Midterms 2022 Predictions: Who Will Win in These Eight Races?

My theory of why Dr. Mehmet Oz will win the Senate race in Pennsylvania isn’t an obvious one — John Fetterman’s debate performance tugging his poll numbers downward, undecided voters breaking for Republicans generally. Rather, it’s what you might call the law of the conservation of anti-incumbent anger, which holds that if voters want to punish the incumbent party and find one path blocked, they’ll choose the other path even if they aren’t in love with the candidate it requires them to pick.

This law would benefit Dr. Oz because the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, seems unacceptable to many swing voters, trailing the Democrat, Josh Shapiro, by a healthy, stable margin. A certain kind of political conventional wisdom expects Mr. Mastriano’s unpopularity to drag Dr. Oz down — because with the decline of ticket splitting, the theory goes, every Shapiro voter is a little more likely to be a Fetterman voter as well.

But it might be the reverse: Every swing voter who’s tired of inflation and irritated at the Biden administration but feels compelled to vote Democratic in the governor’s race will be a little more inclined to choose Dr. Oz for Senate, even if they don’t particularly like him. As long as there are enough Pennsylvanians who feel unhappy with the Democrats, that is, the unacceptability of Mr. Mastriano might be just what Dr. Oz needs to make the last-minute leap to 51 percent.

In 1994, the moderate Republican George Pataki shocked the sitting Democratic governor, Mario Cuomo, by ousting him in a stunning upset. Lee Zeldin won’t have the same luck. After casting his lot with the extremist and isolationist wing of his party, Mr. Zeldin, a Republican congressman, is too far out of step with the average New Yorker to win. But a narrow loss by Mr. Zeldin, which I think we’ll see, should wake up Democrats to the fact that some of his message resonated with voters in the Empire State. Lest we forget, some people will always struggle to vote for a competent woman, and all states are red states at heart. As Malcolm X reminds us: “As long as you are south of the Canadian border, you are South.”

Ms. Hochul has what she needs to overcome these obstacles: She has kept the ship steady during Covid (which is still very much real), taken steps to protect abortion rights, provided relief for small businesses and, after roughly 14 months in Albany, can point to a strong track record of policy victories that have had a measurable effect on the lives of New Yorkers from Buffalo to Long Island, from the passage of a New York State voting rights act to the strengthening of gun laws. Can Mr. Zeldin say as much about his record in Congress? His most prominent stances have been to deny the 2020 election results and to support the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Ultimately, I believe New Yorkers can tell the difference between a problem solver and a fearmonger.

Herschel Walker will win the Georgia Senate race — and he will prevail with more than 50 percent of the vote, defeating Raphael Warnock in a single round and sparing the state a runoff in December.

For all the attention focused on Mr. Walker’s weaknesses as a candidate — above all, his turbulent personal life — his strength as a candidate is relative to Mr. Warnock’s previous Republican opponent, Kelly Loeffler. She was an appointed senator whose background as a financial executive was hardly the thing to inspire enthusiasm from an increasingly populist G.O.P. base. She was not a good fit for the party, yet she lost the runoff election against Mr. Warnock by just two points.

Mr. Walker is a football hero — a perfect pick for today’s G.O.P. He will improve on Ms. Loeffler’s showing with more favorable conditions. Republican voters in January 2021 were divided and demoralized by the results of the 2020 presidential election and by Donald Trump’s refusal to accept them.

With midterms usually favoring the party that doesn’t hold the White House and inflation creating a hostile climate for incumbent Democrats, Mr. Walker can be assured of a more Republican-friendly electorate than Ms. Loeffler had in the runoff.

Kari Lake is going to declare victory regardless of what happens, but I fear she’s really going to win, because she delivers her febrile MAGA message with a news anchor’s airbrushed panache. Meanwhile, Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s otherwise impressive secretary of state, has run an inexplicably weak campaign. In theory, I understand her refusal to debate Ms. Lake: Debating conspiracy theorists is usually a futile exercise, often serving to elevate false claims that can’t be fact-checked on the fly. But Ms. Lake, despite the nuttiness of her ideas, is not a fringe figure who can be marginalized by being ignored. And Ms. Hobbs’s refusal to debate has, it seems, become a major issue in the race; Arizona Republic’s Laurie Roberts called it “a new level of political malpractice.”

Obviously, losing a debate is also damaging, as we saw with John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. But given that Ms. Hobbs has fallen behind in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, I’m not sure what she had to lose. Watching from afar, I feel overwhelming despair, both for what a Lake victory could mean for the 2024 election and for Ms. Lake’s emergence as a national political figure in her own right.

