There’s not much question that the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision helped Democrats over-perform expectations in the 2022 midterms. But the pro-choice cause won direct victories on ballots as well, as I noted at New York:

In November 8’s midterm election, voters in Kentucky defeated a ballot measure that aimed to eliminate abortion rights from the state constitution. And voters in Michigan, Vermont, and California have amended their state constitutions to explicitly acknowledge abortion rights. The door to state abortion bans opened by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year when it reversed Roe v. Wade is being closed by voters whenever they have the opportunity to weigh in on the matter.

In the days after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision turning abortion policy over to the states, Republican politicians and other opponents of legalized abortion looked with bad intent at places where courts had identified a state constitutional right to choose independent of Roe. They immediately found two red states, Kansas and Kentucky, where it was relatively easy to get a compliant, GOP-controlled legislature to put a constitutional amendment on the 2022 ballot (the primary ballot in Kansas and the general-election ballot in Kentucky). The thinking was that in states where the electorate would lean even more conservative than usual due to a midterm Republican wave, it would be a snap to get “liberal” courts out of the way and give legislators the power to enact draconian anti-abortion laws.

This assumption was upended on August 2 when Kansas voters defeated the “Value Them Both” constitutional amendment, which would have ended state constitutional abortion rights, by a 59-41 margin. It was a stunning result in a state that Donald Trump had carried by a 56-42 margin in 2020, and it soon became apparent that a sizable minority of pro-choice Republican voters bucked their party leaders and elected officials by voting “no.”

By then, Democratic legislators in California and Vermont had already arranged for their own states to vote on constitutional amendments enshrining abortion rights. And after the Kansas vote, pro-choice advocates in Michigan secured enough petitions on a citizen-led abortion-rights initiative to get it on that state’s November ballot.

Kentucky’s “no right to abortion” initiative was losing by six points with 88 percent of the votes in, showing once again that some Republican voters remain pro-choice even if their politicians (e.g., Kentucky’s Rand Paul, who was easily reelected this year) are soldiers in the war on legalized abortion. Abortions are still largely illegal in the state by legislative statute, but at least the ban will not be made permanent via a proposed constitutional amendment. Michigan’s reproductive-rights constitutional amendment (Proposal 3) was approved by a double-digit margin. California’s very extensive abortion-rights constitutional amendment, Proposition 1, is being approved by nearly a two-to-one margin. And Vermont’s parallel Proposition 5 (guaranteeing a right to “reproductive freedom”) is winning by more than a three-to-one margin.

There was a much, much narrower ballot initiative at play in Montana, passed by the legislature long before Dobbs came down, requiring medical interventions to treat “born alive” survivors of botched abortions. It too is currently losing by a six-point margin. So there could be a pro-choice clean sweep at the polls. Reproductive-rights advocates and their Democratic allies are already planning additional ballot initiatives for 2024.

Today some unsurprising but still significant political news came over the transom, so I wrote it up at New York:

A loudly barking dog that has quieted down as the midterm elections approach their omega point is the de facto head of the Republican Party — Donald Trump. While he was ubiquitous during primary season, when he was emblazoning a host of candidates with his brand, he appears to have heard the whispered pleas or silent prayers of Republicans that he keep a lower profile so that the midterms could be a straight referendum on Joe Biden and his (allegedly) socialist Democrats. Yes, he’s doing last-minute rallies for favored candidates in Ohio and Pennsylvania and dubious events in the early presidential states of Florida and Iowa. But for a world-class narcissist like the 45th president, this level of activity is almost restrained — if not at all selfless.

It appears that this will change very soon, per a report from Axios:

“Former President Trump’s inner circle is discussing announcing the launch of a 2024 presidential campaign on Nov. 14 — with the official announcement possibly followed by a multi-day series of political events, according to three sources familiar with the sensitive discussions.

“Look for Trump to take credit for Republican victories across the board — including those he propelled with his endorsements, and even those he had nothing to do with.”

Before you mark November 14 on your calendars as a day to spend in a decompression chamber and far from Twitter, it should be noted that there were similar reports in the summer that Trump ’24 would launch any day. But it’s not like there’s any remaining doubt that he’s running. And a relatively early launch would not only allow Trump to come out bragging but could force potential rivals to bend a knee — before their own presidential ambitions tempt them to take the enormous risk of challenging the dark lord of Mar-a-Lago.

However, for Republicans (if not for Trump) there are potential disadvantages to a precipitous 2024 campaign kickoff.

