As the November midterms approach, America seems to be heading for another nail-biter. Republicans have long banked on taking control of the House and perhaps the Senate, while Democrats point to recent successes by President Biden and in special elections as evidence that it’s too early for a political obituary.
According to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, though, the map favors Republicans on both the House and Senate side. At the same time, there are ever fewer fair fight districts. For analysis, WAMC's Ian Pickus spoke with Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Cook Political Report.
So, as we speak here in September, what do you see as the key dynamics heading into the November midterms?
Well, most midterm elections are a referendum on the party that's in charge, especially the party that has not just the White House, but the House and the Senate. It's usually an up or down vote from voters on how they feel that party has conducted itself for the first two years of the presidency and if that's the case, that's not really good news for Democrats, as it has not been good news for the party in charge for more than 80 years. Usually, the party in the White House loses seats in the midterm election, because voters come into that first midterm election and, you know, they tend to look unfavorably on that party in charge, or the people who are most unfavorable to the folks in the White House tend to turn out to vote more than those who liked the folks in the White House. This year, though, what we're seeing is a couple of issues, have, at least for this moment, helped to change the focus from one being a referendum on the party in charge, to one being a choice between the two parties. And of course, those two big issues are abortion and Donald Trump. The fact that we have for the first time in 50 years, there's no longer a constitutional right to abortion has put that issue front and center. And the fact that the former president continues to be in the news, both because of his own actions, and his rallies and his continued presence on the campaign trail and social media, decrying the 2020 election results, but also because of investigations into the former president in a whole bunch of places, in Congress with the January 6 Commission, the DOJ, after the events on January 6, and the and of course, most recently, the files that were found in in Mar a Lago.
President Biden, as he did in 2020, says fundamentally American democracy is on the ballot in these midterms. Is there any evidence that that argument does resonate with voters who are picking a member of Congress?
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. It was a message that was effective in 2020, in part because not only were voters feeling anxious about what was happening more broadly, with this issue, especially as President Trump had destroyed so many traditional norms and was rallying against things like, mail-in voting and arguing that before any votes were cast, that the election was going to be rigged in some way. But this year, I think the issue of the economy is still so incredibly important, even more so than it was in 2020, in part because inflation is one of those things that hits everybody, regardless of your age, or your income bracket or race. And that's to me, the bigger question is, can the Biden and Democrat rally the kinds of voters who showed up in 2018 and 2020 because they didn't want to see another four years of Trump or Trumpism. Is that enough to get them to come out in a midterm year to support Democrats in a time where things like inflation are really hurting their day-to-day livelihoods?
And to add to that dynamic, you folks at Cook say that the map favors Republicans in general before you even break down which dynamics might be salient for voters. Can you explain that?
Sure, just because of redistricting alone, this was obviously a redistricting year and Republicans probably netted something like three to four seats out of that process. Remember, Republicans only need to pick up four seats to take control of the House. So, there's a very, very narrow majority here that Democrats are defending. So, just redistricting alone, plus the number of Democrats who sit in districts that Donald Trump carried, that should be able to get Republicans to the number that they need to win a majority. However, we have also very much scaled back our predictions of just how big the number of seats Republicans will pick up, we expect to be. Earlier this summer and spring, we were projecting somewhere in the 20 to 30 seat range, now we see it more in the 10 to 20 seat range. The other thing that Democrats have going for them besides this change in the environment, is the fact that there just aren't that many Democrats who sit in really vulnerable districts. The reason you had big shifts in seats in the years like 2010, or 1994, when Democrats lost 50 seats, 64 seats, was that you had Democrats who were sitting in districts that were pretty deeply read, at least at the presidential level, there just aren't many of those left. So, there's a pretty there was a pretty narrow band of seats that Republicans were going to be competitive in the very first place. And now what we see is, thanks in part, to the sort of changing dynamics and environment that that band has shrunk and even a little further.
What do we know about the types of candidates who are emerging from party primaries of late to run in November?
Well, if we're looking at the Senate, and that's really where so much of the focus has been recently, and so much of the infighting among Republicans is on candidate quality on the Republican side, and remember, you know, the kinds of folks who show up and vote in a Republican primary are going to be different from the kinds of voters that many of these candidates need to win over in the general election, especially in the states where control of the Senate will be determined. So, the swing states like Arizona, and Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire. What we're seeing, again, on the Senate side is in every single case, the candidate who either was endorsed by Trump, or who took more of a Trumpian kind of agenda profile has been successful in every single one of these competitive primaries. Now, remember, these are states that I was just talking about the Georgia and Arizona, etc. These are states that Trump lost last time. So, the big risk is if you put up a candidate who looks and sounds and acts like Donald Trump, has been endorsed by Donald Trump, in a state he's already fallen behind him is already lost in the last presidential election. That's a pretty big risk. The Democratic candidates, of course, are trying to present themselves as the more moderate, more in the mainstream, especially on some of these issues, like abortion, or on issues that relate to the 2020 election.
