For Republicans, is it about the environment or the exposure?
There aren't many low-lying political areas left that can get swallowed up in a political storm.
With the midterm elections now 20 weeks away, the question isn’t whether Republicans are going to have a bad night on Nov. 3. The question now is just how bad it will be. To be clear, poor elections are the norm for a party holding the White House, but the extent of the defeat varies enormously.
The party in the White House has suffered a net loss of House seats in 18 of the 20 midterms since the end of World War II (90 percent); the exceptions were Bill Clinton’s second midterm in 1998 and George W. Bush’s first midterm in 2002. In both of those cases, the president’s job-approval ratings were in the 60s. In four of the 18 losing cycles for the president’s party—1962, 1986, 1990, and 2022—House losses were modest, in single digits. In seven, the losses were 40 or more seats. The worst were the Democratic losses of 63 and 54 seats in 2010 and 1994, respectively.
The Senate, with just a third of its seats up every two years and only a half dozen or so truly competitive, has a pattern that is less clear, with results that are more idiosyncratic. The party occupying the White House suffered a net loss of Senate seats in 13 out of the 20 cycles (65 percent), they broke even in one (1998), and actually gained in five (1962, 1970, 1982, 2002, 2018, 2022).
On a macro-political level, how stiff are the partisan headwinds Republicans are having to contend with? This is partly a function of whether President Trump’s increasingly unusual behavior and priorities remain largely about him, or whether they metastasize into GOP candidacies up and down the ballot. Last week’s column looked at a new Fox News poll in Ohio that suggested the damage was no longer confined to Trump but could affect turnout levels and the behavior of swing voters.
There are two major factors in determining how bad congressional elections can be: environment and exposure. The environmental factor concerns the political climate. With midterms generally referenda on a sitting president, or on the party in power, this is usually measured by that president’s job-approval ratings, or alternatively, the generic congressional ballot, a rough indicator of the direction and velocity of partisan winds.
The other, more often ignored factor, is exposure: How many seats are actually in the politically low-lying areas, at the most risk of flooding? A candidate of the president’s party in a safe state or district will likely see their victory percentage knocked down a few points, but there is a big difference between that and actually losing a seat.
Starting with the environment: Trump’s approval ratings are running much worse than those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama leading into their 1994 and 2010 debacles, and worse than Trump in 2018 as well, suggesting larger losses. In both the New York Times average of recent polling on Trump’s approval ratings and Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin average, Trump’s approval is a net -19, with 39 percent approving and 58 percent disapproving.
The gold-standard NBC News Poll, conducted jointly by Hart Research (D) and Public Opinion Strategies (R), released on Sunday, had Trump’s approval rating among registered voters at -15, with 42 percent approving and 57 percent disapproving.
On the generic ballot test, the numbers are bad for the GOP, but not horrific. The current RealClearPolitics average shows a Democratic lead of 5.8 percentage points. Since the beginning of this calendar year, Democrats have led in 118 polls that RCP reported, there were three ties, and Republicans led in one. Of course, the House is hardly determined by a national popular-vote winner.
That brings us to the element of exposure. Assuming no vacant seats, the narrowest possible House majority is 218. Immediately after each of the last three elections, the winning party had 222 or fewer seats. This is a function of an evenly divided country; it’s difficult for either party to get much of a majority under the current dynamics. The House is completely sorted, with no fish-out-of-water members, other than those washed ashore by the mid-decade gerrymandering.
Thus, just 35 House races are currently rated as competitive, Toss Up, or Lean or Likely Republican or Democrat; just 28 seats are either Likely Democrat or Likely Republican, meaning potentially competitive. This makes for a very narrow battleground—hardly a target-rich environment for either party.
In the Senate, where the outcome in just a handful of key races will determine which party holds a majority next November, there are a few worth watching closely.
Michigan is the only Democratic-held seat in real danger. The GOP nomination is locked down for former Rep. Mike Rogers, the 2024 GOP nominee who lost to then-Rep. Elissa Slotkin by a third of a percentage point, 48.64 to 48.30 percent. Democrats have three Senate contenders who are roughly tied in polling. Two of the three, Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, don’t figure to be problematic for the party. The challenge for Democrats is if the third candidate, former Wayne County health director Abdul El-Sayed, were to win the nomination. El-Sayed has some mainstream support, but he’s most notably endorsed by a parade of progressives, from Sen. Bernie Sanders to Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Summer Lee, and Rashida Tlaib. In short, if El-Sayed wins the primary, Democrats have little chance of holding the seat.
Barrels of ink, both physical and digital, have gone into stories about the Maine and Texas Senate races. Democrats in the former and Republicans in the latter nominated candidates who were risky choices, as likely to create races centered around themselves than about things that might maximize their party’s chances of winning that seat. In Maine, is it still possible that Graham Platner can make the race about Trump, who is hardly popular in the state? Or will it be about himself and his personal baggage? Texas Republicans decided to go all in on the ethically challenged state Attorney General Ken Paxton; staying with the incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn, would have been a far safer choice.
So there is plenty to watch and ponder on both the macro and micro sides.