October 15: Biden Is the Early Favorite For Reelection Even If Dems Lost Ground in 2022
After absorbing a lot of Democratic gloom-and-doom about the midterms, I offered some silver lining at New York:
The 2022 midterms don’t look great for Democrats, who will try to buck history by hanging on to super-slim congressional majorities. Thanks to the particular lay of the land, Democrats have a decent chance of maintaining control of the Senate. But the House? Not so much: The two times since the New Deal when the president’s party won net House seats in a midterm (1998 and 2002), the president in question had sky-high job-approval ratings. Even if you believe Joe Biden’s plunge in popularity has been stemmed or even turned around a bit, he’s not going to have 60 percent-plus approval in November 2022 unless really crazy things happen. There’s just too much partisan polarization for that these days.
Thankfully for Democrats, even if they lose their congressional majorities next year, Biden himself won’t be an underdog for reelection in 2024. After all, the last two Democratic presidents were reelected after historically terrible midterms. Democrats lost 54 U.S. House seats in 1994 and 63 in 2010. Yes, they had bigger majorities going into those elections than Democrats have now. But they lost the national House popular vote by an identical 6.8 percent in both midterms, which is pretty bad, particularly since Democrats suffer from a voter-inefficiency problem in House elections (too many voters concentrated in too few districts).
It’s possible for a president’s party to lose a midterm so badly that bouncing back in the next cycle is all but impossible. Consider the man whose unique comeback accomplishment Donald Trump will be emulating if he runs in 2024, Grover Cleveland. The president Cleveland defeated in an 1892 rematch, Benjamin Harrison, was a Republican whose party lost an incredible 93 House seats in the 1890 midterms. This, mind you, was at a time when the House had only 332 members, which means the GOP lost over half their caucus in one cycle (an even worse percentage than in 1894, when Democrats lost a record 125 House seats during the midterm after Cleveland’s comeback triumph). In this era of polarization, nothing like that is going to happen to Democrats in 2022.
Looking more broadly at the power of incumbency, there have been 13 sitting presidents since World War II who were on the general election ballot. Nine of them won. The four losers all faced special circumstances. Gerald Ford had not previously been elected to anything more than the U.S. House; he ascended to the vice-presidency and then the presidency when disgraced predecessors resigned, and he pardoned the president who appointed him, the especially disgraced Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter was caught up in a historical realignment that he had held off four years earlier by carrying his native South, which then resumed a massive Republican trend. George H.W. Bush suffered from a terrible economy but then also a party split (third-party candidate Ross Perot won a lot of previously Republican voters). And we all know about Donald J. Trump, who was impeached twice and seemed determined to offend swing voters.
In retrospect, what’s most remarkable is that Ford and Trump very nearly got reelected despite their handicaps, exhibiting not the weakness but the strength of incumbency. And it’s with that perspective that any early handicapping of a potential 2024 rematch should be considered. Trump benefited from incumbency in 2020, as will Biden in 2024. So the idea that the 45th president has some built-in advantage over the 46th — absent the renewed election coup so many of us fear — doesn’t make a lot of sense.
It looks like Annenberg’s latest survey has the difference in party ID dropping to 2.8 percentage points — 34.6 for Dems and 31.8 for Reps. So if we’re going to rely on Annenberg surveys, then we have to accept the fact that the Reps are gaining in party ID. For the full article, click below:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041119/ap_on_el_ge/political_parties&e=5
Yeah but Annenberg’s numbers are among registered voters while the exit poll’s numbers are among (absolutely) certain voters. If Republicans are more certain voters then the average registered voter, you would expect the number among registered voters to be inflated.
What about the rising tide of evidence that the exit polls predicting a Kerry victory not only in Ohio but elsewhere were RIGHT? Doesn’t all this poll analysis ASSUME that the theories of election fraud (eg the computer scams, the hacking issue in Fla, and numerous other issues, on top of the huge number of not only spoiled ballots but PROVISIONAL ballots that were reportedly “handed out like candy” in New Mexico? etc etc)
No analysis of poll results that does not keep up with the election fraud issue (subject to a media lockdown) DAILY is really more than itself doing what the media is now doing, namely justifying the lying. The fraud issue has info coming out constantly — that the exit polls were reliable not only in the morning but in the afternoon, that there were EXTREMELY fishy voting patterns explicable by hacking in Florida and exploding the “Dixiecrat County” theory, that there were massive e-vote “gifts” to Bush not only in Florida but elsewhere in the country. When you ASSUME that all these theories are false by ignoring them as factors in your analysis, you bias your analysis massively and unscientifically.
At the very least, two separate analyses should be put forward from here on out — one of the exit polls and another of the tabulated results, so we can see just what the situation might be if the presumptive “tin-foil hat” theory of election fraud is in fact even half as true as the evidence suggests.
Anyone that agrees with Gallop is uninformed. Gallop is the ENRON of the polling industry
Frankly, I don’t think it’s worth any consideration. If a plurality still identify themselves as Democrats but either vote Republican or don’t show up to vote, then their self-identification really doesn’t matter, does it? And since when are we drawing a distinction between party ID among those who showed up to vote and party ID among adults generally? The whole premise of the weighing-by party ID thesis was that it was the party ID of those who showed up to vote that mattered. After all, it was the party ID among 2000 voters as measured by the 2000 exit polls that was our benchmark. Either we have to reject this approach/thesis or accept it. We can’t suddenly start resorting to party ID as measured across all adults generally.
We need to stop obsessing over party ID percentages. Most people vote for candidates, not party allegiance. In my opinion this last election has put to rest the issue of weighting polls according to party ID. The professionals at Gallup were correct that party ID is fungible.