The more I stare at 2022 election results, the more it is becoming clear that they resist an easy explanation, and I wrote about that at New York:

After the dust has settled on any election cycle, there’s a natural interest in deriving future lessons for the two major political parties. Democrats are interested in bottling and then mass-producing whatever formula enabled them to avoid an apparent oncoming Republican freight train of a midterm and instead gain a U.S. Senate seat while holding the GOP to House gains that are almost (I said almost) more trouble than they are worth.

Data points are still being collected and assessed at this point, but a very strong effort by FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley to examine four big Senate races that Democrats won but were at various points in doubt (in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania) shows us that the search for some simple, overriding explanation may not be terribly fruitful.

Using county-level and in some cases precinct-level results, Skelley explains that the winning formula for Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, Catherine Cortez Masto, and John Fetterman varied significantly. To oversimplify it, Kelly beat Blake Masters mostly thanks to overperformance among Latino voters; Warnock beat Herschel Walker via impressive margins in Atlanta’s urban core and suburbs; Cortez Masto (the one Democrat in these states to run a bit behind Joe Biden’s 2020 performance) held on against Adam Laxalt by a slightly inflated vote among white college-educated voters; and Fetterman dispatched Mehmet Oz pretty clearly by cutting into the recent Republican margins among white working-class voters.

Now it’s also true that all four of these winners more or less held on to the vast majority of Biden 2020 voters as well. But in an apparent era of very close partisan balance, gains and losses beyond rigid partisan bases are probably what matter most. It’s also true that all four candidates, and the Democratic Party as a whole, benefitted from certain unique developments that helped make the usual midterm referendum on the president more of a “choice” election, namely the reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court and high-profile meddling in the election by Donald Trump. And, finally, Kelly, Warnock, and Fetterman — and arguably Cortez Masto as well — got lucky by drawing relatively weak Republican opponents.

So what does all this add up to as a lesson for Democrats going forward? Probably nothing in particular. They certainly cannot count on an epochal development in the judicial system at the very moment an election cycle is heating up to occur on schedule. And there’s only so much you can do to dial up bad opponents. It’s noteworthy that none of the four Senate races in question were among those in which Democrats played the dangerous but occasionally successful game of running ads attacking the most extremist Republican candidates to boost their prospects of winning GOP primaries. Two of the “bad” Republican Senate nominees in the states Skelley analyzed (Laxalt and Walker) were runaway favorites among GOP primary voters. The most prominent alternative to Masters in Arizona (Jim Lamont) was as out there ideologically as Masters himself. And the characteristics that made Oz a stone loser were not nearly as apparent in the primary season as they were when he suddenly started talking about the price of crudités.

It probably is noteworthy that three of the four Democratic Senate candidates in question (all incumbents) were unopposed in their own primaries, and the fourth, Fetterman, won his primary easily. And all of them raised money at a very good clip. But those are always positive candidate qualities in any election. That’s true as well of the successful microstrategies including Warnock’s early-voting blitz prior to the December 6 primary in Georgia, which we will likely learn more about as the story of 2022 becomes more fully available.

At this point, the closest you can come to a general lesson for Democrats in 2022 is that it’s a good idea to stay united, raise money feverishly, prepare for whatever opportunities the campaign offers, and choose candidates with the strength to endure the rolling nightmare that contemporary high-profile contests often produce. You cannot simply dial up candidates with the incredible stamina of Warnock or the amazing courage of Fetterman. But without question, in a period of electoral gridlock, 2022 did establish that, on the crucial margins, candidates and campaigns still matter. And in politics as in football, sometimes the key to victory is to set aside any predetermined grand strategy and simply take what each opponent gives you.

The more you look at the 2022 midterm election returns, the most it looks like a good if flawed Democratic result instead of a good but flawed Republican result, as I explained at New York:

After Election Day 2022, the standard narrative was that a solid Republican win in the national House popular vote (which looked to be as much as six percent initially) somehow didn’t translate into the kind of robust House gains you might expect. Even as late mail ballots drifted in across big blue states like California, reducing the GOP margin in the national House popular vote to 2.8 percent, the sense that Republicans got very unlucky in the actual results persisted. Now, the New York Times’ Nate Cohn has devoted a long column to investigating this alleged underperformance, concluding that Democrats may have actually had better candidates in both the Senate and the House:

“The red wave, to the extent it existed, may have come ashore in a relatively uninhabited area, but the red tide was still high enough to turn the House vote red in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, even while the Democrats won the crucial Senate seats.

