One week to go
The four factors and how they are playing out for the 2022 midterm prediction
I have been following elections since 1980, blogged them for a decade, and worked as a consultant in elections for over a decade at the highest level— smack dab in the capital trough. So that’s my experience. I find myself in the States (I am usually an ex-pat nowadays) this summer and Fall, so I am fascinated by the elections once again.
Now, it’s the midterm, so I will only write about the election from that perspective. It’s not about what worked in the past, a GE or special, but what works for this type of midterm election.
The last election I blew calling was in 2016. I had Clinton winning easily, but I missed the populism, which was the undercurrent. From a democratic party perspective, most of them still don’t get it. At least I caught up with Joe Costello, who told me about it in 2016. I didn’t believe him, but by the end of the midterms in 2018, I got it too.
The decentralized internet vs. the centralized media, populist vs. the elite, rural/burb vs. urban, parent vs. single, based vs. woke— this is all within the demographic of the cultural divide.
We are in one of the great turnings in the US election cycle. I would maintain it’s the 7th or 8th, and I won’t go into the historical details now (too much history). Suffice it to say, this happens when two parties seemingly go to war, the elections go back and forth a few cycles, then one party annihilates the other. Until the next time.
That’s where we are, and I’d say the period of realignment is from 2016 to its completion of ascendency in 2024, and it will leave the Republicans holding all the cards in a complete majority.
For this election, I maintain there are four essential factors to look at:
The generic
The betting market
Whether an incumbent Democrat is polling below 50%
The 2021 elections
That’s it. My perspective has always been, ‘how do I win this next election’ and since I got paid for being right, it mattered. I don’t care about being on the team or taking one for the narrative. That’s just wasting time. I want to get to the point where I believe in a model and see it through. If it’s wrong, I will figure out how and adjust for it the next time.
Dems in this cycle are making the same mistake I made in 2016. Still. It’s clear that horse race polling isn’t something to rely upon, but they still do it. I don’t. To show you what matters, I will take the above list backward.
2021 Election
I don’t have the receipts cause Twitter has me politically silenced for the moment (I am sure it is on Archive.org fwiw), but I nailed the ‘21 elections because I knew what the Democrat’s problem was. Turnout. And I don’t think that model has changed since a year ago. It’s gotten worse. Black turnout is going to falter for Dems; it’s also going to split off in many States to Republicans. Same with Asians, Latinos, and other minorities such as Muslims and Hindus. Across the board, minorities will vote Democrat less and Republican more in ‘22.
This, I maintain, is a cultural divide. One especially impacting parents. Every poll I’ve looked at shows Generation X phenomenally Republican. Being in this generation, I feel exactly what has moved these voters because it moved me, too, away from Democrats. There is no doubt that Millenials, specifically urban multicultural ones, are the backbone of the Democratic party, and they will turn out and vote.
At the same time, we can’t ignore the Uniparty trend in the Democrats. All those neocon Bush and Cheney Republicans from the 90s to 00s and through Romney’s ‘12 campaign have become welcome among Democrats (I know, the opposite of myself, although I have voted Libertarian since ‘12). The Democrats have become THE establishment party, and if you want to dance to that tune, you must keep the lockstep beat. But IMO, this is the worst part of the Republican party that the Democrats took in. They gained so little in terms of reach but way too much in terms of neocon and DC nonsense speech.
Now, the best way to overcome this whole divide by either party is through having a politician on the other side of the perception (all politics is perception). Hence, had Fetterman not been vaccine injured, he most likely would have won in PA. And the best way for the Republicans to win in Virginia was to have some elite guy who could talk to the populist movement and ticked-off parents. That’s Youngkin. I predicted Youngkin would win by 2-3% and the Republicans would take the House 52-48, which is what happened. Now, I live in VA, have worked elections here, and had an insider view that gave me an advantage. New Jersey was a bit different.
However, when I drilled into the polls, I saw that Murphy had no voter excitement and Ciattarelli had a lot. And it was there consistently (this is the one part of a horserace poll that is valuable IMO if it’s a solid trend, as you can’t do this off of one sample). So I looked at this and said Murphy would win 51-49, nailing it again. Other than a special election and an issue election over the summer, I would maintain that trend was baked hard a year ago.
There’s something too to draw upon how those two Gov races played out. McAuliffe spent over ~$70M, and Younkin did too. Only a fraction of that was spent on the NJ Gov race, as Murphy was expected to coast, and the money flowed to Virginia. So there are going to be some outliers in ‘22. Specifically:
Dems who are in CDs that have a buffer (over 5-10%) can manage a victory by out-spending an underfunded Republican.
Dems who spend equally as Republicans don’t gain; but they might mitigate their loss.
So there are the caveats. I don’t have the time to follow up on every contest and the campaign expenditure. So in a national environment, I am bound to miss it sometimes. Someone might say, “That’s 2021 and a lot has changed.” It’s a valid outlook, but not one I have found pans out.
