Tuesday afternoon, the gloom kept rolling in from smart Democratic operatives. The party would lose its House majority, but also kiss the Democratic Senate majority goodbye. The most optimistic spin was that a red wave would be perversely good news for President Joe Biden. Just look at 1994, when Newt Gingrich rode the Contract With America to the House speakership; two years later President Bill Clinton was reelected. Or the 2010 midterms, when Tea Party Republicans shellacked their way to power; two years later President Barack Obama was reelected. And hey, Biden may be personally unpopular, but he’s passed a bunch of legislation that voters like. So a midterm wipeout was to be expected, but it wouldn’t be the end of the political world for Democrats.
Get me rewrite, as they say in the old journalism movies.
Amid all the well-founded pessimism on Tuesday, however, there was one contrary voice. It belonged to Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist who worked on both of Obama’s winning White House bids, among many other campaigns. Here is what Belcher said to me yesterday long before polls closed: “I know this is counter to the narrative that the Republicans have been really successfully driving, but the closer we get to a majority of voters turning out, the lower the probability of Republicans being able to garner a majority. There’s no red wave in the data. This is supposed to be a bloodbath. This is supposed to be their wave election. They’ve got all the structural and momentum advantages. If they can’t get to 60 net seats in the House, it’s a monumental failure.”
Plenty of counting remains to be done, but the 2022 midterm turnout numbers look likely to surpass the typical level, which has lately been around 37 to 40% of registered voters. And forget Republicans netting a gain of anything close to 60 House seats: The best they can do appears to be a pickup of about 30. Which would be enough for Republicans to grab a majority and make a lot of noise for the next two years. But it’s a long way short of a wave.
So how did Democrats defy modern midterm history and 2022 conventional wisdom? It’s worth looking at a few individual contests and one prevailing trend. Pennsylvania’s crucial Senate race showed the value of having a uniquely authentic and compelling candidate who connected with middle-class voters on economic and cultural issues—especially when the Republican opponent is a confection. John Fetterman’s campaign team—led by Brendan McPhillips, Rebecca Katz, and Fetterman’s wife, Gisele—didn’t just endure Fetterman’s emergency three-month campaign-trail absence when he was knocked down by a near-fatal stroke. They filled the void with a sharp, clever social media campaign that defined Mehmet Oz as a fraud and a carpetbagger. Fetterman’s doctors, who got him back into credible fighting shape, deserve credit as well. Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer—who dealt with a life-threatening drama of her own two years ago—relied on a similar genuineness to easily defeat a conservative Republican challenger.
In multiple races—Hillary Scholten’s for a House seat in Michigan, Wes Moore’s for governor in Maryland, JB Pritzker’s for governor in Illinois, and Josh Shapiro’s for governor in Pennsylvania, to name a few—Democrats placed a risky bet by funding extremist candidates in Republican primaries, the theory being that they would be easier to beat in a general election. Every single one paid off. Drawing stark distinctions was crucial, as California Democratic strategist Sean Clegg told me it would way back in July. “This isn’t the Democratic Party against the Republican Party. It’s the Democratic Party against the antidemocratic party,” Clegg said. “These candidates are the brownshirts of the Trump movement. We are confronting a choice as a country, and we may as well make that stark choice up front.”
Roe. Dobbs. Abortion rights. Shorthand it however you want, but the Supreme Court’s ruling in June reverberated, consistently, from the defeat of an antiabortion referendum in Kansas in August through the rejection of a similar measure in Kentucky last night. The impact was less direct, but nonetheless clear, in the New York governor’s race as well. The incumbent, Democrat Kathy Hochul, waged a low-key campaign for months that relied on spending millions on TV ads; a major theme of those ads was Hochul’s pledge to protect the right to abortion in her state. She got a lot of help motivating Democratic voters on that front from her opponent, right-wing Republican congressman Lee Zeldin, who cosponsored a House bill to grant full personhood rights to embryos.
Yet even with an effective last-minute Democratic freakout at the possibility Hochul could lose—Biden flew in to campaign with her, and from the left flank Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suddenly hit the streets with the governor—Hochul’s winning margin will probably end up in the mid-single-digits. Her weakness was reflected in five key New York House races, all of which went to Republicans, which may end up determining control of the House. The most painful loss was by Sean Patrick Maloney, running for a sixth term in a Hudson Valley district north of the city. That district, and many others, was a new one, configured by a special master appointed by a Republican state judge, in response to a proposed redistricting map that would have favored New York Democrats, a map pushed in part by…Maloney, in his role as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Given the surprising results across the country, it appears Maloney did a great job of helping elect Democrats elsewhere and a lousy one of holding onto his own seat: The district where Maloney chose to run would have gone for Biden by 10 points in 2020.
Speaking of the big picture: Belcher has earned the final word. The larger trend he points to from the midterms is generational. “There really are two electorates,” he says, “one older and one younger, fighting to take this country in very different directions.” For instance: The youngs helped save Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and the olds dominated for Ron DeSantis in Florida. Abortion rights have intense relevance to voters in their 20s and 30s, as does climate change and student loans and threats to democracy and racism. There will be a great deal of turmoil in the next two years that scrambles the dynamic. But in 2024 Joe Biden will be the oldest president to ever run for reelection—and to win, he’ll need to make sure younger Democratic voters keep showing up.
Chris Smith
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