“How did the Democrats survive? Perhaps the simplest explanation: On average, they had better candidates thanks partly, but not completely, to weak Republican nominees.”

But another veteran number cruncher, Jacob Rubashkin of Inside Elections, looked at the final House results and found something remarkable:

“Ultimately, not only did a Red Wave fail to materialize, but Republicans barely cleared the lowest of bars they had set for themselves at the beginning of the cycle: winning back the House of Representatives.

“The GOP needed a net gain of five seats to win back the majority. While the party did net nine seats, in the five closest GOP wins in the country, the victorious Republican candidates outpaced their Democratic opponents by a combined 6,670 votes….

“The five closest races won by Republicans were Colorado’s 3rd (554 votes), California’s 13th (584 votes), Michigan’s 10th (1,600 votes), New York’s 17th (1,787 votes), and Iowa’s 3rd (2,145 votes).”

The combined margins in the “majority-making” races, Rubashkin calculates, were about a fourth of those in 2020 when Democrats won the same number of House seats and were widely thought to have skirted a major disaster. So you could definitely argue that Republicans got lucky to the tune of 6,670 votes.

Had those votes not materialized in the right places at the right time then instead of congratulating Democrats for not doing as poorly as everyone expected, we might be trying to figure out if Nancy Pelosi should serve one more term as Speaker or give way to Hakeem Jeffries. And 2022 might have been viewed as a historical anomaly ranking right up there with 1962, 1998, and 2002 (years in which the White House party gained net seats in midterms).

Nate Cohn also acknowledges that the results were close enough to merit different interpretations of their partisan import:

“Should it be understood as an outright good Democratic year that was interrupted by a few isolated Republican waves (Florida, New York, Oregon) and obscured by low nonwhite turnout in solidly Democratic areas? Or was it a good but not great Republican year that the party didn’t translate into seats because of bad candidates and somewhat inefficiently distributed strength?”

More to the point, an interpretation of this midterm as a lost Democratic rather than Republican opportunity might influence what we can properly expect in 2024, as Rubashkin notes:

“Not only did a ‘red wave’ not materialize for House Republicans, but their new majority rests on the narrowest victory in over a decade, setting up the fight for the House as the marquee congressional battle of 2024.”

In a presidential cycle, moreover, some of the Democratic-leaning voter groups that don’t turn out proportionately in midterms, including Black and under-30 voters, could very well tip the balance. So aside from the other issues he has in hanging on to a Speakership that depends to an unhealthy degree on the sufferance of MAGA extremists, Kevin McCarthy should deal with the real possibility that he’ll be back in the minority two years from now.

When beginning to look at 2024 polls, it occurred to me that some information is more valuable than others, and wrote about that at New York:

Now that we are in the 2024 presidential-election cycle with the first primaries just over a year away, it’s time to begin looking at how the two parties’ voters will approach their choices. At this point, a competitive GOP nomination contest seems a lot more likely than one among Democrats. Perhaps the punditocracy is underestimating Donald Trump’s strength within his party yet again, but even so, no one thinks he’s strong enough to clear the field and run unopposed. While no one knows exactly how many intraparty rivals Trump will face, it is already possible to look at polls to estimate his relative popularity among Republicans, and his “electability” as a general-election candidate against presumed Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

On the first measurement, let’s get something out of the way right off the bat: I don’t put a lot of stock in vague polls asking Republicans if they want to renominate Trump or “someone else.” Perhaps that’s because I am old enough to remember similar signs of disenchantment with presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama before they were renominated without opposition. Plus, more recent polls showed disenchantment among Democrats with President Biden, who nonetheless seems to be a lead-pipe cinch for renomination if he indeed runs. Republicans overwhelmingly remember the Trump administration positively, and one major pre-midterm poll gave him an 81 percent favorability rating among Republicans (arguably unhappiness over his role in the underwhelming GOP midterm performance will fade much like the Republican anger at his role in the January 6 insurrection). A post-midterm survey from Pew showed 60 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners feeling “warmly” toward Trump (41 percent “very warmly”). He’s hardly a spent force just yet, and it’s more compelling to look at how specific potential rivals would perform against him.

