Democrats pulled off one of the best midterms ever

I was wrong

New episode of Bad Takes just dropped, all about Kevin McCarthy’s plan to unleash a debt ceiling crisis in order to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

This was a bit of a monkey’s paw campaign for those of us who two years ago said Joe Biden could have a surprisingly successful presidency by boring the country to death, lowering the temperature on the culture war, and returning focus to brass tacks economic issues. Biden was pretty successful at delivering on that agenda, except the economic basics seemed to turn against him with inflation soaring and the national mood souring. Rather than the kitchen table, Democrats’ best issue was clearly abortion when the Supreme Court hung an albatross around Republicans’ necks.

Democrats ran lots of ads about abortion. Lots and lots and lots of ads.

To the point where a lot of people on both sides thought they were really fucking up by not doing more to be visibly addressing the crime and inflation issues that voters said was more important. I always thought the abortion-centric ad strategy was the right choice among the choices available, but I still didn’t really think it would work.

Yet looking around, I think you have to conclude that it did.

Democrats did better than I thought they would. They didn’t wildly outperform the polls or anything. But they did outperform the vibes. They outperformed the history of in-party midterm performances. They outperformed skepticism that surveyors know how to reach the public. And in several states where it counted, they outperformed Joe Biden.

Last, Democrats outperformed a factional battle in which both moderates and progressives spent Tuesday morning “explaining” why Democrats did so badly (it was the other faction’s fault) only to need to pivot once the results came in and it became clear that Democrats are posting the best midterm result in recent history, outside of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It turns out that people don’t like having their rights taken away, and that a critical swathe of the public prefers not to be represented in office by kooks and insurrectionists.

What we don’t know

Unfortunately, there’s a lot we still don’t know — not just races that are still out, but critical information about turnout and demographics.

My extremely strong caution to you is to not trust anything you see or hear based on exit polls. Exit polls in the modern world suffer from some very persistent flaws. With a normal poll, you survey a random but demographically unrepresentative group of people. You then weight your survey results to match what you know about the demographics of the country. Exit poll surveys tend to get a sample with too many college graduates and too many young people, and because the sample is too young, it also includes too many non-white people. They then weight the poll to the known results of the election. And because the most GOP-leaning groups in the country (older non-college white people) were under sampled, surveyors then have to exaggerate the GOP share of every group.

The truth is, at this point we just don’t know. We have to wait for proprietary survey analysis, and for analysis that involves matching to validated voter files.

Initial analysis from people I trust is that there was nothing particularly special in the turnout. A lot of people voted, but fewer than in 2020 and with broadly similar proportions to what we’ve seen in recent races. The turnout differential was small but seems to have slightly favored Republicans. Democrats did well because the backlash that the in-party normally faces among independents didn’t materialize. Education polarization fell slightly, though it was a smaller fall than between 2016 and 2018, so the trend is still increasing. Racial depolarization continued, as Democrats did worse than in the past with Black and Hispanic votes but better with white ones. Of course in levels of support, white voters continue to be more Republican than non-white voters. But the trend is in the other direction.

Most of all, of course, we don’t know who won the House, and we don’t know exactly what the Senate picture is. John Fetterman winning gives Democrats a little cushion. They are favored to win in each of Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia but not by huge margins. They need two out of three to hold on, and they probably will, but it’s not a sure thing.

The big news is that while there was polling error in 2022 , it was random and uncorrelated, which is how it’s supposed to work.

I didn’t believe the polls could possibly be right, because they suggested Democrats would do amazingly well in historical context, which felt impossible given that Biden isn’t super-popular. But I was wrong.

Dobbs and democracy

Ezra Klein asked me to preregister a take on what I would conclude if Democrats turned out to do better than I thought they would and my answer was that the democracy issue mattered.

And I think that holds up. Republican election deniers did worse than average. Trump recruits selected for no reason other than personal loyalty to him did worse than average. Incumbent Democratic governors did really well at staving off insurrection.

The way Democrats hoped this issue would play after January 6 was that either the GOP would top to bottom clearly reject insurrectionism or else they’d be punished up and down the ballot for it. Those consequences haven’t materialized. But I think they clearly are paying a price, especially in races where Democrats have a plausible story to tell about why it matters in that specific race. Brian Kemp did the right thing and stood up to Trump and was rewarded for it, while a lot of GOP gubernatorial candidates in other swing states suffered.

But the other thing, of course, is Dobbs. Elon Musk in an infamous pre-election tweet recommended that independent-minded voters should pick Republicans to achieve balance. This made tons of people mad, but it’s exactly how midterms normally function and why they normally go badly for the president’s party.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.

