Midterm Elections (2022)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Struggle to Energize Their Base as Frustrations Mount

      by

      Even as President Biden achieves some significant victories, Democrats are warning that many of their most loyal supporters see inaction and broken campaign promises.Democrats across the party are raising alarms about sinking support among some of their most loyal voters, warning the White House and congressional leadership that they are falling short on campaign promises and leaving their base unsatisfied and unmotivated ahead of next year’s midterm elections.President Biden has achieved some major victories, signing a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill and moving a nearly $2 trillion social policy and climate change bill through the House. But some Democrats are warning that many of the voters who put them in control of the federal government last year may see little incentive to return to the polls in the midterms — reigniting a debate over electoral strategy that has been raging within the party since 2016.As the administration focuses on those two bills, a long list of other party priorities — expanding voting rights, enacting criminal justice reform, enshrining abortion rights, raising the federal minimum wage to $15, fixing a broken immigration system — have languished or died in Congress. Negotiations in the Senate are likely to further dilute the economic and climate proposals that animated Mr. Biden’s campaign — if the bill passes at all. And the president’s central promise of healing divisions and lowering the political temperature has failed to be fruitful, as violent language flourishes and threats to lawmakers flood into Congress.Interviews with Democratic lawmakers, activists and officials in Washington and in key battleground states show a party deeply concerned about retaining its own supporters. Even as strategists and vulnerable incumbents from battleground districts worry about swing voters, others argue that the erosion of crucial segments of the party’s coalition could pose more of a threat in midterm elections that are widely believed to be stacked against it.Already, Mr. Biden’s approval ratings have taken a sharp fall among some of his core constituencies, showing double-digit declines among Black, Latino, female and young voters. Those drops have led to increased tension between the White House and progressives at a time of heightened political anxiety, after Democrats were caught off-guard by the intensity of the backlash against them in elections earlier this month. Mr. Biden’s plummeting national approval ratings have also raised concerns about whether he would — or should — run for re-election in 2024.Not all of the blame is being placed squarely on the shoulders of Mr. Biden; a large percentage of frustration is with the Democratic Party itself.“It’s frustrating to see the Democrats spend all of this time fighting against themselves and to give a perception to the country, which the Republicans are seizing on, that the Democrats can’t govern,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who leads the A.M.E. churches across Georgia. “And some of us are tired of them getting pushed around, because when they get pushed around, African Americans get shoved.”Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading House progressive, warned that the party is at risk of “breaking trust” with vital constituencies, including young people and people of color.“There’s all this focus on ‘Democrats deliver, Democrats deliver,’ but are they delivering on the things that people are asking for the most right now?” she said in an interview. “In communities like mine, the issues that people are loudest and feel most passionately about are the ones that the party is speaking to the least.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats acknowledge that a significant part of the challenge facing their party is structural: With slim congressional majorities, the party cannot pass anything unless the entire caucus agrees. That empowers moderate Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia to block some of the biggest promises to their supporters, including a broad voting rights bill.A more aggressive approach may not lead to eventual passage of an immigration or voting rights law, but it would signal to Democrats that Mr. Biden is fighting for them, said Faiz Shakir, a close adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Mr. Shakir and others worry that the focus on the two significant pieces of legislation — infrastructure and the spending bill — won’t be enough to energize supporters skeptical of the federal government’s ability to improve their lives.