Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
Ambivalent emotions about the American election watching from abroad. Figured I'd just note them here.
I am less surprised than underwhelmed. From a distance/superficial level, the results don't seem to match what I was vaguely tracking as the polling trends, which is to say I was expecting the Republicans to do better in general, but in various places I'm not surprised they didn't since local variance and some such, and really they only needed to underperform in a few places to change the swing. Some reports that suggest the Democrats overperformed expectations makes me more inclined to think political polling is generally bad, but I am curious on what the data will show- and where the anamolous surprises are. I guess I'm trying to say I'm more surprised that Fetterman won than Oz lost, if that makes sense.
I'm not particularly curious or interested in any current allegations of -insert shenanigans here-, as much as sighing that ballot control measures appear to have been as bad as ever and so people will conflate an inability to detect with a lack of detection. Undated mail-in ballot saga in PA is probably one of those two-screens divides on whether you take fraud-control seriously. But- on the assumption that the results are legitimate I'm pegging three main reasons the Democrats only lost badly and not terribly.
(Yes, I consider losing the house meaning the Democrats lost, which it looks likely to happen even if Senate control doesn't. I mention framing below.)
1: The summer information campaign and early voting synergized
Post-Roe emotional highs and the friendly media coverage over Ukraine and summer were enough to draw in Democratic engagement were sustained long enough to translate into early voting, before the loss of narrative control let the economy dominate sentiment in the last weeks. Even if voter engagement was only in the form of 'fill out ballot now, mail-in later', engaging people outside of the final media cycles would have engaged them on much more favorable information terrain. We'll probably never know the party distribution of ballots based on time, but I'd be surprised if Democrats didn't do significantly better earlier than later.
A trade-off of this, however, is that I think this is non-repeatable/reliable per see. The denial phase of the economy is over, and I think that was far more important for enabling summer high-energy than the Democratic culture war issues themselves. Affirmative action will be unlikely to have the same kick, and have longer to dissapate. That said, people like to say COVID broke people's brains, and I'll not be surprised if the 'because of COVID I'll only do mail-in voting' demographic becomes a campaign reality, as the sort of people who would use COVID as a reason for absentee ballots at this point are probably atypical media consumers and atypical for the time they commit their votes.
2: The Democrat finger on the Trump primary candidates worked well enough (or was just lucky)
Infamously, Hillary tried to boost Trump because she thought it would support him. From various pieces I saw over the primary season, some efforts were made at that this go around, usually in trying to ease the way for them. I'm not particularly certain it was ever decisive per see as much as a finger on the scales that may not have been necessary, but the 'hope the outrageous candidate wins the primary (and maybe give them an aid),' a classic strategy, worked well enough often enough. As I said, I'm not surprised someone like Oz lost, and it only takes/took a few candidates failing to create a significant swing in the senate.
Edit after- a Washington Examiner article on 9NOV, "Democratic midterm meddling in Republican primaries worked but not perfectly" is a recount of various examples. While the editorial position is hardly lauding, it raises the point of how elevating weak candidates is an accepted strategy.
Since I still not not see a link embed button on this forum, link below
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/democratic-meddling-republican-primaries-effective
3: Media framing helped set a stage the encouraged donor/base engagement early, and changed what would be considered serious defeat
I raised above I feel the summer friendly media environment- when there was a lot less cynicism about the economy, and more rally about Ukraine/abortion/etc/ helped juice the early voter turnout via mail-in, but it also supported expectation management in ways that helped boost the Democratic prospects. I no longer have exactly when it was, but there was a point in the summer where a number of the Democratic-aligned major media pre-emptively approached the election with a winner mentality rather than what was building as a doomer mentality. I'm not in a state to really expound, except that by creating even false motivation, they were able to keep the party system working together long enough to suffice for real motivation, which kept the donor checks coming and the activits engaged instead of depressed and inactive. Losing optimism/motivation is one of the death-spirals of a campaign movement, and just delaying that would help pad the war chest, which enabled significant spending.