Arizona’s elections have been closely fought since 2018, when both Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Senator Kyrsten Sinema won by the slimmest of margins and each barely secured 50 percent of the vote. In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by just 10,457 votes.

In her contest this year, Ms. Hobbs is hoping for a sizable Latino vote. Through the steady voter registration work of groups like Living United for Change in Arizona and others, the Latino vote has grown steadily in power over the past few years: According to presidential exit polls, Mr. Biden received over 150,000 more Latino votes in Arizona in 2020 than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. The Census Bureau’s biennial population survey found that there were nearly 200,000 more Latinos eligible to vote in 2020 than there were in 2016.

And exit polls show that a majority of Arizona Latinos have consistently supported Democratic candidates, most recently backing Mr. Biden with 61 percent of their votes and backing Mark Kelly with 65 percent.

What many are missing is that the electorate is shifting as more young people turn 18 and enter the electorate. Sixty-four percent of all Arizonans under 18 are people of color. The demographic trends in Arizona clearly tilt the electorate in the Democrats’ direction, and the on-the-ground voter mobilization infrastructure will likely tip the election in Ms. Hobbs’s favor.

I cringe to think about this race. Heading into the cycle, Mr. Johnson was the Senate’s most vulnerable Republican — as he should have been. The man is a disgrace, especially with his anti-vaccine lunacy and Jan. 6 conspiracy mongering. If only he had stuck with his pledge to serve just two terms!

The Democratic nominee, the lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, jumped out to a solid lead early on, especially among independents. But by late last month, Mr. Johnson had closed the gap and was running slightly ahead in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. This smells an awful lot like the senator’s winning trajectory in previous campaigns. He is a come-from-behind kind of guy.

Like elsewhere, inflation is the top issue for Wisconsinites, and they are unimpressed with how President Biden has been handling things. Public safety is also a major concern, and Mr. Johnson has relentlessly hammered Mr. Barnes as a radical leftist who’s weak on crime. Conservatives have gleefully played up Mr. Barnes’s more contentious past remarks on race relations and law enforcement.

To overcome the political headwinds his party is facing this cycle, Mr. Barnes needed to dazzle. Instead, my inner pessimist tells me we’re in for six more years of Mr. Johnson acting the fool on the Senate stage.

OK, it’ll be tough. At best, Ohio is a purple state, and given the popularity of some other Republican candidates on the ballot, like Gov. Mike DeWine, Mr. Ryan would require a really good chunk of ticket splitting.

But his big advantage is having a terrible Republican to run against. J.D. Vance became famous as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and returned to his home state in 2017, allegedly to start a nonprofit that would wage a powerful fight against problems like drug abuse and joblessness.

Who dared to say he was only really interested in preparing for a political career? Well, his charity raised just a little over $200,000, which supported a tiny staff that kept it going until 2021, when the whole venture quietly passed away.

Meanwhile, Mr. Vance became the Senate nominee. Even though Republicans complained over the summer that he wasn’t spending nearly enough time schlepping around to state fairs and fund-raisers. Hard to really knock the socks off Republican voters when you’re the guy Donald Trump said “is kissing my ass, he wants my support so much.” While you’re standing right there.

So Mr. Ryan’s my bet. I’m probably more interested in Ohio than most of you are, since Cincinnati is my hometown. Don’t want to think of it sending a dweeb like J.D. Vance to Washington.

It’s no surprise that two Latinas are vying for what has become one of the state’s most competitive races. The 27th Congressional District — where I grew up and where about 70 percent of voters are Hispanic — has switched between Democrats and Republicans since 2019, when the first Latina to be elected to Congress, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, retired. The district encompasses wealthy suburban areas like Coral Gables and Pinecrest and has become, like the rest of Florida, redder with the influx of monied pandemic émigrés. In 2020, it was almost evenly split but went for Joe Biden by a thin margin. Since then, Gov. Ron DeSantis targeted the area in his aggressive redistricting push and the seat is now safer than ever for Republicans.

The Democrat Annette Taddeo, a former state senator who was born in Colombia and whose father was kidnapped by Marxist rebels, has mounted a strong campaign. But Ms. Salazar, a former TV presenter who has had an unimpressive run so far in Congress, will benefit from Mr. DeSantis’s star power and the demographic winds, which have more broadly hurt Sunshine State Democrats.

The big takeaway from another Republican victory in what had been a swing district? Florida is no longer a purple state. Republicans have managed — with planning from Tallahassee, Democratic stumbles and demographic good fortune — to paint it red.

Source: Elections - nytimes.com