There is a chance that control of the U.S. Senate will come down to a December 6 general-election runoff between Herschel Walker and incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock. As any Georgia Republican will privately tell you, Trump personally ruined the January 2021 runoff contests of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler by coming to the state and talking about himself and Georgia’s rigged election system, which did not inspire enthusiasm to vote among Republicans. It seems unlikely that he would stay away from the runoff campaign of his buddy Herschel, but with Trump as a newly reminted presidential candidate, that might not be good for Walker, who needs to hang on to and mobilize every single Trump-skeptic Republican in the state.

Another moment for Republicans a Trump announcement might ruin is Joe Biden’s 80th birthday on November 20. If, as is widely expected, Democrats suffer serious losses on Election Day, there will be immediate talk about the need for replacing today’s party gerontocracy in Washington with fresh leadership. But the real-life prospect of a Trump comeback could do wonders in reminding everyone that Old Man Biden defeated his predecessor and may still be the only candidate who can do that in 2024. More generally, there’s nothing quite like hearing the Big Bad Wolf howling outside the door to instill a desire for unity among all the little piggies who fear being gobbled up politically just two years down the road.

I know at this point of every election cycle, political people are supposed to feel reverently towards swing voters. But sometimes you just have to tell the truth, so I did at New York:

If you’ve been following the midterms, you know there are a lot of close Senate, House, and gubernatorial races. The irony is that if you are tuned in to what’s happening, the odds are low that you are among the small group of voters who will determine the results next week. Call them “swing voters,” “persuadable voters,” or simply “undecided” or “late-deciding voters,” the people with the most power to shape American government for the next two years are typically underinformed about, if not thoroughly alienated from, government and the political system. And as Lee Drutman and Charlotte Hill explain in a New York Times essay, “swing voters” are often far from being the thoughtful moderates that the conventional wisdom imagines:

“If we consider only voting behavior, the number of ‘floating voters’ — those who have voted for presidential candidates from both major parties at some point in the last four elections — dropped to 5.2 percent in 2012 (down from an average of 12 percent from 1952 to 1980). In 2022, new polling suggests swing voters could make up as little as 3 percent of the electorate …

“Swing voters hold an idiosyncratic mix of priorities and values that scramble the common liberal-conservative divide. Some are economically liberal and socially conservative, while others, albeit relatively few, are the reverse. Many are holdouts from another political era: conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans who no longer feel at home in their party but who haven’t (yet) formally switched to the other side.

“But this is not to say that swing voters are moderates. Undecideds are just as likely as partisans to hold a mix of extreme and mainstream positions. The only difference is that these positions do not neatly align with those of one party.”

They’re not typically moderate or milquetoasty in their attitudes, either, They’re often angry, yet disengaged.

“[If] a shared outlook binds swing voters, it mostly seems to be generalized disdain for both major parties and a kind of anti-system, anti-partisan outlook. This only perpetuates their disengagement. It also leads to more candidates running against Washington, which further undermines trust in government.”

In fact, this disdain for politicians means that negative campaigning, featuring character attacks on opponents as corrupt charlatans, falls on fallow ground in swing-voter-land. These voters often assume the worst of politicians, so they accept this “information” even if it’s being spewed by ad agencies hired by other politicians. And all the nastiness only adds to this group’s civic estrangement.

This year, there is a small subgroup of swing voters in what CNN’s Ron Brownstein calls the “‘double negative election,’ in which most voters are expressing doubts about each party,” as reflected in low job-approval ratings for President Biden alongside low favorability ratings for Republican candidates:

“[R]ecent CNN polls in several key Senate races show that a large, and potentially decisive, slice of voters both disapprove of Biden’s performance and view the GOP nominee unfavorably: 9 percent in Wisconsin, 11 percent in Nevada, 13 percent in Pennsylvania, and 15 percent in Arizona, according to detailed results provided by the CNN polling unit.

“’The real question comes down to that group of independents in the middle, and who votes at the end,’ says Paul Maslin, a long-time Democratic pollster. ‘Is it people saying, “I hate inflation, crime is wrecking this big city I live in,” or people saying, “I’m sorry, but Herschel Walker is a clown, Mehmet Oz is a clown … Blake Masters is a joke,” and they go back to [the Democrats]? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’”

Of course, it’s easier for politicians to expand on these voters’ negative feelings about their opponents rather than convincing them their party isn’t so bad. So you wind up with the chimera of a political system dominated by partisans who hold diametrically opposed views on a whole range of economic and cultural issues being controlled by swing voters who dislike them all. Indeed, as Drutman and Hill point out, some swing voters prefer divided government because they don’t trust anyone to govern, leading to tactical voting aimed at perpetuating gridlock as an alternative to the kind of clear governing agenda needed to meet big challenges. And so the cycle of frustration, alienation, and poorly performing government goes on down the road to perdition.

