Philippa Kaur

Soon after the first results had been declared in the 2020 US midterm elections it became clear that the “red wave” of Republican victories many pundits had thought would hand them control of both houses of Congress was not materialising as expected. And what was especially marked was that candidates backed by the former president, Donald Trump, had not fared well.

Many of these Republican candidates had followed Trump in denying the validity of the results of the 2020 US presidential election, something which may affect his decision about whether to run for the presidency in 2024.

This year’s midterms are highly consequential, with the US president, Joe Biden, a Democrat, declaring that “democracy is at risk”. After the 2020 election, which should have been heralded for a record-breaking turnout instead engendered conspiracy theories from the right wing of the Republican party. These have sowed doubt on the legitimacy of the election results among a significant minority of the US population.

As highlighted in a poll conducted by CNN in July 2022, only 57% of registered Democrats, 38% of independent voters and 29% of registered Republicans “said they were at least somewhat confident that elections reflected the will of the people”. But the root causes for such levels of confidence in election outcomes – or lack thereof – remains different for each set of voters.

For Republicans, many still possess lingering doubts about the validity of the 2020 US presidential election – despite claims of pervasive voter fraud continuing to be entirely unsubstantiated. On the other hand, many Democrats express concerns about the representative nature of future elections. A great deal of these concerns are due to the introduction of new voting laws – limiting postal voting, for example,or expanding voter ID requirements and reducing the number of places people can vote – that some argue make it more difficult for people to vote. This is thought to disproportionately affect voters from ethnic minorities that typically tend to lean Democratic.

New voting laws

The Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan organisation that monitors states’ voting rights, has identified a raft of new legislation in multiple states that affect voting rights.

Since the beginning of 2021, lawmakers have passed at least 42 restrictive voting laws in 21 states. Among those laws, 33 contain at least one restrictive provision that is in effect for the midterms in 20 states.

The Brennan Center went on to assert that the ten restrictive state laws passed in 2022 is the second-highest number (behind 2021) of such laws enacted in any single year in the past decade. “This is particularly noteworthy since this is an election year, which typically has less legislative activity overall than nonelection years.”

Of those 20 states that have adopted new restrictive voting laws in time for the 2022 midterm elections, most are typically Republican-voting states (Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Wyoming). Nevertheless, even traditionally Democratic-voting New York has introduced new legislation that affects absentee voting.

But, perhaps of most significance – and possible impact – are the new voting laws introduced in the swing states of Florida, Iowa and New Hampshire as well as Arizona and Georgia – two states that only narrowly voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Voting underway in Georgia, which was a key swing state in the 2020 presidential election.
EPA-EFE/John Amis

Georgia’s S.B.202 is perhaps the new voting law – which even makes it illegal to supply food or drink to someone standing in line to vote – that has received the most attention. The American Civil Liberties Union has argued that the “bill attacks absentee voting, criminalises Georgians who give a drink of water to their neighbours, allows the state to takeover county elections, and retaliates against the elected secretary of state by replacing him with a state board of elections chair chosen by the legislature”.

The passage of the bill also received backlash from prominent corporations and prompted Major League Baseball to move the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver. Biden went so far as to describe Georgia’s new law as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

What these laws could mean

In light of these new voting laws coming in to force, many have expressed concerns about the possible implications for voters, particular people from ethnic minorities. Studies have shown that voting laws that require ID disproportionately effect voters of colour and result in an enlarged racial turnout gap. Voting laws that also remove mandatory early voting on Sundays – such as Georgia’s new bill that made it optional – reduce black voter turnout.

Despite these concerns, a recent study by American political scientist Alan Abramowitz argues that efforts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to suppress turnout by Democratic-leaning voter groups by imposing restrictions on absentee voting, early in-person voting and the use of drop boxes, or by requiring that voters present photo identification, are “unlikely to bear fruit.”

According to Abramowitz, “such efforts could even backfire by angering voters who are targets of these efforts and by causing left-leaning voting rights groups to increase their voter registration and GOTV [get out to vote] efforts.” Indeed, such arguments have been made by Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to defend the state’s new laws. He said recently that the fact that the number of people voting on Sunday before the elections is more than twice that of 2018, “shows that voters are enthusiastic, but most importantly, have the options available to get that vote in early.”

Of course, the true impact of these new voting laws will only be properly understood after the 2022 midterm elections have taken place. Even then, it may take some time to accurately account for turnout disparities that may have occurred as a consequence of such laws coming into effect.

Regardless, the ability to exercise one’s democratic choice by participating in free and fair elections should not be up for debate. The fact that such concerns are now widespread – on all sides of the political divide – is a worrying state for American democracy to be in. More

This year’s US midterms are on a razor’s edge.

In the summer it appeared the US supreme court’s ruling on abortion and some legislative successes – most notably Build Back Better, a post-COVID infrastructure and social policy package – benefited the Democrats. It was believed they would overturn the long-held pattern of the president’s party losing seats two years after election. But as autumn set in, the tide turned, with economic pains and crime rates thought to be fuelling a Republican resurgence.

With control of the House of Representatives now highly likely to pass to the Republicans, all eyes are on control of the US Senate. The chamber is currently controlled – just – by the Democrats and 35 of the 100 seats are in play.

The key races are in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona, each with their own specific issues, including secret abortions, stroke recoveries and fake police badges.

So, who will win? I don’t know. But there are two places to get relatively unspun data on what might happen: polls and gambling markets or so-called “prediction markets”. As an anthropologist, I have been looking at the rise in political gambling throughout 2022 to find out how speculating on political events shapes how politics is understood.