“I’m a supporter of Biden, a supporter of the agenda, and I’m frustrated and upset with him to allow this to go in the direction it has,” said Mr. Shakir, who managed Mr. Sanders’s presidential run in 2020. “It looks like we have President Manchin instead of President Biden in this debate.”He added: “It’s made the president look weak.”The divide over how much attention to devote to staunch Democratic constituencies versus moderate swing voters taps into a political debate that’s long roiled the party: Is it more important to energize the base or to persuade swing voters? And can Democrats do both things at once?White House advisers argue that winning swing voters, particularly the suburban independents who play an outsize role in battleground districts, is what will keep Democrats in power — or at least curb the scale of their midterm losses. They see the drop among core groups of Democrats as reflective of a challenging political moment — rising inflation, the continued pandemic, uncertainty about schools — rather than unhappiness with the administration’s priorities.“It’s November of 2021, not September of 2022,” John Anzalone, Mr. Biden’s pollster, said. “If we pass Build Back Better, we have a great message going into the midterms, when the bell rings on Labor Day, about what we’ve done for people.”Even pared back from the $3.5 trillion plan that Mr. Biden originally sought, the legislation that passed the House earlier this month offers proposals transforming child care, elder care, prescription drugs and financial aid for college, as well as making the largest investment ever to slow climate change. But some of the most popular policies will not be felt by voters until long after the midterm elections, nor will the impact of many of the infrastructure projects.Already, Democrats face a challenging education effort with voters. According to a survey conducted by Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm, only about a third of white battleground voters think that either infrastructure or the broader spending bill will help them personally. Among white Democratic battleground voters, support for the bills is only 72 percent.Representative James E. Clyburn, the high-ranking House Democrat from South Carolina and a close ally of Mr. Biden, said the way the bills were negotiated and reported in the media had voters in his district asking him about money that was cut from initiatives rather than the sweeping benefits.“People stopped me on the streets saying we cut money from our H.B.C.U.s,” Mr. Clyburn said, pointing out that more funding for historically Black colleges and universities will be added in the coming years of the administration. “So while everybody keeps blaming the Democrats, Democrats, Democrats, it’s the Senate rules that are archaic, and stop us from passing these bills.”Mr. Clyburn and other lawmakers say they struggle to explain the vacillations of congressional wrangling to their voters, who expected that by electing Democrats to the majority they would be able to pass their agenda.“Nobody thought about the filibuster and the realities,” said Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee. “People don’t understand the Byrd rule and the parliamentarian and the things we have to put up with. It does lower their enthusiasm.”Atlanta voters cast their ballots last November. Mr. Biden won more than 90 percent of Black voters in Georgia, but inaction on voting rights has weakened their support.Jessica Mcgowan/Getty ImagesAs they’ve begun to do with the infrastructure bill, the White House plans an aggressive approach to sell the social policy legislation once it passes, dispatching Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other top officials for events across the country.“There is a real window of opportunity to show the cooperation and competence people expect from us,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey and a leader of a moderate wing of lawmakers in congressional negotiations. “It’s up to us to communicate what we just accomplished for families and for the country.”Yet many activists say the White House is to blame for failing to aggressively push for the central promises made to their supporters during the campaign. They said they wanted Mr. Biden to leverage both his bully pulpit and executive powers to tackle student loans, criminal justice, immigration reform and other issues.“We’re talking about democracy in such a crisis and here we are with very few legislative days left and the lack of urgency is deafening,” said Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, a minister and civil rights advocate who has helped lead the response from faith leaders on voting rights. “For the president to say he can only do one thing at a time is simply not true.”Lorella Praeli, the president of Community Change Action, a group advocating immigration reform, offered a terse warning to the administration about keeping Latino support: “There are no participation trophies.”Some of the most popular policies in the social safety net bill that passed the House won’t be felt by voters until long after the midterm elections.