The reason why ‘21 (and the off-cycle election in comparison to the midterm in general) is important is that voters always keep score. And they keep scores like a semester grade, and they are the teacher handing out the grades. From the past election till the next. Things from the beginning don't change or disappear, and at some point in the cycle, the trend stops curving. IMO it’s been fixed since last fall. Those summertime polls are just nonsense— as anyone who has been in the business knows it’s the best time to tune out (not for candidates).
Whether an incumbent Democrat is polling below 50%
Murphy was at 50.5 and gained .5 of the remainder 5% all the rest went to the Republicans, that’s 90% which the Democrats better pray is an outlier. I don’t believe it is so I will take it at face value. For the ‘22 midterms, I am pegging the number at 48% for incumbent Democrats who will lose the election based on polling below that number (assuming the undecideds are less than 10%). The logic of this should be pretty straightforward.
There’s another factor at work here too. Nate Cohn mentioned it on Twitter today after his NYT’s outfit released their Siena polls (which showed Dems winning all of the races, but the Dems are stuck in the 40s —A HUGE RED FLAG).
This is a key reason why polling will be wildly off this cycle. And we’ve already seen it happen in the primaries.
Look at Mastriano, gaining 9.5% and none of the others being off. The only other number off a bit is Hart, who dropped out but might have gotten votes higher in her former seat due to name id. Those polls missed huge with one specific group. The same group whom Cohn couldn’t find to poll. Anti-WEFfers, let’s call them. None of the others polling outfits are finding them either, but they certainly are voting. This is a recipe for a shocking result.
It’s not that they are a Wave unto themselves, but that they are outside the system and cannot be determined other than by creating a voter turnout profile, which polling outfits are loath to do on their own or for the public (of course they do this for campaigns which must be freaking out the Dem side).
So those are two very specific ingredients of this cycle that are unaccounted for in the margins and the makeup of the mainstream polling. They point toward upsets and surprises, almost all going the way of Republicans.
The betting market
This is what got me in trouble in 2016. But the betting market adapts and has learned its lesson about trusting horserace polling exclusively. It’s vastly superior to polling in general.
This article shows its track record from 2016 to 2018. Of course, it’s going to be in that 40-60% range where it is not entirely accurate:
So you are still looking at roughly 50% of the time being correct. But that’s better than the competition:
…betting beats listening only to polls, according to several studies, such as this one in Public Opinion Quarterly. Also, a study by the author of Superforecasting got smart people to make predictions for study of their accuracy:
I managed to recruit 284 serious professionals, cardcarrying experts whose livelihoods involved analyzing political and economic trends and events... Almost all had postgraduate training; half had PhDs...
In the end:
the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.
Certain groups of pundits - namely ideological ones and those with frequent TV appearances - actually did worse than dart-throwing chimpanzees.
The Generic
This is the key. It’s all one needs to make a very accurate election prediction. In ‘21, as the generic moved in Oct from a Dem lead of 3% to even, it created a tilted environment for the Republicans. Right now, it’s at a 3% lead for Republicans. So it’s an even more robust environment for the Republicans than the elections of ‘21.
And in the States that have the toss-up Congressional elections, polls show it moving up to a ~10% Republican lead.
Of course, the economy matters, and abortion and all the other things. I am sure that will factor into the post-analysis.
That excuse reads like a symptom, not a cause. A feature, not a bug. The Dems have huge lockstep structural problems. One they brought on themselves with near tyrannical fanaticism around covid and yet another excuse to waste money on war abroad. One that is exemplified by their social media problem.
The biggest upsets will be at the State level.
Alex lives within the narrative, so he rode that illusionary Dem wave over the summer. No Democrat ever cracked over 50%, though, meaning they were still in the same position: vulnerable and exposed. Republican support dropped, and now it’s risen back up.
It’s not that voters see Republicans as the solution, just that they know what the problem is— Democrats who are too rigid and entrenched to change and instead focus on trivial events like a riot in the capital years ago (how could they not figure out this doesn’t work by now) and giving away their clue by saying over and over their ass in the majority (aka democracy to them) is what at stakes. Thanks for stating the obvious in such a superficial, self-centered way. So out of touch.
However, it is these statewide races that get to the real thing at stake here, the constitutional convention. Then it would take the legislature majorities in 34 States. We will have to see those numbers before looking further into its potential after the election. Since I maintain we are in a colossal historical reshuffle of the political landscape and our country, it could very well happen.
I don’t maintain that the above model is the only way to view elections and get them right. It’s what has worked and is working for me. And we will see how it pans out again. If the model is wrong, I will get the laughs. If it’s right, I believe we are looking at about ~250 Republicans in the House, 53 or maybe even up to 56 in the Senate, and 30-34 Governor seats. I won’t leave any in the toss-up column, so we shall see how many 40-60% of the betting market there are and go from there.
Be sure to vote. People say it doesn’t matter, but it does. We can have a revolution at the ballot box instead of in the streets.
My suspicion is that your assessment will be shown to be correct.