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.
Whoops. My bad. The correct Kerry margin of victory among college students was indeed 55-41 percent, not 62-27 percent (the figure for independents)and will be corrected.
Actually, the results are not as sanguine as first reported. First, the margin for Kerry was actually 55-41, NOT 62-27% — that was the breakdown for independent voters. Second, the 77% turnout figure should be treated skeptically — survey respondents are notorious for saying they voted when they actually did not in order to appear socially desirable. Given the percentage of students in the 18-24 group that actually voted in 2004 (42%) and the percentage of this age group that attends college (two and four year), the turnout among non-college students in this age group would have to be VERY, VERY low for the numbers to add up. The social desirability explanation is likely particularly potent in 2004 given the stakes of the election and the strong outreach initiatives aimed at students. Finally, the education majors favoring Bush (5pts. higher than business majors?!?!) makes no sense and should not be taken seriously. It’s probably the result of sampling error due to the small sample for that subgroup (which is unreported in the news release).
College campuses are certainly fertile ground for Democrats, and we should try hard to appeal to this demographic, but things are not quite as rosy as the post suggests.
I had the same reaction as Josh–education?
Random result?
Teachers colleges clustered in strongly pro-Bush states?
Remnants of “traditional” female career path?
Inadvertent exposure of a hidden piece of the GOP’s plan to establish long-term political control?
(I write that last one reluctantly at the urging of my tinfoil hat–the damn thing’s been more right than wrong the last 4 years)
Josh – Click on the link and read the study. It says Bush got 46 % of B-School students.
Education… voted for Bush? These are the future members of the teachers unions, the people who were screwed over by NCLB: what the heck? This is the *last* group I would have expected to vote for Bush. What about the business majors?