Tomorrow is (finally) Election Day, and Republicans have all the momentum.
The party appears to be on the cusp of flipping both chambers of Congress to GOP control, as well as winning a handful of governorships in battleground states.
But just how substantial will the Republican Party’s victory be?
Polling patterns taken together with historical trends suggest that Republicans are likely to pick up 30-35 House seats and two or three Senate seats. This would entail the GOP winning over half of the House races currently rated as “toss-up” by RealClearPolitics, and Democrats most likely losing two or three of the four most competitive Senate races: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Nevada.
To be sure, this outcome would not necessarily rise to the “red wave” levels of the 1994 and 2010 midterms. In 1994, Republicans gained 53 House seats and nine Senate seats; in 2010, the GOP picked up 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate.
An important note: The reason Democrats likely will not lose 50 or 60 House seats is not necessarily because the party is in a stronger position politically this year than in 1994 or 2010, as their momentum from the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade appears to have faded. Rather, it is in large part due to the continual decrease in the number of competitive congressional districts.
However, historical trends suggest that a “red wave” of this magnitude this year is not impossible. In fact, all current national mood indicators are either in-line with — or worse than — what they were in 1994 and 2010 at this same time, per Gallup data.
Just 40 percent of Americans approve of Joe Biden’s job performance, compared to 46 percent for Clinton at this time in 1994, and 45 percent for Obama in 2010. Congressional approval is currently 21 percent, which is near historic lows. Economic ratings and national satisfaction are also at the lowest levels Gallup has measured at the time of a midterm election, worse than in 1994 and 2010.
Further, Nathaniel Rakich at FiveThirtyEightwrote, if polling error this year is consistent with what it has been over the last two decades, a Republican landslide is not out of the question.
Since 1998, the weighted average error for polls conducted within three weeks of Election Day has been 5.4 points in Senate races and 6.3 points in House contests generically, per his analysis. If polls underestimate GOP performance again this year — as they infamously did in 2016 and 2020 — to this degree, Republicans would win a 54 seat majority in the Senate and would see a net gain of nearly 50 House seats.
Rakich does note that polls could just as easily be wrong in the other direction this year — meaning, they could be underestimating Democrats — if researchers overcorrected for 2016 and 2020 errors.
That being said, prominent pollsters have indicated that the problems in 2016 and 2020 which led to overestimations of Democratic performance have not gone away. The most notable issue cited is nonresponse bias, whereby respondents who take polls are fundamentally different — i.e., are more Democratic — from those who do not.
Many pollsters, including my firm, have made strides to deal with the challenges associated with non-response bias, while also being mindful not to overcorrect. Further, polling in the 2018 midterm elections was highly accurate, which suggests that the mere absence of former President Donald Trump’s name on the ballot could lead to more predictive data.
Of course, this is just a hypothesis that could be proven — or disproven — after tomorrow’s election. But for now, we can extrapolate a few concrete conclusions from the data we currently have.
In the final stretch of the campaign, there was a demonstrable shift in the national political environment that benefited the Republican Party as the GOP honed in on attacking Democrats for costs and crime.
Republicans gained 2.5 points in the generic congressional ballot in just the last few weeks, which also coincided with the Senate forecast shifting to predict a GOP win after months of favoring Democrats.
Further, in terms of competitive gubernatorial races, Republicans now appear poised to flip Wisconsin, Nevada, and Kansas to GOP control — while holding Arizona — and could also win in Oregon for the first time in 40 years thanks to an unusual three-way race.
It is not uncommon for races to narrow in the weeks preceding the election. That being said, Republicans have even made substantial gains in contests in which extreme, far-right GOP candidates are challenging Democratic incumbents in states that Joe Biden won — i.e., the Georgia and Arizona Senate contests — as well as in Democratic strongholds, including New York and Oregon.
What does it say about the incumbent party when the voters who elected them just two years prior now prefer candidates who lack experience, who deny the results of the 2020 election, and who hold fundamentally backward views on social issues like abortion?
It tells us that the Democratic Party’s brand has become increasingly toxic and untenable. Polling by my firm this year found that the leftward movement of Democrats’ agenda and their focus on social issues at the expense of quality-of-life issues like high costs and rising crime has damaged the party politically.
While we will not be able to definitively draw this conclusion until after Tuesday’s election, current data strongly indicates that establishment Democrats will be ousted by extremist Republican candidates — an outcome that would force the Democratic Party to contend with a hard political truth in the coming weeks and months.
Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who served as an adviser to President Clinton and to the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg. His new book is “The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.”