There are presently 40 polls in the RealClearPolitics database measuring support among Republican voters for potential 2024 nominees. Trump has led in all 40. To be more specific, Trump leads Ron DeSantis, far and away his most formidable rival, by an average of 21.5 percent (48.8 percent to 27.3 percent). There is a school of thought (mostly based on the huge field of opponents Trump faced in 2016) that in a one-on-one competition DeSantis would dispatch Trump easily, but that probably overestimates DeSantis’s appeal among Republicans backing other potential candidates, and underestimates Trump’s king-of-the-mountain performance in 2016 once the field had been culled of all but the strongest opponents.

So at this very early stage, it’s reasonable to affirm that DeSantis’s strength against Trump remains speculative and could be illusory, much like Rick Perry’s momentary burst of support in 2012 or Scott Walker’s alleged potential going into 2016. It’s also worth remembering that national polls assessing support for this or that presidential candidate mean a lot less than performance in the early nominating contests, which for Republicans will begin in Iowa and New Hampshire. We have yet to see how DeSantis performs in a presidential caucus or primary.

But there is one measurable optic that could affect Republican voter preferences from sea to shining sea if they show a glaring disparity: perceived 2024 electability. Just as Democrats who might have preferred a younger or more progressive nominee in 2020 settled on Biden as the most electable option against the much-hated Trump, Republicans could dump Trump in 2024 if he’s perceived as a sure loser while alternative candidates aren’t. So it’s probably a good idea to keep an eye on general-election polling along with primary polling.

There hasn’t been a wealth of 2024 general-election trial heats matching variable candidates just yet, but so far there are already signs that a perceived electability advantage could be an important asset for DeSantis, aside from the very important data point that Trump has already lost to Biden once.

In the RCP averages, DeSantis is currently tied with Joe Biden at 43 percent, while Biden leads Trump by three points (44.7 percent to 41.7 percent). But the most recent poll, from USA Today–Suffolk, shows DeSantis leading the incumbent by four points (47-43), while Biden leads Trump by seven points (47-40). That’s a pretty big performance gap, and if it persists or even grows, it could affect Republican primary voters who detest Biden today as much as 2020 Democratic primary voters detested Trump. Yes, Trump can be expected to denounce all adverse polls as fake, and confidently predict total victory every time his name appears on a ballot. But even hard-core MAGA folk know in their hearts that their warrior-king has lost some altitude, and may want the kind of general-election victory that doesn’t require months of conspiring and an insurrection at the Capitol to achieve pay dirt. A focus on electability could produces some dilemmas for DeSantis (and other Trump rivals) as well; the Florida governor has spent a lot of time perfecting appeals to the most extreme elements of his party to outflank Trump on the rights. But DeSantis seems like the kind of politician who is motivated by opportunism more than principle, so he may give electability a try.

Sifting through more data from the 2022 midterms, there was one indicator that surprised and concerned me, so I wrote about it at New York:

As analysts pick over the results of the 2022 midterm elections, there have been a lot of mixed messages for Democrats. Yes, they performed better than you might have expected for the party controlling the White House, especially considering the president has underwater job-approval ratings. And yes, Democrats benefited from an unusually robust performance among young voters, who often don’t participate in midterm elections. But at the same time, Democrats didn’t significantly improve their performance among other key demographics, notably Black, Asian American, and Latino voters. As my colleague Eric Levitz observed, Democrats remain dangerously dependent on white college-educated voters who remain sympathetic to Republican economic messages.

Worse yet for Democrats, there is growing evidence that their single most loyal demographic group, African Americans, was underenthused in 2022. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn looked at the preliminary numbers and sounded the alarm:

“Georgia and North Carolina are two of the states where voters indicate their race when they register to vote, offering an unusually clear look at the racial composition of the electorate. In both states — along with Louisiana — the Black share of the electorate fell to its lowest levels since 2006.

“In all three states, the turnout rate among Black voters was far lower than among white voters. In North Carolina, for example, 43 percent of Black registered voters turned out, compared with 59 percent of white registered voters — roughly doubling the difference from 2018 and tripling the racial turnout gap from 2014.

