Looking Back at Who Was Right About This Weird Election

There were always two competing major theories about the 2022 midterm elections. Here’s what held up and why that might have been.

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A crowd watching election returns at a bar in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday night.

There were always two competing major theories about the 2022 midterm elections.

Theory 1: It was a normal year, and the national political environment and the modern American tradition of rebuking the president’s party told us all we needed to know.

Theory 2: It was a weird year, with abortion, election denial and fringe pro-Trump candidates giving Democrats an unusually strong chance of holding off a Republican surge.

Now that we actually have results, which theory was right?

Theory 2 seems to have won the argument.

There was no red wave. Few laid out such a case more forcefully and consistently than Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, who had presented his arguments in this pre-election podcast, in interviews and on his Twitter feed. A flood of low-quality partisan surveys really did skew the polling averages to the right, as Rosenberg had asserted, while higher-quality nonpartisan polls proved to be much more accurate.

The Senate is still up for grabs, and so far, Republicans have flipped about a dozen House seats. They came up short in many other districts they had assumed they would win. Democrats picked off Republican incumbents in New Mexico and Ohio and won, or appeared on track to win, open seats in red-leaning areas in Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan and North Carolina.

Depending on how the remaining races shake out, if Republicans win the House, the margin will be much smaller than they had predicted.

“I think in politics, people have a tendency to want to overcomplicate things,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, interpreting the results. “What happened was really simple: Democrats did a lot of popular things, and Republicans did a lot of unpopular things.”

In his private newsletter, which is widely read among Democratic operatives, Michael Podhorzer, a longtime adviser to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. who is now an independent analyst, argued all year that the Democrats’ best chance of holding Congress was to capitalize on the public’s disdain for far-right Republicans in the mold of Donald Trump. The election would be more a choice between two alternatives than a referendum on President Biden, he thought.

Biden had the same instinct. “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative,” he often said. In recent speeches, he elevated the issue of democracy and made frequent swipes at “MAGA Republicans”; he called them “super-mega MAGA” during a news conference on Wednesday. The president’s use of the term emerged from the White House’s exposure to Democratic research known as the G.O.P. Branding Project, which Podhorzer often championed in his newsletter.

In a memo sent to reporters on Thursday, the leaders of that effort, Navin Nayak of the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the pollsters Geoffrey Garin and Jefrey Pollock, claimed vindication.

Citing data showing how mentions of “MAGA” in various news outlets skyrocketed as Democrats began using the acronym widely, they said the election “became a choice between President Biden and Democrats who are focused on moving the country forward and MAGA extremists who would strip away people’s fundamental rights and freedoms.”

Who Will Control Congress? Here’s When We’ll Know.

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Much remains uncertain. For the second Election Day in a row, election night ended without a clear winner. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, takes a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate, and when we might know the outcome:

The House. Republicans are likelier than not to win the House, but it is no certainty. There are still several key races that remain uncalled, and in many of these contests, late mail ballots have the potential to help Democrats. It will take days to count them.

The Senate. The fight for the Senate will come down to three states: Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Outstanding ballots in Nevada and Arizona could take days to count, but control of the chamber may ultimately hinge on Georgia, which is headed for a Dec. 6 runoff.

How we got here. The political conditions seemed ripe for Republicans to make big midterm pickups, but voters had other ideas. Read our five takeaways and analysis of why the “red wave” didn’t materialize for the G.O.P.

Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, said that the conventional wisdom before Election Day missed two important trends among voters. First, he said, “a lot of people who said the economy was the top issue voted for Democrats.” And second, he said, “people were really worried about democracy,” even if they did not list it as their No. 1 concern in polls.

In the real world, Kaine said, voters might be concerned about a number of things all at once, and “they combine sometimes into meta-issues.”

Many Democrats were not so confident ahead of time; Senator Chris Coons of Delaware confessed to feeling a sense of “disquiet” going into Election Day and thought the polls could mean a loss of three to four Senate seats. Trump was “a huge drag” on Republican candidates across the country, he said.

“I think this is another time when polling led the pack story astray,” Podhorzer said. “I’ve hardly read all the coverage, but while it is certainly true that survey-takers picked inflation and don’t like Biden much, they were also not so keen on MAGA Republicans in a way that the polls seem to have missed.”