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesAlready, the national environment looks difficult for Democrats, who may lose seats in redistricting and face the historical trend of a president’s party losing seats during his first term in office.Tomás Robles, the co-chair of Lucha, a Latino civil rights group based in Phoenix that is widely credited with helping Democrats win the state in 2020, said people were “disillusioned and unmotivated” by what they had seen in the first 10 months of Democratic governance.“When you’re not passing bold progressive policies, you have to be able to show something,” Mr. Robles said. “President Biden gets the most blame because he’s the most visible, but it’s the party as a whole that has failed its voters.”In Georgia, inaction on voting rights has fueled a steepening decline of enthusiasm for Mr. Biden among Black voters. The New Georgia Project, a progressive civil rights group, conducted a study last month of Black voters in Georgia, and found that 66 percent approved of the job Mr. Biden was doing, and 51 percent thought that his administration was working to address the concerns of the Black community. In 2020, Mr. Biden won more than 90 percent of Black voters in Georgia.Representative Cori Bush, a progressive whose district includes large parts of St. Louis, said the social safety net and climate provisions included in the bill that passed the House could not be pared down any further. And, she added, the White House has to follow through on other provisions if Democrats want to excite Black voters — perhaps the party’s most loyal constituency — ahead of the midterm elections.“Do I believe Black community members will be happy to see these investments? Absolutely. Will they feel like this has changed their lives in some ways? Yes,” Ms. Bush said. “But will this be enough to excite? When you’re excited, that means that you feel like something else is coming. You have hope that more is happening. So what’s next?” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      How Higher Prices This Holiday Season Could Cost Democrats, Too

      by

      Rising prices for gas and a holiday meal could come back to bite Democrats, who fear that inflation may upend their electoral prospects in the 2022 midterms.AUBURN HILLS, Mich. — Samantha Martin, a single mother shopping ahead of Thanksgiving, lamented how rising gas and grocery prices have eaten away at the raise she got this year as a manager at McDonald’s.Gas “is crazy out of hand,” Ms. Martin said as she returned a shopping cart at an Aldi discount market in Auburn Hills, a Detroit suburb, to collect a 25-cent deposit.Her most recent fillup was $3.59 a gallon, about $1 more than the price in the spring. Her raise, to $16 an hour from $14, was “pretty good, but it’s still really hard to manage,” Ms. Martin said. “I got a raise just to have the gas go up, and that’s what my raise went to.”Ms. Martin, 35, a political independent, doesn’t blame either party for inflation, but in a season of discontent, her disapproval fell more heavily on Democrats who run Washington. She voted for President Biden but is disappointed with him and his party. “I think I would probably give somebody else a shot,” she said.As Americans go on the road this week to travel for family gatherings, the higher costs of driving and one of the most expensive meals of the year have alarmed Democrats, who fear that inflation may upend their electoral prospects in the midterms. Republicans are increasingly confident that a rising cost of living — the ultimate kitchen-table issue — will be the most salient factor in delivering a red wave in 2022.Democrats’ passage in quick succession of the $1 trillion infrastructure law and, in the House, of a $2.2 trillion social safety net and climate bill, promise once-in-a-generation investments that Democratic candidates plan to run on next year, with many of the policies in the bills broadly popular.But, despite rising wages and falling unemployment, Democrats are also in danger of being swept aside in a hostile political environment shaped in large part by the highest inflation in 30 years, which has defied early predictions that it would be short-lived as the country pulled out of the pandemic.With control of Congress and many key governor seats at stake, Republicans are pointing to public and private surveys that show inflation is linked to Americans’ falling approval of Mr. Biden. And, given the wholesale gerrymanders drawn, particularly by Republicans, in the current round of congressional redistricting, the Democrats would face a high bar in keeping their paper-thin majority in the House of Representatives, even in a favorable environment. President Biden talking with an assembly line worker as he looks over an electric Hummer by General Motors during a plant visit in Detroit last week. Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe president’s recent tour of ports, bridges and auto plants — which was meant to promote the infrastructure legislation — was overshadowed in part by inflation anxieties. As he test drove an electric Hummer at a General Motors plant in Detroit this week, his message of a future of zero-emission vehicles was eclipsed by a present in which Americans are driving more miles in conventional vehicles, contributing to soaring gas prices.Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a vulnerable House district, wrote to Mr. Biden this week that inflation was the most pressing concern of her constituents. A former C.I.A. analyst in Iraq, she urged the president to pressure Saudi Arabia to increase oil output.Ms. Slotkin, who won her seat in the midterm wave of 2018, is one of two Michigan Democrats in highly competitive districts that include the Detroit suburbs. In the Trump years, Democrats had mixed results in the populous region, advancing in white-collar communities but losing ground with their traditional union supporters.In an interview, Ms. Slotkin said that during a recent visit home, she heard constantly about the high costs of gas and groceries, and experienced them herself. “I buy groceries, I drive a ton,” she said. “Thanksgiving week is going to be more expensive by a long shot than last Thanksgiving.”[This Year’s Thanksgiving Feast Will Wallop the Wallet.]She acknowledged the political peril that rising consumer prices could pose for her party if it continues next year. “Kitchen-table issues affect Michigan and the Midwest more than any other national issue going on in Washington,” she said.In interviews with voters in suburban Detroit, including from Ms. Slotkin’s district and that of the second vulnerable Democrat, Representative Haley Stevens, residents almost universally acknowledged the pain of rising prices on their budgets. But it was unclear, from their accounts, that Democrats would suffer politically. Most voters ascribed blame according to their party leanings — as they do on almost all issues in an era of hyperpolarization.Margie Kulaga of Hazel Park, a Trump voter in 2020, said she paid 49 cents a pound, up from 33 cents a pound last year, for a 23-pound turkey that she had just bought from a Kroger market. Prices for meat and eggs have risen by 11.9 percent in the Midwest from a year ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.“I blame Biden, his whole administration,’’ Ms. Kulaga, 55, said. “I never used to cut coupons, but now I do.”On the other hand, Gloria Bailey, 63, a special-education teacher who lives in the suburb of Redford, is a Biden supporter who said rising costs should not be laid at his doorstep.“The coronavirus has affected a lot of shipments and deliveries and crops and drivers who bring the food to market,” she said.Container ships waiting to enter the Port of Los Angeles in October.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThis month, Republicans broadly advanced in elections across the country, especially in Virginia, prompting forecasts of a similar tide in 2022. Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governorship after emphasizing the rights of parents to control how schools operate and what they teach.But Mr. Youngkin’s chief strategist, Jeff Roe, said the “big takeaway” of the election was how the rising cost of living had significantly motivated voters, an issue that was little covered by the news media. He predicted it would drive Senate and House races around the country next year (many of which he and his firm have a hand in).Biden’s ​​Social Policy Bill at a GlanceCard 1 of 6A narrow vote. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Just How Bad Is It Out There for Democrats?

      by

      Democratic support has plunged nationally in recent months. Exactly how far it has fallen is hotly debated in both parties.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.In the heady aftermath of Republicans winning the Virginia governorship this month, Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader who hopes to become speaker after the 2022 midterm elections, made a bold claim at the Capitol.“If you’re a Democrat and President Biden won your seat by 16 points, you’re in a competitive race next year,” McCarthy declared. “You are no longer safe.”It was, by most measures, more bullish hyperbole than sincere prognostication. There are 276 House seats that Biden won by less than that — far more than Republicans have held in nearly a century. (As of now, Democrats hold a narrow 221-213 majority.)But there was also an undisputed truth undergirding McCarthy’s braggadocio: Democratic support has plunged nationally in recent months. The party’s loss in Virginia was just the most consequential example.Exactly how far and fast Democratic popularity has fallen is hotly debated in both parties.Virginia was one key data point: The election showed a Republican improvement