What’s going to happen in the 2022 midterms? Historically, the party out of power typically wins in midterms elections, meaning that Republicans have that as an advantage. Inflation and economic concerns are also crushing the nation, and voters tend to punish the party in power when things are bleak. So again, the advantage goes to the Republicans.
Democrat experts have been predicting doom for their power for months now. A couple of months ago, Bill Clinton pollster Doug Sosnik said that the Democrats’ fate in the upcoming midterms couldn’t be changed at this point, as past elections have proven that the voters had already “lock[ed] in on their views of the state of the country and their expectations for the future.”
“In the last four midterm elections, by June the public had made up its mind about the leadership in Washington and how they were going to vote in November,” he wrote.
Despite the grim diagnosis, Sosnick believed that if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it could change the trajectory of the midterms. However, a CNN poll taken after the Dobbs draft majority opinion was leaked found that enthusiasm to vote in November increased slightly for both the left and the right, while the generic Republican edge over Democrats even increased slightly. Moreover, after the final ruling was released, an analysis of generic polling suggested that the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling has had minimal impact on the forthcoming midterms. Ultimately, the voters are far less concerned about abortion now than they are with economic issues.
Even CNN acknowledged back in May that polls showed Biden was near “the point of no return with Americans on the economy” and dangerously close to an “irreversible severing of public confidence in his capacity to deliver prosperity and financial security.”
In the latest Rasmussen generic poll, the GOP’s advantage actually improved.
However…
Michael McKenna, the president of MWR Strategies, argues at The Daily Caller “that there is little data that suggests that Republicans are on their way to a historic realignment in the 2022 elections.”
How is that, you ask? According to him, generic ballot polling is “all over the map,” as evidence that “Republicans have yet to seal the deal,” even though Democrats appear to be in trouble “because of the national mood, because of concerns about inflation and the economy, because of the general hopelessness of Team Biden.”
He pointed at a recent ABC/Washington Post poll that showed Republican advantages on the key issues for voters, including inflation, crime, and the economy, yet only a one-point advantage in the generic ballot. Then he pointed at a Harvard/Harris poll that similarly showed terrible indicators for Democrats, yet the generic ballow was evenly split.
“These results are consistent with other lots of opinion research executed over the last few months, which consistently indicates voters identify both the economy and president as failing enterprises,” McKenna argues. “At the same time, voters seem unwilling to commit fully to changing congressional horses, as the generic ballot results bounce around both the margin of error and the centerline.”
I’ll be the first to admit that Republicans are definitely not immune to finding ways to steal defeat from the jaws of victory. Still, with more bad economic news on the horizon, it’s hard to see how Democrats can overcome everything working against them.
