Midterm Postmortem

Most of us professional prognosticators fell flat on our faces this week. Isn’t it great?

I love politics.

That’s hardly surprising for a guy with a Ph.D. in political science who spends his days writing journalistically about the subject. But it’s still worth reflecting on why this year’s midterm election results have reinforced that love.

Part of it is partisanship. I feared Democrats would get pummeled, and instead they did surprisingly well—indeed, quite possibly better than they’ve done in a midterm election since 1950. Given my fears about the anti-liberal right, that’s very good news. Though not primarily because I’m excited for all the great things the president and his party will be able to accomplish. Whichever way the House and Senate fall, the divides will be narrow and the possibilities for big legislative moves minimal. And besides, I’m a centrist. I don’t especially want Democrats to do Big and Bold things.

For me the outcome is very good news, then, because it’s a hard, stinging slap in the face for the Republican Party. The GOP could sort of write off the Democrats’ big 2018 midterm gains as exactly the kind of normal, thermostatic outcome one might expect two years into the Trump administration. Even those who accepted the truth of Trump’s defeat in 2020 could blame it on the black swan of COVID-19 and take solace in several data points: The president’s defeat in the Electoral College was quite narrow; he gained 11 million votes between 2016 and 2020; Biden won, but the GOP nonetheless picked up 13 seats in the House. Tilt your head and squint a little and it could look like things were going pretty well for the party since Trump’s hostile takeover.

After this past Tuesday, though, no amount of squinting, head-tilting, or wishful thinking can sustain such thoughts.

So I was cheered by the shape of the midterm election results. The only thing that might bring the GOP to its senses and stop its ongoing descent into a bottomless moral and political gutter is electoral repudiation, and that was finally delivered. The GOP should have done very well this year, and it didn’t. That has to inspire some soul-searching and second-guessing about the party’s current path. Good. More please.

Reading the Ink Blot

But that’s not the primary reason why this week reaffirmed my love of politics. The key to understanding that response is my line above about squinting and head-tilting.

The United States is a big, sprawling, kaleidoscopically complex continent-wide polity that in some ways resembles a polycultural empire more than a nation. Dozens of pollsters, the avalanche of data they spew out, and a range of analysts and aggregators of this data try to give us a clear picture of what’s happening politically in this dynamically churning cauldron of a country. Except that picture is anything but clear. It’s more like a three-dimensional Rorschach ink blot.

But even that image doesn’t quite capture the character of our situation. We’ll have a three-dimensional Rorschach ink blot of the country on November 8, 2022 when all the votes are finally counted and certified a month or two from now. Before November 8, 2022, we didn’t even have that. We had a series of badly smudged ink blots released by different polling firms and different analysts and aggregators, each a little different than the others, trying to make sense of what the blot tells us, and each expressing (in most cases) unearned confidence.

That’s how we got to the morning of November 8, with its predictions of red waves or even red tsunamis, and with its readymade theories about why the event that was sure to happen would take place.

The Democrats are in charge in Washington and Joe Biden’s approval is in the low 40s. That means the Republicans are bound to do well!

With inflation high, the Dems are doomed!

Voters say they care about immigration and violent crime, but Biden won’t talk about them!

Americans are sick of this “woke” nonsense and want nothing to do with its blue-state enablers!

The polls are surging toward the Republicans and we all know by now that they’re biased in favor of the left, so the GOP must be doing even better than it seems!

Turnout is king in midterms votes, and Republicans are way more motivated than Democrats deeply demoralized by Sleepy and Senile Joe Biden!

Sure, some Republican candidates seemed shaky, but voters care more about voting against the other party than for specific individuals!

Yeah, the Dobbs decision might hurt some Republicans at the margins, but the outrage about overturning Roe v. Wade faded fast, allowing the GOP to dodge that bullet!

Americans are sick of hearing Biden and other Dems hectoring them with histrionic warnings about the Threat to Democracy and need to repudiate the GOP!

Those are just a handful of the hot takes I read over the past couple of months. Indeed, I pushed some of them myself as recently as a week ago. But all of them turned out to be wrong in whole or in part. Reality (along with the American people) got its vote, and it had other ideas.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, I pre-wrote a 1,500-word white-hot take for a major newspaper that I was quite proud of and continue to think was a cogently argued piece of analysis. But it was premised on the Democrats receiving a drubbing. That didn’t happen, so the piece will never see the light of day. It was written for what turned out to be Earth 2. On Earth 1, the Democrats did much better than I, along with most other smartypants pundits, expected. And so my super-sharp 1,500 words have ended up in the trash can.

Getting It Wrong

That’s why I love politics. Because it matters. And because it’s hard.

Because it matters, we aspire to grasp what’s going on, offering up comprehensive takes that make sense of everything. Those of us who try to do it honestly do our best to back up what we say with carefully deployed argument and evidence.