of 12 percentage points, from Biden’s win in the state a year ago by 10 points to Democrats’ loss of the governorship this month by two points. The governor’s race in New Jersey swung toward Republicans by a similar margin.Still, few strategists, Democrat or Republican, believe the Democratic brand’s collapse nationally has been quite that complete and widespread.Among campaign insiders, one popular measurement that is closely tracked to gauge the mood of the electorate is the “generic ballot test.” That is when pollsters ask voters whom they would prefer to serve in Congress — a Democrat or a Republican, with no names attached.For years, Democrats continuously have held an edge in this metric.Until now.For the first time since January 2016, Republicans are now preferred, according to the FiveThirtyEight public polling average. FiveThirtyEight’s average has swung 4.6 points in the last six months toward the G.O.P.Just how bad is it out there for the Democrats? A Washington Post/ABC News poll last weekend showed Republicans in the strongest position on this measure in the poll’s four-decade history. On Thursday, a poll from Quinnipiac University of registered voters said 46 percent wanted G.O.P. control of the House, compared with 41 percent for Democrats.The same trend is showing up in private surveys. The National Republican Congressional Committee’s internal polling this month showed that Republicans in battleground districts had improved by seven percentage points since the beginning of the year. So-called generic Republicans began the year three points behind Democrats; now they are ahead by four points.The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s generic ballot testing this month also shows Democrats trailing — albeit by two points. Party officials said that actually was an improvement from some other recent months. The D.C.C.C. declined to say what its polling showed at the start of the year.Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who is chairman of the House Republican campaign arm, said in an interview that the N.R.C.C.’s private polling at the start of the year measured Biden’s approval rating as 10 percentage points higher than his disapproval rating. Now, Emmer said, it’s the reverse: Biden’s disapproval is 10 points higher.Emmer offered a less hyperbolic version of McCarthy’s prediction of exactly how many Democrats are at risk in 2022. “The experts are telling me that any Democrat who sits in a seat Joe Biden won by 10 points or less a year ago is vulnerable,” Emmer said.That is still roughly 250 seats. “We will win the majority,” Emmer said flatly, “but we’re going to let the voters tell us how big that’s going to be.”The indicators for Democrats are not quite as sour everywhere.My colleague Nate Cohn wrote earlier this week in the newsletter about two House special elections in Ohio, where Democrats finished only about three percentage points behind Biden’s performance.That is erosion, but it’s not as politically catastrophic.And in Pennsylvania, a Supreme Court vacancy was contested with millions of dollars in spending. In some ways, the contest functionally pitted a generic Democrat against a generic Republican, because even the most engaged voters know little to nothing about candidates for the judiciary.The Republican candidate won by 2.6 percentage points — in a state Biden carried by 1.2 points in 2020. That represented a nearly four-point improvement for Republicans.To summarize, various data points show a range of possibility for Democratic decline: somewhere between three to 12 percentage points. None of the possible outcomes bode well for holding the House in 2022 or maintaining control of a Senate now equally divided between 50 Democratic-aligned senators and 50 Republicans.Perhaps what is giving Democrats the most solace is the calendar. It is 2021 still and not 2022.Democrats also hope they will have more to sell in the coming year — Biden signed a $1 trillion infrastructure package on the South Lawn of the White House on Monday, and a $1.85 trillion social policy and climate change bill is winding its way through Congress — and more time to sell it.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the D.C.C.C., has pushed for both the president and Democratic members of Congress to more forcefully pitch what they have already passed this year. As he told my colleague Trip Gabriel this month: “My message is ‘free Joe Biden.’ That campaign needs to start now before the next crisis takes over the news cycle.”Maloney said it was understandable that voters hadn’t given Democrats credit for the large economic recovery measure that passed earlier in the year or for the new infrastructure spending.“We don’t expect them to know if we don’t tell them,” he said this week on Capitol Hill. “So we’re going to tell them.”Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Shouldn’t Panic. They Should Go Into Shock.