There are some interesting regional nuances, though.

Four of the Republican flips came in New York, a state controlled by Democrats. And Republicans made Democrats work hard to keep many other East Coast seats, including in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. It’s a little too early to tell what’s going on in California, but the Democrats’ blue-state blues seem to have also hit other Western states, such as Oregon — where the party could still lose the governor’s mansion.

Democratic governors in swing states mostly fended off their Republican challengers (with the possible exception of Nevada, which remains too close to call). Meanwhile, in red states like Florida, Ohio and Texas, Republican governors won big. Just look at how Ron DeSantis moved every county in his direction, including Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, on the way to a nearly 20-point rout of Representative Charlie Crist.

These regional differences may be why so many of us, watching the flood of campaign money stream into districts President Biden won by double digits in 2020, started to wonder if the first theory — that it was a normal election year after all — was turning out to be correct. The president was making his final campaign stops in traditionally safe districts in California, Maryland and New York, a sign of trouble for his party. And Democrats in Nevada were freaking out about the turnout numbers they were seeing.

ImageVoters in Nevada, a state hit hard by lockdowns and job losses during the pandemic, were drawn to the polls less on abortion and more by the economy.Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Voters in battleground and blue states didn’t behave the same.

One reason for the regional discrepancies seems to be abortion, an issue that played out differently depending on whether voters believed that abortion rights were truly at risk. In Michigan, they absolutely did. In Nevada, New York and Oregon, where abortion rights were never in question? Not nearly as much.

Another factor was crime. It didn’t end up hurting Democrats in Pennsylvania, even though violent crime has spiked in Philadelphia. But the crime issue bit them hard in New York, where you had to squint to see a definitive trend. There’s now a lot of grumbling on the left at Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor, who stands accused of playing into Republican hands by creating a panic about public safety.

Adams isn’t backing down. In an interview on MSNBC this morning, the mayor accused progressives of promoting unpopular bail laws. “This catch, repeat, release system is just destroying the foundation of our country,” he said. “And that’s why we are losing this election.”

A third factor, which has received less attention, was the long tail of the pandemic.

Nevada, a state hit hard by lockdowns and job losses, proved to be an exception among swing states, not an indicator. If Senator Catherine Cortez Masto wins her race against Adam Laxalt, her Republican challenger, it will be by the thinnest of margins.

And in Florida and Ohio, G.O.P. governors managed to convince voters that their very different approaches to the pandemic kept the economy humming while saving lives. (Whether those claims are true is another story.) DeSantis made central to his political brand the idea that he “kept Florida free,” while other states punished their own economies with overly strict lockdowns.

And finally, there’s redistricting, which evened the playing field across the country.

New maps gave Republicans an opening in New York after Democrats in Albany completely botched the process. Many on the left now blame Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic former governor, for appointing the judges that threw out the Legislature’s aggressive gerrymander.

The court’s decision led to a game of musical chairs that ultimately cost Democrats dearly. Representative Sean Patrick Maloney jumped into a new district, forcing his more progressive colleague, Mondaire Jones, to run in an unfamiliar part of New York City. Jones lost his primary. Then Maloney, the chair of the Democrats’ House campaign committee, lost his seat anyway.

Republicans might make enough gains elsewhere to take the House regardless, but the finger-pointing within New York political circles has been fierce.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already called on Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, to resign. In an interview with my colleague Nicholas Fandos, she cited “big money and old-school, calcified machine-style politics that creates a very anemic voting base that is disengaged and disenfranchised.”

Joe Dinkin, political director of the progressive Working Families Party, told me, “Andrew Cuomo, Eric Adams and Sean Maloney may have cost Democrats the majority.”

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What to read

• The Times is tracking the remaining uncalled House races, as states count outstanding votes.

• The election results have made President Biden less inclined to pivot on economic issues to appease Republicans, Jim Tankersley writes.

• With the next class of lawmakers taking shape, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson profile some of the new members.

• The fall of Roe v. Wade put abortion front and center in campaigns. Corina Knoll and Mitch Smith found that the issue motivated voters to support abortion rights in several states.

• Georgians will vote in a runoff election next month, since neither Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, nor his Republican rival, Herschel Walker, won a majority. Here’s how it will work.

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Source: nytimes.com