Drutman and Hill make a compelling case for changing our system of electing legislators to one of proportional representation wherein swing voters lose most of their decisive power and those frustrated with the political system can find outlets in viable minor parties rather than paralyzing government altogether. Maybe that will happen someday.

For now, however, it is extremely likely that Democrats will lose their rare governing trifecta next week mostly due to swing voters who’ve decided their unhappiness with the status quo outweighs their fears about Republican extremism. Two years from now, some of these same people may vote for an ex-president with such contempt for voters that he refuses to accept their judgment of his performance. The risk remains that low-information, low-trust swing voters may be the death of us as a functioning democracy.

It’s still unclear which way the winds are blowing going into the midterms. But if a GOP wave does develop, Republicans might want to curb their enthusiasm, as I explained at New York:

Republicans are generally upbeat about their midterm prospects while Democrats are fearful, if not necessarily pessimistic. Most of the major indicators of likely midterm performance (notably the generic congressional ballot and polling of a lot of battleground races) are turning steadily red, which is also what one would expect from all historical precedents involving the party of an unpopular president in sour economic times. GOP activists and spinmeisters are excitedly imagining that the wave in their favor will rise and rise and engulf all sorts of Democratic candidates thought to be safe.

They should curb their enthusiasm. There are some structural factors at play this year that limit the probable size of any big turnover in offices in either direction.

The first is what the professionals call “exposure,” which means the number of Democratic-held offices that are reasonably within the reach of any rival. High-exposure cycles are typically those that follow a landslide in the opposite direction, creating a lot of vulnerable incumbents next time around. For example, the 2010 wave that swept 63 House seats into the Republican column came right after two consecutive very good Democratic cycles (2006, in which Democrats gained 31 House seats and flipped control of the chamber, and 2008, when they added 21 more).

While Democrats do go into the midterms with a small House majority, their surprising losses in 2020 essentially took some vulnerable Democratic districts off the table this time around. In the last midterm, in 2018, the authoritative Cook Political Report listed 73 Republican-held House seats as being up for grabs in competitive races (toss-ups or leaning to one party or the other). Democrats ultimately netted 41 seats. In the 2022 cycle, Cook has just 44 Democratic House seats as being at risk in competitive races. The battleground just isn’t as large, so the losses will likely be smaller, even in a rout.

The efforts of both parties to protect their own House seats via control of the redistricting process also reduces exposure to big losses. In essence, both parties are trading the opportunity for big gains for a reduced risk of big losses. And since they are making decisions that will draw maps for an entire decade, they may not be all that opportunistic about short-term gains.

There’s a different calculation for U.S. Senate seats thanks to the eccentric patterns created by six-year terms, which means only one-third of the seats are up in any one election. And the 2022 Senate landscape has never been that promising for Republicans, with only 14 Democratic seats up, none of them in states carried by Donald Trump in either 2016 or 2020. Meanwhile, the GOP is defending 21 seats, two of them in states carried by Joe Biden in 2020 and six left open by retirements.

But there’s another factor as important as reduced exposure in placing something of a cap on Republican gains this year. It’s the sheer partisanship of an electorate that just isn’t as “persuadable” as it used to be and also doesn’t need much “enthusiasm” for its own candidates to become motivated to vote in order to smite a feared and hated enemy party. New York Times columnist Tom Edsall has assembled some political-science literature on this subject. He quotes UC San Diego’s Gary Jacobson on how partisanship modulates big electoral swings:

“Partisans of both parties report extremely high levels of party loyalty in recent surveys, with more than 96 percent opting for their own party’s candidate. Most self-identified independents also lean toward one of the parties, and those who do are just as loyal as self-identified partisans. Party line voting has been increasing for several decades, reaching the 96 percent mark in 2020. This upward trend reflects a rise in negative partisanship — growing dislike for the other party — rather than increasing regard for the voter’s own side. Partisan antipathies keep the vast majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents from voting for Republican candidates regardless of their opinions of Biden and the economy.”

This helps explain the persistent gap between the president’s underwater job-approval ratings and Democratic voting preferences (which we also saw on the other side of the partisan barricades in 2020). But it also helps explain positive assessments of Joe Biden from the vast majority of self-identified Democrats who do think he’s doing a good job, Edsall notes:

“As partisanship intensifies, voters are less likely to punish incumbents of the same party for failures to improve standards of living or to live up to other campaign promises.