      by

      The rise of inflation, supply chain shortages, a surge in illegal border crossings, the persistence of Covid, mayhem in Afghanistan and the uproar over “critical race theory” — all of these developments, individually and collectively, have taken their toll on President Biden and Democratic candidates, so much so that Democrats are now the underdogs going into 2022 and possibly 2024.Gary Langer, director of polling at ABC News, put it this way in an essay published on the network’s website:As things stand, if the midterm elections were today, 51 percent of registered voters say they’d support the Republican candidate in their congressional district, 41 percent say the Democrat. That’s the biggest lead for Republicans in the 110 ABC/Post polls that have asked this question since November 1981.These and other trends have provoked a deepening pessimism about Democratic prospects in 2022 and anxiety about the 2024 presidential election.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, holds similar views, but suggests that the flood tide of political trouble may be beyond Democratic control:Biden and the Democrats have had almost all bad news: the pandemic is still going; the economy has not picked up in terms of perceptions of the expected increases in employment and economic growth not on fire; perceptions of what happened in Afghanistan; what has happened on the southern border; high crime rates, all amplified in news reports. It is all perception, and the latest is the increase in inflation and gas prices that people see/feel. The critical race theory controversy and perceptions of Democrats being too woke and extreme. The bad news is overwhelming.Bill McInturff, a founding partner of Public Opinion Strategies, provided me with data from the October WSJ/NBC poll asking voters which party can better manage a wide range of issues. On three key issues — controlling inflation (45R-21D), dealing with crime (43R-21D) and dealing with the economy (45R-27D) — the Republican advantage was the highest in surveys dating back to the 1990s.“Washington Democrats are spending months fighting over legislation,” McInturff wrote by email,but, during this time, voters tell us prices are soaring, the cost of living is tied for the top issue in the country, and there is a sharp increase in economic pessimism. It is these economic factors that are driving negative impressions about the direction of the country to unusually high levels, and this is hurting Democrats everywhere. No administration is going to thrive in that economic environment.In his analysis of the Nov. 6-10 Washington Post/ABC News Poll, Langer made the case thatWhile a year is a lifetime in politics, the Democratic Party’s difficulties are deep; they include soaring economic discontent, a president who’s fallen 12 percentage points underwater in job approval and a broad sense that the party is out of touch with the concerns of most Americans — 62 percent say so.The numbers are even worse for Democrats in the eight states expected to have the closest Senate elections, according to Langer — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Not only is Biden’s overall job approval rating in those states 33 percent, 10 points lower than it is in the rest of the country, but registered voters in those eight states say they are more likely to vote for Republican House candidates than for Democrats by 23 points (at 58 percent to 35 percent).On Nov. 3, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball updated the ratings for three incumbent Democratic senators — Mark Kelly of Arizona, Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada — from “lean Democratic” to “tossup.”An examination of Gallup survey results on the question “As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?” reflects the damage suffered by the Democrats. From January through August, Democrats held a substantial 7.9 point advantage (48.2 percent to 41.3 percent). In September, however, Gallup reported a 2-point (47-45) Republican edge that grew to a 5-point (47-42) edge by October.In terms of election outcomes, Republican are once again capitalizing on their domination of the congressional redistricting process to disenfranchise Democratic voters despite strong public support for reforms designed to eliminate or constrain partisan gerrymandering. On Monday, The Times reported that the Republican Party “has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.” The current partisan split in the House is 221 Democratic seats and 213 Republican seats, with one vacancy.There is perhaps one potential political opportunity for Democrats — should the Supreme Court overturn or undermine Roe v. Wade, mobilizing supporters of reproductive rights across the country.In the meantime, uneasiness prevails. Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard, noted in an email thatBiden had two drops in approval ratings, one from June to August of about 6 points, and another from September to October of another 6 points. The first was a response to Afghanistan. The second was a response to Covid and weak employment growth over the summer.Passing the infrastructure bill should help “with the sense that the administration wasn’t doing enough for the economy,” Ansolabehere continued, but “the hit from Afghanistan is going to be harder to reverse, as it was a judgment about the administration’s handling of foreign affairs.”Micah English, a graduate student in political science at Yale who studies race, class and gender dynamics, argued in an email that Democratic leaders have, at least until now, mismanaged the task of effectively communicating their agenda and goals.