Voters are frequently reminded of Trump and the party he leads: When they hear revelations from the House select committee investigating Jan. 8, Biden was mentioned in 336 network and cable news stories, but Trump was close behind with 308. Research by Steger found that between July 1 and Sept. But unlike his predecessors, Trump has kept a high profile since leaving office, seeking to shape the GOP in his image and siphoning away public attention from the current president. Usually, midterms are a referendum on the president’s performance. This may not be a pure “referendum” election on the president. In a midterm, this differential could help Democrats. But since Donald Trump’s emergence on the political scene, the GOP has increasingly lost affluent voters in the suburbs, while gaining the support of less-affluent voters, notably white people without a college degree. Historically, this pattern has helped Republicans. “Partisans seem to be breaking from their parties much less frequently, as their antipathy for the other party has intensified.” “Split-ticket voting has declined precipitously,” Smith said. Meanwhile, increased partisan loyalty in safe districts makes upsets in those districts less likely. “This dampens the range of seat swings that are likely,” Smith said. Aggressive redistricting and partisan polarization have reduced the number of seats that are considered competitive between the parties.ĭecennial redistricting has reduced the number of competitive House seats from 51 in 2020 to about 30 in 2022, out of a total House membership of 435, according to an analysis by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. There are fewer truly competitive House seats. “If the Democrats held 250 seats now, they would be in for bigger losses,” Abramowitz said. In that midterm, the Democrats lost 63 seats. 31.) By comparison, in 2010, Democrats held 49 seats in districts that had voted Republican for president two years earlier. (It was seven until Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola won a special election to the House on Aug. Just eight Democrats now represent districts won by President Donald Trump in 2020. Although it’s not uncommon for winning presidential candidates to carry weaker House candidates to victory, Democrats lost 11 seats when Biden won in 2020, including defeats in generally Republican states such as Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. With a small House majority, Democrats have fewer vulnerable seats to defend in 2022. Could 2022 be different? Maybe, with reasons ranging from structural factors to news events such as the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. If presidential approval ratings were all that mattered in predicting midterm election outcomes, Biden’s outlook would be poor. Could 2022 break the historical pattern of presidential losses in a midterm? 9, the FiveThirtyEight average of Biden’s approval rating in polls showed him more than 10 points underwater, with 42.5% of voters approving of his performance and 53% disapproving. ![]() One of the most important predictors of midterm malaise - presidential approval ratings - shows President Joe Biden with weak support nationally. In the Senate, the Democrats control the 50-50 chamber only because Vice President Kamala Harris can cast tie-breaking votes. The House’s majority party has only fallen below 222 seats two other times since World War II, when the chamber was without vacancies - the Republicans with 221 from 1953 to 1955 and again from 2001 to 2003. In the House, the Democrats hold a 221-212 edge over the Republicans, with two vacancies. Those included Todd Akin in Missouri, Richard Mourdock in Indiana, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. In recent years, the GOP has lost several Senate seats that were considered winnable because the party’s voters nominated candidates who made extreme or controversial comments, said Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist. “The lesser visibility of House races makes it more likely that voters default to their partisan preferences” than in the more widely covered Senate races, he said. If the Senate seats contested in a midterm happen to be in states where the president’s party is weak, the party controlling the White House can be especially hard-pressed to gain seats.Ī candidate’s individual qualities also matter more in Senate races than in House contests, something Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has alluded to and that Wayne Steger, a political scientist at DePaul University in Chicago, echoed. ![]() The main difference is the Senate’s pattern of staggered elections, in which one-third of the body faces the voters in any given election, rather than every member every two years, as with the House, said John Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |