voters with a college degree tend to be trending Democratic and these voters are reliable midterm voters.
Voters in midterm elections historically skew older. That could work to the advantage of the Republicans. As the University of Virginia Center for Politics points out:
“One big difference between midterm and presidential electorates is that the midterm electorate skews older. On average, about 54% of the electorate was aged 45 or older in the most recent presidential elections, while an average of 64% of the midterm voters — nearly two-thirds — were 45 or older. Overall, 53% of the adult population is 45 or older, so older voters are significantly overrepresented in midterm elections. That’s a generic advantage for Republicans in midterms although, again, the overall political environment next year may be more important than the age of the participants.”
Another factor working against the Democrats is that midterm elections tend to be less diverse than presidential elections. Once again, we have a caveat to add here. The 2018 midterms were the most diverse in history. According to the Census Bureau in 2018:
· Voter turnout increased among non-Hispanic Asians by 13 percentage points, a 49 percent increase.
· Among Hispanics, voter turnout increased by 13 percentage points, a 50 percent increase in Hispanic voter turnout.
· Non-Hispanic black voter turnout increased by 11 percentage points.
Will this trend towards more diverse midterm elections continue or perhaps even escalate in 2022? Right now, this question is still open for debate.
Then, of course, there is the question of former President Trump. Will he successfully motivate Republicans to turn out and vote for Republican candidates? On the other hand, will his absence from the political stage keep Democrats from turning out? Some GOP commenters argue that: “Republicans have to cut through that miasma of obnoxious, Trump-serving rhetoric if they want to win in 2022. A platform of policy ideas — articulate positions on policy questions such as health care and crime and federal spending of the sort that propelled them to victory in 1994 and 2010 — would be just the ticket.”
One thing that the Democrats and the Republicans do agree on is that a crucial battle for the 2022 midterms will be the suburbs. In 2020, former Vice President Biden won 54% of the suburban vote. Democrats feel they hold the advantage in the suburbs. Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) was recently quoted in the New York Times “The post-Trump Republican brand is bad politics in the suburbs,” he said in an interview. “They have embraced dangerous conspiracy theories, flat-out white supremacists and a level of harshness and ugliness that is not appealing to suburban voters.”
The stakes for both parties in the 2022 midterm elections are huge. If the GOP takes back even one house of Congress the Biden presidency will be crippled and we will have stalemate for two years as the country attempts to move past COVID-19.
