Is the red wave back on?

One last look at Senate polls and my midterm predictions

We are less than a week from Election Day and things are shifting. A great many Republican pundits are crowing that the red wave is arriving at long last, but, as I’ve pointed out over the past couple of months, things weren’t looking so bright for Republicans in many races. Back in September, I wrote that the Senate bubble was bursting. Is that still the case? At four days from the big day, let’s take one last look at the polls.

To recap, the Senate is currently divided, but Democrats are defending 14 seats, nine of which are considered safe (California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington). Republicans are defending 21 seats, which put them at a disadvantage out of the gate even though 15 seats are safe (Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, both seats from Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota).

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

At this point, even though 29 seats are in play, only a handful are considered to be in likely to change hands. Eleven seats are on shaky ground, but only about two to five seats (depending on who you listen to) are considered to be tossups or likely to change hands.

Here is an update on the 11 seats to watch.

Arizona - Cook Political Report shows Arizona as a tossup, but Larry Sabato and FiveThirtyEight predict that incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly will defeat Trump-backed challenger, Blake Masters. As I wrote several months ago, this looks like a Democratic hold. Even Real Clear Politics shows Kelly with a lead.

Colorado - Incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet is a clear favorite over Republican Joe O’Dea. This will be another Democratic hold.

Georgia - Erick Erickson and others have been reading the tea leaves of early voting and proclaiming that not only will Herschel Walker win but that he may well avoid a runoff. The race is still a tossup, but FiveThirtyEight does give Herschel a slight edge. It’s still too close to call and, as a reminder, if neither candidate gets 50 percent of the vote, there will be a runoff to determine the winner. If the race goes to a runoff, I’d say that Herschel would be the favorite.

New Hampshire - Steve Berman mentioned a recent poll that showed Republican Donald Bolduc up by one point, which is still a statistical tie. Despite a pattern of tightening polls, Democrat Maggie Hassan seems likely to retain her seat.

The news today showed Bolduc doubling down on claims that some high school students who identify as animals are allowed to use litter boxes. The school has debunked the claim. Republican voters may buy into this sort of craziness, but I’m not sure it will play as well with moderate and independent voters.

Nevada - Nevada is a problem for Democrats. Republican Adam Laxalt has continued to surge. Although the race is still close enough to be a tossup, this looks like a loss for Democrats.

This puts the Democrats at a total loss of two seats if they lose both Georgia and Nevada. On a really bad night, New Hampshire would make it three.

On the Republican side, these are the races to watch.

Florida - Democrats were never going to win Rubio’s seat.

North Carolina - Trump-endorsed Ted Budd is the likely winner over Cheri Beasley in this race for the open seat of retiring Senator Richard Burr.

Ohio - J.D. Vance is uniformly considered to be the likely winner over Democrat Tim Ryan.

Pennsylvania - Pennsylvania is interesting. Democrat John Fetterman tried to debate as he recovered from a stroke. Not a good idea. In the same debate, Dr. Oz advocated letting “women, doctors, local political leaders” make decisions on abortion. Also not a great thing to verbalize in a state that leans blue.

A month ago, Pennsylvania looked like a sure Democrat pickup. Now, it’s a tossup, but the odds are good that it still ends up in the Democratic column.

The key may be whether voters think that Fetterman is cognitively impaired or whether they accept his campaign’s claims that his problems are only related to speech and are recoverable.

Add to that the fact that Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump are all going to be stumping in Pennsylvania before the election. It may very well be that Trump’s appearance seals Oz’s fate. If Republicans want Oz to win, they should tell Trump to stay home (but of course none of them would dare say that).

Utah - Polling is all over the map between incumbent Republican Mike Lee and independent Evan McMullin. Lee continues to have the edge, but there are a lot of undecided voters. It will likely be a Republican hold, but it will be interesting to see if McMullin outperforms the Democrats that usually run against Lee.

Wisconsin - The race for Ron Johnson’s seat is the other true Republican tossup. The Republican incumbent has the edge over Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes, but polling in Wisconsin is perennially questionable.

Total Republican losses appear to be one seat. Taken together with Democrat losses, that likely means a net Republican gain of one or two seats.

Based on the latest information, I’ve put my predictions in the chart above. I’d really like to see Herschel lose, but Georgia is more of a reddish purple than a true swing state. I also see Nevada and Pennsylvania as likely to change hands.

House Forecast In the House, the Republicans are also likely to take control. Currently, there are 220 Democrats and 212 Republicans with 3 vacant seats. The Wall Street Journal notes that there are 25 tossup seats with 200 seats considered safe or likely for Republicans. FiveThirtyEight gives Republicans an 80 percent chance of controlling between 215 and 248 seats. Cook and Sabato go into more detail about individual races. It seems likely that Republicans will have a small majority of about 220-230 seats at the end of the day.

The Big Picture So Republicans are likely to end up controlling both houses of Congress. Does that constitute a red wave? It all depends on what you mean by a wave.

Going into 2022, the Republicans were heavy favorites. The opposition party always has an edge in midterms, but everything else seemed to favor Republicans as well. Inflation was up and the stock market was down. Ukraine was in flames and gas prices were through the roof. Considering all that, Republicans really should have been able to do better than one or two Senate seats and a couple of dozen House seats.

Next Wednesday, Republicans will be crowing over their gains, but Democrats should be thanking their stars that it wasn’t worse (unless Republicans get all the breaks and it does happen to be worse).

There are several reasons that the Republican wave is likely to be blunted. First, the economy has improved. Even though inflation is stubbornly persistent, gas prices are down and the country has so far avoided falling into a recession. While Republicans have talked about these problems, I haven’t heard them offer any realistic solutions.

Second, the Dobbs decision motivated Democratic voters who might have otherwise stayed home in a blah year. A number of Republicans softened their positions on abortion in September and there was a reason for that. Those tactical adjustments may not survive into 2023, however.

Third, Donald Trump was back in the news over the summer. The correlation between news coverage of Donald Trump’s legal woes after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in early August and the late-summer Democratic surge is very strong. When Trump stepped back from the limelight, Republicans started to gain again.

Finally, as we’ve said before, candidate quality matters. Republicans made some poor choices in the primaries. Some of those candidates will win, but others will lose races that could have been won by a better pick.

In the end, I think the outcome is going to be close to a status quo election. It’s likely to result in Republican control of both houses but not by large margins. It isn’t going to be a wave, but it could have been.

What do you think? Am I right? Am I full of crap? Let me know what you think below. And then come back next week to see the Racket News analysis of how the election shakes out.

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Post script I’ll add one more item: If the Republicans win majorities, I predict that they will once again quickly overplay their hand. Any majority, however small, will be assumed to be a mandate. It won’t be.

A Republican victory in 2022 may hold the seeds of (another) Trump presidential loss in 2024. Trump is running and he’s the front runner.

If you don’t believe that the electorate can veer wildly from handing majorities to Republicans and then re-electing an unpopular Democratic president two years later then you don’t remember 2010 and 2012.