“Yphtach Lelkes, a professor of communication and a co-director of the polarization lab at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote by email that ‘people (particularly partisans) are far less likely to, for instance, rely on retrospective voting — that is, they won’t throw the bums out for poor economic conditions or problematic policies.’”

“In the early 1970s, Lelkes wrote, ‘partisanship explained less than 30 percent of the variance in vote choice. Today, partisanship explains more than 70 percent of the variance in vote choice.’”

A wild card is whether either of the two parties gains or loses significant support from whole demographic groups. Republicans are still boasting about the modest but significant gains they made among Latinos in 2020, and Democrats are counting on detaching Republican women offended by the Supreme Court decision abolishing constitutionally protected abortion rights.

But another possibility is that abrupt swings in partisan performance may simply not occur in the immediate future as often as they did in the recent past. If polls continue to redden, then Democrats may profoundly hope this is the case.

Since I write a lot about things I think I know about politics, it’s good occasionally to write about the “known unknowns,” so I did so at New York.

There are some things we don’t quite know just yet that could wind up being as important as what we know (or at least think we know). Here are a few political suspense stories whose endings might shock or comfort us when it’s all said and done.

Early-Voting Patterns

By my rough calculation, early voting is underway in 31 states. Though polls can sometimes give a sense of how voting by mail is proceeding (along with harder data on mail-ballot requests and returns), the numbers you always here about shortly before any election involve in-person early voting, which is a bigger deal in some parts of the country (notably the South) than in others.

Sometimes the chatter is about overall early-voting levels as a sign of high or low overall turnout levels, as in a CNN report earlier this week:

“Three weeks from Election Day, nearly 2.5 million Americans have already cast their ballots in the midterm elections, according to data from election officials, Edison Research and Catalist. In 30 states where Catalist has data for 2018 and 2022, pre-election voting is on par with this point four years ago — which was the highest turnout for a midterm election in decades.”

In states with party registration, it’s often possible to discern which party’s voters are turning out early. And even without such data, some southern states collect racial data on early voters as part of a Voting Rights Act reporting requirement (one of the few features of the VRA still in place).

There’s been some excitement this week about very high initial early-voting numbers in Georgia, a state with highly competitive Senate and gubernatorial races. The data also show an especially high percentage of that vote has been cast by Black voters (39 percent, whereas Black voters only make up 29 percent of registered voters in the state).

Is that good news for Democrats, who really need high youth and minority turnout to over-perform expectations this year? Maybe, but we don’t know, as Sean Trende pointed out two years ago when there was even more excitement about early-voting numbers:

“Unless you somehow know what is going to happen on Election Day, this argument is useless. To take an extreme example: Democrats could turn out every one of their voters early, and Republicans could still win the election by turning out more on Election Day.

“Obviously, that isn’t going to happen. But we exist somewhere along that spectrum. Most, if not the overwhelming majority, of these early voters are people who would otherwise vote on Election Day. The fact that they decide to cast ballots early just isn’t all that interesting.

“We don’t know in these states what share of Republicans, Democrats, or independents are voting for Republicans or Democrats, and we don’t know how many voters for any party are going to end up voting on [Election Day]. This is all speculation dressed up as news.”

Understanding early voting in this particular cycle is additionally difficult because we don’t know if the early-voting habits many Democrats cultivated during the COVID-19 pandemic will stick, and how many Republicans are still averse to anything other than Election Day voting after Trump told them that’s what they should do in 2020. So it’s best to wait and see.

Potential Polling Errors

There was a lot of anxiety over polling errors in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, mostly involving under-sampling of non-college-educated white voters, which in turn led to underestimation of Trump’s vote. That could mean polls may be similarly off-kilter in the same direction again (even though most pollsters have tried to adjust methodologies to reduce under-sampling). But on the other hand, polls in the last midterm election were quite accurate. Then, as now, Donald Trump is not on the ballot anywhere. So what’s the appropriate precedent?

We probably won’t know that until the results are in. But there are some signs that polls with reputations of being more or less favorable to the two parties are beginning to converge as this particular election approaches. In Pennsylvania’s Senate race, for example, six of the last seven public polls, from a variety of outlets, showed John Fetterman two to four points ahead of Mehmet Oz. Similarly, in Nevada’s Senate race, the last ten polls have shown at most a five-point variation in a race narrowly favoring Republican Adam Laxalt. And in Arizona’s tense gubernatorial race, there’s only a four-point variation in nine polls dating back to mid-September, with most showing Republican Kari Lake with a slight advantage. If either candidate won narrowly in any of these races, no pollster is going to be completely humiliated, and there probably won’t be much discussion of polling errors.