But because it’s hard, we fail. Almost invariably—once again, in whole or in part. And just as it’s good that Republicans have received a stinging slap in the face from the results, so it’s good for all of us to be humbled now and then by tripping and falling flat on our faces.

Do I like to be wrong? In itself, no. (Sadism isn’t one of my kinks.) But I do like to get as close to the truth as I can. And nothing advances that goal more than being forced by a harsh dose of reality to adjust my assumptions and expectations.

What’s interesting to me about the past couple of days is that so many pundits got things wrong about what would happen on Tuesday—and yet have been so quick to offer new, equally sweeping summations of what happened even though lots and lots of races have yet to be called! (I may write on another occasion about how pathetic it is that this country takes weeks to finish counting ballots.)

So now we’re being told that the Dobbs decision was decisive after all. Or that Republicans got punished for their poor choices of candidates. Or that election-fraud trutherism was behind the disappointing results for the right. And on and on and on.

I’m sure there’s some truth in those suppositions, and in many others that have been floated and will or won’t be floated over the coming days and weeks. But it’s unlikely that any one of them is the decisive cause, the one thing that explains why events unfolded so differently than most pollsters and pundits expected.

Micro Waves and Counter Waves

Consider these observations about the results that we have so far:

Overall, the outcome of the vote was a significant disappointment to Republicans. It’s possible Democrats will hold both the House and the Senate, and even if the GOP takes majority control of one or both chambers of Congress, the margins will be extremely narrow.

But this doesn’t describe the results everywhere. Florida really did see a red wave, which is why its quick vote count seemed to confirm expectations for an hour or so on Tuesday evening. Ohio pretty much went along with expectations for a big Republican night, too, with Senate candidate J.D. Vance beating moderate Democrat Tim Ryan by nearly 7 points and incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine trouncing his Democratic challenger Nan Whaley by more than 25 points. Interestingly, New York state also saw Republicans pick up several congressional seats, including a shocking loss for Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who headed up the Democrats’ campaign arm, even though incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul managed to beat back Republican challenger Lee Zeldin by 5-1/2 points.

In those states, the red wave was real. But not in lots of other places, including in the three states that just six years ago looked to be at the leading edge of a Republican realignment. One big reason Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016 is that Trump scaled the Democrats’ “Blue Wall” in the upper Midwest, narrowly winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This was supposed to be a sign that conservative populists had activated heretofore “hidden” throngs of white, working-class voters in the Rust Belt who would form a new GOP base of support in the electorate.

But now? In Pennsylvania, Republican candidates for governor and the U.S. Senate lost their races decisively. In Michigan, Democrats achieved a remarkable clean sweep, taking full control of state government for the first time since the 1980s. In heavily gerrymandered Wisconsin, the GOP fared better, though Democrat Tony Evers won re-election as governor of the state, preventing unified Republican control of government.

So what explains this discrepancy? Why are Florida, Ohio, and New York moving in one direction while Michigan and Pennsylvania are headed in the other? None of the confident, sweeping theories floated over the last 48 hours can answer that question to my satisfaction.

Threats to Democracy?

Then there’s all the talk of the “threat to democracy.” As the proprietor of a Substack devoted to analyzing the dangers posed by the anti-liberal right, I obviously share those concerns. But to my enormous relief, no Republican I know of has refused to concede his or her race, despite the party’s many election-denying candidates. Only Trump himself has dabbled in these claims, which means that it may be less that Republicans as such are a threat to democracy and more that one specific Republican is a threat to democracy, with the rest merely aping his authoritarian aspirations. The latter calls for a very different response than the former, so resolving that question matters a lot.

But of course some Democrats have spoken in recent years about a much broader threat to democracy than what unfolded in the aftermath of the 2020 election. This is the threat of minoritarian government, as the current Republican electoral coalition interacts with our (often quirky) electoral system to produce a systematic edge for GOP candidates in the Senate, in presidential contests, and (as a result) in judicial appointments.

But what, then, are we to make of Republicans quite possibly winning the national popular vote on Tuesday and by a margin that will likely exceed their share of congressional seats? Could it be that the inefficiency of the Democratic vote over the last few cycles—with Dems running up the total in blue states and slightly falling short of winning in red states—has begun to flip the other way? This could, ironically, be a function of Republicans winning a higher portion of votes from Hispanics and Blacks, since such voters often live in deep-blue cities where votes cast for the GOP don’t much effect the outcome and therefore end up “wasted.”

Or maybe something else is going on. We just don’t know yet, and we can’t really even get a handle on what all the possibilities might be, let alone nail down the answers, until we know the final vote count, reweight exit poll data to correspond to the actual tallies, and analyze what we see. Until then, we’re just groping around in the dark—or pointing and gaping at a smudged ink blot, pretending we know precisely what the blurry image adds up to.