But, even when the narrative flipped to the more doomer perspective of a Red Wave, I think it flipped to the other extreme, such that by not being the the worst-case scenario, even a poor performance could look good by contrast to the expectation, and thus a win. At this time of writing, the sentate is still up in the air... but somehow, losing the House but keeping the Senate is framing in some areas as 'Republicans lost.' There is, indeed, an argument to be made 'you should have won this'... but I dispute that the Red Wave 'should' have been expected as a matter of course. Red Wave wasn't the 'should' from 12, 8, or even 5 months ago. The numbers bandied about a year ago that I remember were... within two-to-three senate races. We are now... within two-to-three senate races. We'll see the final numbers, and the specific reasons why where, but assuming the conclusions is still a flaw even when in false-modesty. 'We should have lost worse, but we didn't, so really we won' is a cope that's assisted by a media inclined to inaccurate extremes.
Or, to reframe- early on, a supportive media environment kept the party machine churning better than it would have with early despair. Later on, catastrophic reframing allowed a non-catastrophic defeat to be portrayed as victory.
All of this may be too early, or turn out to be wrong in hindsight, but what's a musing if not to put a prediction to look back on?
Now, I am interested- and curious- what the final demographic totals are. Various points of change in recent polling suggested white women, hispanics, and even blacks going more towards the Republicans than expected in recent weeks. If those are trends, and more importantly trends that continue, reasons that apply above may easily not be sufficient next time... especially if it is literally Biden on the ballot, rather than a lot of local-man-versus-trump-proxy.
Or maybe Trump will be on the ballot. Who knows.
Just regarding your win/lose takeaway: I think you could argue fundamentals were always "midterms with a unpopular president." What happened during the campaign never made Dem victory a wholly expected outcome that they could then lose. Against the core fundamentals, Dems were always underdogs, and it seems hard to me to see this as a Dem loss.
This is what I mean by reframing defeat. 'Better than expected' isn't the same as 'good', and it's not a metric of success. You can do better than expected but still fail. You can do better than expected, but your expectations were horribly based in the first place. It's neither proof of good performance, or good evaluation.
I agree that better than expected isn't sufficient to qualify as good. For instance, if the races happened to be extremely close but the senate went +1 Republican, that would still beat the fundamentals for Dems, so I should probably expand my point.
To regard D senate and R house as a D loss seems to be judging victory based on the ground gained. But I think there's plenty of examples, in ongoing conflicts, where merely gaining some ground isn't sufficient to claim victory. If your goals are to gain a certain amount of ground and you get some but not all, that can also be fairly framed as a defeat.
Both sides appeared to me to view gaining the Senate one victory condition, and gaining/preventing a sizable R advantage in the house as the other. Taking those as the victory conditions, the Democrats won both. The results are:
Republicans fail to prevent Democrats confirming more judges.
Rs fail to stop a potential Supreme Court confirmation.
Rs have a much harder time dealing with their house than if they had a larger majority, and have less of a mandate of using the house to pressure Ds
The R dream of a senate supermajority next cycle is extinguished.
The R leadership is in disarray after their kingmaker failed to produce satisfying results.
If the economy happens to turn around, Ds get to take a lot of credit (though also more blame if it doesn't).
D's are happy with that, R's are very much not, and historical precedence appeared to give R's the advantage. That helps clarify why winning the senate was considered a condition to claim an R victory, not just gaining some ground in the house.
What do you mean? Senate control is gonna depend on Georgia runoff, which looks very hard to call -- and while the size of the R majority in the house is not yet clear, the Ds aren't takin' it AFAICT.
If team R can pull it together in Georgia, team D has just lost control of both houses -- how in the world is that a victory?
I didn't have the most precise phrasing but this is the hypothetical we were debating from OP
If Ds lose the Senate I'd agree that it doesn't look like much of a victory. That said I'd bet on a D senate.
I wonder if anyone is prepping an enormous bribe for Joe Manchin.
He seems like someone who wouldn't stay bought.
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