“While similarly conclusive data is not available elsewhere so far, the turnout by county suggests that a relatively weak Black turnout was a national phenomenon.”

Low Black turnout in Georgia and North Carolina is especially significant because Black candidates (Senate candidate Cheri Beasley in North Carolina and Senate Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in Georgia) headed up the Democratic tickets in both states. It’s not like the old days when Black voters were being urged to support white conservative Democrats to thwart even more conservative Republicans.

If the signs of relatively low Black turnout in 2022 are accurate and representative, what do they mean? Cohn offers some possible explanations:

“Still, relatively low Black turnout is becoming an unmistakable trend in the post-Obama era, raising important — if yet unanswered — questions about how Democrats can revitalize the enthusiasm of their strongest group of supporters.

“Is it simply a return to the pre-Obama norm? Is it yet another symptom of eroding Democratic strength among working-class voters of all races and ethnicities? Or is it a byproduct of something more specific to Black voters, like the rise of a more progressive, activist — and pessimistic — Black left that doubts whether the Democratic Party can combat white supremacy?”

It’s possible to overinterpret Black voter trends. According to exit polls, the Democratic share of Black voters dropped from 90 percent in 2018 to 87 percent in 2020 and 86 percent in 2022 — not exactly a deep plunge. And some of the negative turnout trends may be attributable to voter-suppression efforts in Republican-controlled states rather than Black voter disaffection with Democrats. In Georgia, moreover, there are encouraging signs about Black early voting turnout in the U.S. Senate general election runoff contest between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker.

But any way you cut it, Democrats have both a practical and a moral responsibility to boost Black voter participation in elections going forward. In particular, President Joe Biden, whose nomination and election in 2020 depended heavily on Black support, should devote a lot of attention to rekindling the fires of affection in this critical segment of the electorate.

I took a vacation last week and a fresh look at the midterm results and some pertinent analysis struck me with a realization I wrote up at New York:

Ever since the results of the 2022 midterm elections became clear, it’s been a bit of a struggle to find a proper precedent. Yes, there have been a few past midterms where the party controlling the White House gained House seats (or just lost a few), but invariably that happened under presidents quite a bit more popular than Joe Biden, and usually in economic circumstances a lot more positive than those prevailing today. Still, the results weren’t all that crazy; Republicans did, after all, flip the House, and Democratic success in the Senate (much like Republican success in 2018) was heavily dependent on a favorable mix of contests.

The shock and awe that accompanied a relatively strong Democratic performance may have been because many were expecting a late Republican surge. The polls, after all, were pretty accurate. But it was hard for a lot of analysts from both parties to overcome the belief that the party opposing the White House would get all the late breaks and win most of the really close races. That wasn’t just a hunch; it used to be a political-science truism until late surges cemented the reelections of George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012. It seemed even more probable in 2022 given the historical unlikelihood of a good Democratic midterm and the suspicion that the energy Democrats got from the Dobbs abortion rights backlash might have dissipated by November.

But that’s not how it turned out, as the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter explains in a new analysis:

“Since 2006, the final House and Senate races we’ve rated as Toss-Ups have broken decisively in one direction. What was different about this cycle, however, is that both the House (69 percent) and Senate (currently 75 percent), broke for the White House party.”

Republicans in 2014 and Democrats in 2006 won sizable majorities of the toss-up House and Senate races. And Democrats won a majority of toss-up Senate races in 2010, as did Republicans in 2018, thanks to Senate landscapes that tilted the playing field (along with non-toss-up contests that flipped seats). So a late-breaking surge (against expectations, at least) for the White House party in both House and Senate races in a midterm truly is unusual. That Democrats also won four of five gubernatorial races identified as toss-ups by Cook reinforces the surprising late trend.

So what’s the explanation? That’s not so easy to determine. Take your pick among such factors as bad GOP candidate selection (though it wasn’t just “bad candidates” who lost), Republican extremism, or a stronger “Dobbs effect” than expected. Or, to cite the explanation that makes the most sense to me (and to Walter, who has written about “calcified” politics), maybe we are in an era where polarization and partisan attachments are so strong that midterm “swings” are less powerful and the party controlling the White House is going to be on stronger ground for the time being. As always, we’ll need more elections to supply the data needed to make postelection surprises less … surprising.