Do those issues translate to wider races? I ask that question because we here at WAMC closely covered the special election in New York-19, the current New York-19, which Pat Ryan won. I don't think a campaign event went by where he didn't talk about Roe v. Wade. Is that a winning strategy for other Democrats in marginal districts?
Well, that is the million-dollar question and unfortunately, we're not going to know until November but we're already seeing in race after race after race and all kinds of districts, Democrats going up on television with similar ads to the ones we saw in New York 19. Hoping to galvanize support, not just from women but from the kinds of voters who showed up in 2018, in 2020 to vote. Not necessarily because they liked Democrats more or because they wanted to see, they were excited about Joe Biden, but because they were worried about what they saw as overreach by Republicans and specifically Donald Trump. But what Republicans argue is that the kinds of voters who are, you know, maybe not as engaged, they are going to vote, but they don't pay a whole lot of attention to politics. They aren't checking in on cable or Twitter every five minutes. They're living their lives, and they are going to be motivated much more by pocketbook issues, by the cost of groceries, the cost at the gas pump, and here, they argue is where the races will be decided. The issue of abortion while it may help to motivate some previously reticent Democratic voters, it's not enough, they argued to turn many of these races completely away from the topic of the economy.
How much weight do you give to special election outcomes? You know, Pat Ryan won his race, it was a close margin against Marc Molinaro, the Dutchess County Executive, but with a significantly smaller margin than Antonio Delgado had won in that district in 2020. Can we actually tell things from special elections? Or are they just so, you know, unusual and have their own dynamic that it's difficult to draw lessons from?
Right. As we like to say special elections are special for a reason, which is, they have a much lower turnout and so you have to be careful about taking too much from one individual race taken at one specific time. But the fact that it wasn't just the New York special election, but four other special elections, held either that same day, or previously, where Democrats outperformed their 2020 margins, or better yet outperformed Joe Biden's 2020 margins in every single one of those districts, including really, really red districts in places like Nebraska, and Minnesota. So, while Democrats didn't win there, it showed that their base is engaged and motivated and will turn out. So again, the big question is, well, what happens when the sort of more normal turnout happens in the Fall, where Democratic voters who are motivated, they'll show up and they'll continue to vote for the Democrat, but you're going to have a whole lot of other people show up to who, you know, maybe they just weren't paying much attention to a special election. Maybe they don't show up in any race that isn't in November, they don't vote in primaries, but they show up for the general election and that, again, that's the million-dollar question. If you're a Republican, you have to be feeling somewhat better about the fact that you are voters, the voters who are in so many of these districts, in these rural or small-town areas, who maybe didn't show up in the special, like we saw in New York, you had turnout was much higher in the more democratic areas of that district. That, you know, at the end of the day, your voters are motivated, they're motivated by what they see as you know, overreach by Democrats, by Biden and they're motivated by the economy. And, again, that is, that's the that's the hope for Republicans. But I think, you know, the way one Democratic strategist said it to me the other day is, what's really changed is that the environment went from being somewhat hopeless for Democrats back in April, May, to being competitive. And being competitive is, you know, these things are still going to be hard fought, you can you could lose by one or two points, you could win by one or two points. But the prospect of big blowout of this being an election where you're going to see all kinds of Democratic candidates get swept out by a big red wave that just seems less likely now than ever.
One last thing. We obviously here covered closely the tortured redistricting process in New York where the maps were drawn and thrown out and redrawn and challenged again. From a country perspective, is it bad to have only 82 swing seats out of 435 in a cycle?
Yeah, listen, when I first started covering politics, they were you no more than 100 districts that we would put into the so-called competitive category, or districts that had split their ticket voting for presidential candidate of one party and congressional candidate of the other party. There are very few of those district’s left. Gerrymandering is a big part of it, there's no doubt about it. But we also have to look to voters as well, fewer and fewer of them are splitting their tickets, in part because they see every single race, whether it's for Congress, or even at the county level, as sort of an existential kind of situation, that if the party that is not yours wins, your fear of what could happen, is really high, right? So that every one of these elections feels less like you're choosing between candidates and more like you're choosing between two very different views of what America should look like, and what America's values should be. So, that's part of it. The other part is that, you know, we have now and this has been going on for quite some time. But, you know, a lot of Americans are also choosing to live in places that also fit their ideological or cultural opinions and way of life. And so, for many Democratic voters, that are living in and around urban and inner suburban areas or college towns, they are over represented there and if they were better, you know, if they were spread out a little more efficiently, you could see more competitive braces. So, it's a little bit of both. We can't completely blame gerrymandering, though it's a big piece of it. There are so many other factors that go into this. And, you know, again, the death of split ticket voting, the rise and in polarization and partisanship, of cultural identity being now fused with your political identity. All of those things matter. And primaries matter, too. And I think, a primary process that really encourages candidates to take the most extreme position, that's the only way that they can win, has also made our Congress you know, less sort of diverse and I mean, diverse in a much more expansive way, where you have members not only from all kinds of congressional districts, but representing all kinds of opinions that's getting harder and harder.