That could all change, of course, before Election Day, and polls showing dramatic last-minute trends in key races will be hyped to the stratosphere by the campaigns and parties that appear to benefit. Until then the best bet remains looking at polling averages and not at individual polls. There’s enough confusion now over “best practices” in polling methodology that cherry-picking “better” pollsters is perilous.

Youth Turnout

Back as recently as 2014, you could confidently predict that any party depending on young voters was in trouble during midterm elections, because The Kidz did not vote much in non-presidential elections, for a variety of reasons mostly having to do with personal mobility and complicated lives and work schedules. But something remarkable happened in 2018: Youth turnout more than doubled. Combined with high voting preferences for Democratic candidates, this youth-turnout boom helped Democrats win back the U.S. House and win some key governorships that year. Youth turnout remained high and solidly Democratic in the presidential year of 2020, too.

If the large and diverse millennial and Gen-Z cohorts show up similarly on November 8, they could save a lot of Democratic bacon. Objective indicators of youth engagement with voting this year are high. But there’s significant disgruntlement with Joe Biden among young voters, who are also very much cross-pressured by economic concerns they feel acutely, and a liberalism on cultural issues like abortion on which they feel strongly.

Even fairly small variations in youth turnout and voting preferences could be crucial in close races. And young voters obviously aren’t the only demographic category that should be watched closely. Republicans are counting on maintaining and if possible increasing the inroads they made in 2020 among Latino and certain Black voters.

Contested Elections

Given the extraordinary number of Republican candidates this year who have bought into Donald Trump’s stolen-election fables from 2020, there are obviously reasons to fear that some of these election-deniers may deny their own defeats and cast the results in doubt. A survey by the Washington Post identified 12 Republican candidates in high-profile statewide races who would not affirm they would accept the results, win or lose. So barring a GOP sweep, we can expect some contested elections in the courts, in the court of public opinion, or unfortunately even in the streets.

Democrats might have some issues of their own given the wave of restrictive voting laws Republicans have enacted in many states, along with the voter intimidation efforts of MAGA “poll watchers” that will appear across the country.

With control of the the U.S. House and Senate, and many key state positions at stake this year, you can expect post-election contests over close elections to become larger and more divisive than ever. With one of our two major parties more or less completely subscribing to doubts about “election integrity,” it’s only going to get worse.

The Wave Factor

Some of the talk about “waves” and “winds” and “breezes” in this election represents a meteorological metaphor for perceived momentum and predictions of the results. But as Amy Walter recently pointed out, there is a tendency in most elections for close contest to break in one direction or the other:

“[S]ome of the races that many are expecting to go in different directions — like Pennsylvania toward Democrats and Nevada toward Republicans — may not turn out to be the case. Instead, we shouldn’t be surprised to see Pennsylvania not as an outlier but part of a trend. For example, if Republicans are winning Pennsylvania on Election Night, we should expect to see the lion’s share of those other Toss Up seats go that way. A Democratic win in Pennsylvania would suggest that Democrats are going to win a disproportionate share of the closest contests and hold onto the majority.”

“Waves” are more predictable in House races where national trends frequently dwarf whatever individual candidates are doing. But we’ve seen Senate waves too: Democrats won eight of ten toss-up Senate elections (using the Cook Political Report’s authoritative ratings) in the otherwise very close 2012 cycle. Republicans won eight of nine toss-up Senate races in 2014. And I’m old enough to remember the elections of 1980, when Republicans netted 12 Senate seats — winning virtually every competitive race — and took control of the upper chamber for the first time since the Eisenhower administration.

Late trends can move a lot of elections, in other words, particularly at a time when partisan polarization has made all elections more or less national.

Another Overtime in Georgia

Lastly, one other imponderable is the possibility that Senate control could come down for the second cycle in a row to a post-November runoff in Georgia. That state eccentrically requires majorities for general-election victories, and the Raphael Warnock–Herschel Walker Senate race looks close enough to make the expected 3 to 4 percent minor-party vote an off-ramp to a December 6 runoff. The two combatants might even be joined by bitter gubernatorial rivals Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp. It could be lit.

Don’t get too easy in your pre-election — or post-election — EZ chair.