Election Polling

Using the latest polling in the US Senate race in Georgia as an example, a big advantage of election polling is that it’s easy for the public to understand. Once the numbers are crunched they can be expressed as: “Herschel Walker is on 48.8% while Raphael Warnock is on 47.4%”, which looks just the same as the vote count will look. In other words, Herschel Walker is in the lead and will probably win.

But polling itself is inexact and difficult to get right. Assuming polling organisations are not manipulating their methods to get a result that favours their preferred candidate, they will nevertheless be playing “whack-a-mole” with different biases.

These can include how participants are selected or how the questions are asked . And compensating for one bias can potentially cause another.

Read more:
Do biased polls skew elections? Experimental evidence says yes

The other issue is that polls can only ever measure a snapshot in time, and that snapshot is always in the past. In response to both these issues, informed audiences pay increasing attention to what’s known as “weighted polling averages”. These try to combine polls in a way that accounts for biases – such as compensating for how much Fox News polls typically overestimate Republican candidates or giving less weight to polls with a bad track record. The more bullish forecasters run projection models many times and report who wins most often.

Do betting markets know best?
studiostoks/Shutterstock

At the time of writing, FiveThirtyEight, the highest profile of these organisations, has several different versions of its polling model. One based solely on weighted polling has the Democrats winning the Senate 55 times out of 100.

The “deluxe” model, which incorporates indicators such as fundraising and experts’ ratings, has Republicans winning a majority in 54 out of 100 runs of their model. But less than two weeks ago, the deluxe prediction was the opposite: Democrats won 54 times out of 100.

Political betting

Political gambling, on the other hand, tells us something quite different. The odds simply tell you how much money you can expect to get – the rate of return – on different bets. In the UK, this rate has traditionally been set by gambling company employees called handicappers who have the job of making sure that bets are placed for both sides and that a profit for the companies is built in.

But the use of what’s known as betting exchanges has changed this somewhat. Betting exchanges are different to traditional betting sites in that they allow gamblers to bet against each other rather than a bookmaker.

Exchanges also allow players to bet against the odds of something happening. This is known as a lay bet or laying a bet, which simply means betting against an outcome. Most serious political gamblers bet with each other through the exchanges, where, for a fee, they can take either side of any bet, switching between being the bookie and the punter as and when it suits them.

One thing about the political gambling markets is that they are highly reactive to news. For instance, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Pennsylvania, Mehmet Oz, saw his odds shorten from 1.93 (52% likely to win) to 1.53 (65% likely) during his televised debate with Democrat John Fetterman. The latter visibly struggled to speak, clearly still affected by his recent stroke.

In this sense, markets react faster than the snappiest snap poll. The political gambling community itself would turn a pollster’s stomach. I have found it to be overwhelmingly made up of white, educated, males who are mathematically inclined and politically sophisticated (including a good number of politicians themselves). Yet there are quite a few statistical analyses that credit the markets collectively as more predicatively powerful than polls.

That said, betting market information expressed in probabilities – for example, Herschel Walker is given a 61% chance of winning and Raphael Warnock is given a 41% chance of winning – is much less intuitive to the public. This is because, unlike a poll, in betting markets a lead of 61% to 41% actually indicates a tight contest where either candidate could well win.

It’s also worth adding that the legal status of prediction markets and gambling on politics in the US is complicated at the moment. Many bets are placed but there’s a question mark over the legality of political betting as historically it was illegal in the US.

Predictions and forecasting

So, with all this in mind what can the polls and betting markets tell us about the results of the US mid-terms? On the British outlet Smarkets, the Republicans gained the upper hand decisively on the 20th of October – 11 days before they did on FiveThirtyEight.

On US and cryptocurrency sites, such as PredictIt and Polymarket which style themselves as “prediction markets”, the shift came earlier still.

Prices on Smarkets rate the Republicans as 65% likely to control the Senate. Punters are significantly more bullish on this than the predictions of FiveThirtyEight (45% on polls alone, 54% with other metrics) and most other polling aggregators.

Who is correct? We will soon see. I do have one prediction though, the more tumultuous and data-heavy our democratic politics becomes, the more influential the highly reactive odds from political gambling will be. More

From the US to Brazil to India, deepening political polarisation is used as a frame through which to see a lot of 21st-century politics. But what can actually be done to depolarise deeply divided societies, particularly democracies? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast we speak to a political scientist and a philosopher trying to find answers to that question.

When a country is deeply polarised it may feel that there’s no way back. But that’s not what history tells us. Jennifer McCoy, a political scientist at Georgia State University in the US, is studying cases of depolarisation from around the world over the past century to see what lessons they have for today. She’s found that in places that have successfully depolarised, three-quarters “happened under conditions of major systemic interruption”. That could have been an independence struggle, a civil or international war, a foreign intervention, “or it was a regime change mostly from an authoritarian to a democratic type of political government”.

Depolarisation within liberal democracies is rarer, but it does happen – and McCoy points to South Korea and Bolivia as recent examples. Her research has now begun identifying a couple of fundamental conditions that countries which have successfully depolarised, and sustained it, can think about, which she talks to us about in this episode.

Meanwhile, Robert Talisse, a political philosopher at Vanderbilt University in the US, identifies another type of division which is dangerous for democracy that he calls belief polarisation. It’s a cognitive phenomenon in which members of like-minded groups adopt increasingly extreme positions. “They become more dismissive of any countervailing evidence,” he says. “They become less willing to listen to dissenting voices, and importantly, they become more internally conformist.”

Talisse doesn’t believe polarisation can ever be eliminated – only managed. And he has a couple of suggestions for how. “Good democratic citizenship requires that we sometimes do non-political things with others, but it also requires that we sometimes do political things all by ourselves,” he says.

To find out more listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly.

This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. A transcript of this episode will be available soon.

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