To understand why 2022 is different, you need to put the Dobbs decision at the center of the story. The president’s party normally does badly in the midterms because people fear overreach and want to check their power. But the biggest example of policy overreach in Biden’s first two years in office was ending Roe v Wade. The result was an election landscape that didn’t so much overturn the normal thermostatic dynamics of midterm results as complicate them, giving us backlash against the policy overreach by the out party. If you look at my springtime posts “Winning After Roe” and “Some Practical Advice for Making a Difference in the New Abortion Fight,” this possibility has always been on the table. My view of the abortion issue turned more pessimistic because I thought that to maximize their advantage, frontline Democrats would need to moderate their position on the substance a bit. But they used a well-crafted message, well-crafted adds, and the palpable reality of GOP overreach to really win on this topic.

Republicans just went too far.

Exceptions that prove the rule

I think you can also see that it was a harder sell to convince voters in New York, Connecticut, California, and Oregon that abortion was on the line in those states.

That’s probably accurate, and in the gubernatorial races, Democrats are going to win there while underperforming. But you also had problems for down ballot candidates in those states, and the House may be won or lost there.

I also think that abortion is important to the Florida Exceptionalism of this race. There was no red wave, but there very much was a hard red break specifically in the state of the Florida.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Florida has a GOP trifecta that took up abortion legislation, passed a 15-week ban, and then went no further. Fifteen-week ban is popular, and it’s popular because it protects the overwhelming majority of abortions that actually take place, allows clinics to continue operating, etc. But it’s not just that the 15-week ban is reasonably popular policy, it’s that Florida Republicans were already running the whole show — they were showing pro-choice Florida voters that they could be trusted with political power. That’s exactly what GOP politicians elsewhere in the country couldn’t demonstrate.

Joe Biden’s effective anti-politics

What’s a little bit harder to quantify is the political impact of dogs that didn’t bark.

But I do think it’s striking that there was essentially no popular mass mobilization against either the American Rescue Plan or the Inflation Reduction Act. The ARP didn’t fully work out as a matter of policy substance, but there was no Tea Party or Resistance-style movement against it. The IRA is even better as policy and was the subject of tons of wrangling in congress, but similarly faced zero grassroots opposition.

This has always been the core promise of Joe Biden’s politics — to be a bit boring — and even though it annoys various strands of political obsessives, I do think it’s been pretty successful. He does not necessarily have a legion of adoring fans, but he is getting things done that most people like and that even the people who don’t love him find to be broadly acceptable. He has not done what the most enthusiastic right-wing culture warriors want, but he has helped foster some perestroika around “cancel culture”-type issues and made people feel more relaxed. Politics is less exhausting under Biden than it was under Trump, and keeping the abortion-banners and insurrectionists at bay will help keep it that way.

There obviously continue to be problems in American life that weigh on Biden’s approval rating.

The good news here is that these are very much known-knowns. The White House is aware that the price of gasoline matters to people, and they have committed to a smart contingent supply strategy that should keep the oil flowing. Biden has generated the most domestic oil production of any president ever, and in 2023 we should exceed the 2019 peak year of output, and this fact will be clearer to people than ever.

Used car prices are plummeting, and goods inflation in general is falling.

In big macroeconomic terms, that doesn’t mean we are out of the woods. But I do think there’s a qualitative difference between inflation driven by labor-intensive services (which means the higher prices are largely passed through to people as wages) and inflation driven by shipping bottlenecks or commodity scarcity (which generate windfall profits). The economic strategy that Janet Yellen has outlined in Slow Boring and elsewhere is conceptually correct, as is the technology-neutral energy future envisioned in the Inflation Reduction Act.

The question for the future is going to be all about the implementation details of these elements of Yellen’s “modern supply-side economics.” Will we permit the transmission lines that let utility-scale wind and solar flourish? Can geothermal exploration get regulatory parity with oil and gas? The IRA is the most robust pro-nuclear legislation passed in two generations, but it still won’t amount to much unless the Nuclear Regulatory Commission makes complementary changes. Money is now available for carbon capture and sequestration projects, but we need to permit storage wells so it doesn’t all just get used for enhanced oil recovery.

I think we have tentative evidence that the public rewarded the robust jobs growth under Biden more than the tenor of media commentary might lead you to believe, and that’s excellent news. The idea that people would regard the 2022 economy as actually worse than the 2010 economy seemed extremely bleak to me — and I now think they just didn’t. But having restored full employment, the central task continues to be not so much “curbing inflation” (which would be achieved through massive unemployment) but unlocking abundance and delivering on the promise of ARP, IRA, IIJA, and the CHIPS Act with regulatory followthrough. I was wrong about the 2022 midterms, and I’ve never been so glad to be wrong.