The last two Democratic presidents with approval ratings matching Biden’s in their first midterm (Bill Clinton in 1994 and Barack Obama in 2010) saw their party suffer a net loss of more than 50 House seats, at least five Senate seats and at least five governorships. Still, Democrats look to have scored an incredible achievement in the 2022 midterms, especially given how unpopular polls showed Biden was. Perhaps the lack of success by these GOP candidates shouldn’t be a surprise given that some 60% of voters – both in pre-election surveys and the exit polls – believe Biden was legitimately elected. None of them has been projected a winner, and only Republican Kari Lake of Arizona has any chance of winning. Republicans nominated 2020 election deniers for governor in a number of blue or swing states. We see this in gubernatorial elections, as well. In every Senate race (save Georgia) that Inside Elections had rated as a toss-up or only tilting toward a party before the election, more voters said the Republican candidate’s views were too extreme than said the same for the Democratic candidate. The exit polls bear out Republicans’ “candidate problem” in the 2022 midterms. (This, of course, is false, as Biden won the election.) Many of those Republicans were endorsed by Trump and had said (at least at one point) that they believed he had won the 2020 election. Interactive: How 2020 election deniers did in their 2022 midterm races Democrats in pretty much all the key races were better liked than their opponents. Pre-election polling showed that Republicans in all the key races had negative net favorability ratings. Analysts, myself included, noted that Republicans seemed to have a candidate likability problem. The ability for Democrats to defy expectations this year starts simply with whom Republicans nominated for statewide elections. Bush respectively) with approval ratings north of 60%. The polling from 19 shows the presidents at the time (John F. We don’t have any polling from 1934, though considering Franklin Roosevelt won two landslide victories on either end of that midterm, he was likely quite popular. His approval rating was 44% in the exit polls. The shocking thing about this year (assuming the current trends hold) is that Biden is quite unpopular. (1986 is the only other post-1934 midterm, regardless of when it fell in a presidency, when the president’s party had a net gain of governorships, though Ronald Reagan’s GOP had massive losses in the Senate that year.) We already know, based on projected races, that this will be the first time since 1934 that the president’s party had a net gain of governorships in a president’s first midterm. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty ImagesĪnalysis: Democrats would have gotten crushed this election without young votersĭemocrats’ performance this year has funneled down to the state level as well. Since 1922, there have been three previous instances of the president’s party gaining (or losing no) Senate seats and losing fewer than 10 House seats in the president’s first midterm.Īll of them – 1934, 19 – are thought to be monumental achievements for the president’s party and major exceptions to rule, which suggests the party controlling the White House usually loses seats in a midterm.Īttendees cheer during a rally for gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore and the Democratic Party with US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden on the eve of the US midterm elections, at Bowie State University in Bowie, Maryland, on November 7, 2022. Still, the election results were extremely unusual. So just what happened? It’s pretty clear that general election voters punished Republican candidates they saw as too extreme – on issues such as abortion and/or for being too closely tied to former President Donald Trump. Instead, Biden and the Democrats are in a position to have one of the four best midterms for the party controlling the White House in the last century. That should especially be the case when there is once-in-a-generation inflation and when the vast majority of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. Midterms are supposed to be the time for the opposition party to shine. Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Getty Imagesĭemocrats will keep control of the Senate, CNN projects The Capitol building is seen through the American flags in Washington DC on October 20, 2022.
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