DETROIT – The traditional indicators all say this year’s midterm elections should be absolutely terrible for the Democrats. Inflation is the highest it has been in most Americans’ memory.
Gasoline prices are at a record high. The stock market suffered scary losses in May; consumer confidence is low. Presidents, even popular ones, almost always suffer losses in their first midterms.
On average, the incumbent President’s party has lost 27 seats in the House and four in the Senate. In times of turmoil, they do worse. Republicans lost 48 seats in the House after Watergate. Bill Clinton’s Democrats lost 54 in the House and eight in the Senate in 1994.
They then lost a whopping 63 House seats in President Obama’s first midterm. Even popular Ronald Reagan lost 26. (Ask Toledo’s Ed Weber, swept out by Marcy Kaptur that year.)
So how badly will Democrats do this year?
One publisher whose views I respect told me he thought Democrats, who now control the House of Representatives by a narrow 222-213 margin, could lose close to 100 seats.
Could that possibly happen?
In politics, all things are possible; you could have been richer than Elon Musk if you had bet in 2002 that the next President would be a black guy with the middle name of Hussein.
You also could have made money if you’d bet, when the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal was exploding in 1998, that Democrats would do astonishingly well that year. But they did, losing only five House seats and none in the Senate, something that sent their leader, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, into retirement.
This year is different, however; the economy was humming along nicely in 1998, with little inflation. So Democrats are very likely to do worse, and almost certain to lose control of the House of Representatives. But there are reasons for thinking their losses may not be nearly as bad as some now think.
Here’s why: When Democrats suffered those devastating losses in 1994 and 2010, they started out with far more seats — 257 and 258 — than they have today, because they held far more swing seats.
No matter what, Republicans are not going to beat Democrats in safe districts like Debbie Dingell’s in Michigan or the district Marcia Fudge held in Cleveland.
Political scientist Alan Abramovitz, a professor at Emory University, and an expert on congressional elections, predicted in an April 15 article that Democrats will lose between 9 and 29 seats in the House, with the most likely number being 19.
Abramovitz, who is also a popular columnist for Congressional expert Larry Sabato’s newsletter Crystal Ball, added “it is even less likely that the party will experience a shellacking the size of which we’ve seen in some previous midterms,” because very few of the seats Democrats now hold in the House of Representatives are in districts President Trump carried in 2020.
What about the U.S. Senate?
Believe it or not, even if this is a really good year for Republicans, they could actually lose seats in the U.S. Senate. There, Democrats are likely to catch a big break due to math.
First of all, only a third of the U.S. Senate is elected every two years, and of the 34 seats up this time, Republicans control 20, Democrats only 14, and have a lot fewer to defend.
What’s more, every Democratic seat up for election this year is in a state Joe Biden carried in 2020.
Not only that: The vast majority of seats held by both parties are in little danger. No matter what, Democrats will never defeat Republicans in states like Arkansas, Alabama, Idaho or Kentucky. Similarly, Republicans have no chance in New York, California or Illinois. In fact, each party has no more than three or four seats that could change hands.
Democrats are most at risk of losing in New Hampshire, where Maggie Hassan won by only 1,017 votes in 2016; Georgia, where U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock barely prevailed in a runoff in January, 2021, Nevada, where first-termer Catherine Cortez Masto won by just two points, and Arizona, where astronaut Mark Kelly, the husband of gun violence victim Gabby Giffords, won a special election in 2020.
Republicans have far more turf to defend, but as prospects have worsened nationally for the Democrats, many of their once-vulnerable seats look less so. Ohio’s JD Vance, for example, now seems a favorite over Democrat Tim Ryan.
Republicans also seem likely to hold their other open seats in North Carolina and Missouri. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin may be in for a tough time; he promised to retire, but changed his mind, something that doesn’t tend to play well with voters anywhere.
The GOP could be in trouble in Pennsylvania, where Republican Pat Toomey is retiring. The Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, is popular, and won his May 17 primary by a landslide. Weeks after the election, Republicans still don’t have a nominee; Mehmet Oz, a surgeon and TV star was locked in a virtual tie with Dave McCormick, head of the nation’s largest hedge fund; it will be later this month before a recount is completed.
When everything shakes out, political scientist Abramovitz predicts that the most likely scenario is: No change whatsoever in the 50-50 tie in the U.S. Senate. He thinks Republicans could possibly gain as many as three seats — but so, he says, could Democrats.
The election is still more than five months away, and lots of things could change, but the picture is that GOP gains are likely,but not on the scale some think.
By the way – what will the midterms tell us about what voters will do in 2024? The answer to that is clear: Absolutely nothing!
Two years after their big midterm losses, Presidents Obama and Clinton were reelected fairly easily. After a better-than expected midterm result in 1990, George H.W. Bush lost badly.
Once again, in politics, you never can tell.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