“The Democratic Party has a messaging problem that they don’t seem to have any plans to rectify,” she wrote:The Republicans message right now is essentially “Democrats and Biden are only concerned about teaching your children critical race theory instead of focusing on the economy!” The Democrats have no unified countermessage, and until they do, they are likely to continue to suffer major losses in the midterms and beyond.This failure, English continued, has resulted in an inability to capitalize on what should have been good news:The Democrats have proposed legislation that contains incredibly popular policies, but if they continue to fail to communicate the benefits of this legislation to the wider public, it won’t do them any good in the midterms. Additionally, as the 2020 election demonstrated, the Democrats cannot continue to rely on the prospect of changing demographics to deliver them electoral victories.One theme that appeared repeatedly in the comments I received in response to my questions is that even as Biden has succeeded in winning passage of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, he has struggled to maintain an aura of mastery.Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, argued in an email thatwhat a lot of swing voters expected from Biden was competent leadership during a time of crisis. And many perhaps expected that a return to normal leadership would immediately solve the unprecedented problems facing the country. Of course, that was never a realistic expectation.The crucial factors underlying Biden’s declining favorability rating, Schaffner continued, are “several things calling into question Biden’s effectiveness — the Afghanistan withdrawal, the continued impact of Covid, the struggling economy and the difficult time Democrats have had in passing their major legislative initiatives.”I asked a range of political scientists for their projections on how the 2022 elections for control of the House are likely to turn out. Their views were preponderantly negative for Democratic prospects.Matt Grossmann of Michigan State wrote: “Based on simple midterm loss averages, the Democrats are expected to lose 4 points of vote share and be down to ~45 percent of seats on ~48 percent of votes in 2022.” Those numbers translate into roughly a 24-seat loss, reducing Democrats to 197 seats. “There is not much under Democrats’ control that is likely to make a big difference in the extent of their losses,” Grossmann added. “They can try to avoid retirements and primary challenges in swing districts and avoid salient unpopular policies.”Robert M. Stein of Rice University is even less optimistic:In South Texas, Florida and parts of Arizona immigration policy is hurting Democrats with traditional-base voters. This is especially true with Hispanics in Texas border counties, where Trump did well in 2020 and Abbott (incumbent Republican governor) is making significant gains by appealing to the concerns of Hispanics over jobs and immigration.Stein adds:My guess is that Republicans are poised to take the House back in 2022 with gains above the average for midterm elections. Since 1946, the average seat gain for the party not in the White House is 27 seats. The best the Democrats can do is hold at the average, but given the Republican’s advantage with redistricting, my guess is that the Republicans gain 40+ seats.Martin Wattenberg of the University of California-Irvine wrote that “it would take a major event like 9/11 to keep the Democrats from losing the House.” He was more cautious about control of the Senate, which “really depends on the quality of the candidates. Republicans have had the misfortune of nominating candidates like Christine (“I am not a witch”) O’Donnell who have lost eminently winnable races due to their own foibles. It remains to be seen if they will nominate such candidates in 2022.”Wattenberg cited data from the General Social Survey showing a sharp rise in the percentage of Democrats describing themselves as liberal or slightly liberal, up from 47 percent in 2016 to 62 percent this year: “The left-wing movement of the Democrats is probably going to hurt with the 2022 electorate that will likely be skewed toward older, more conservative voters.”At the same time, Bruce Cain of Stanford suggested that a Democratic defeat in 2022 could be a potentially favorable development for the party’s long term prospects:It is quite possible that losing in the 2022 midterm is the best path to winning the presidency in 2024. It will put the Republicans in a “put up or shut up” spot vis a vis problems facing the country, and Biden meanwhile can work the middle without looking over his left shoulder.Cain took this logic a step further to argue thatIn retrospect the worst thing that happened to Biden was the Democrats winning the two seats in Georgia. It raised expectations among some in his party that they could go left legislatively while the political sun was shining when in reality the political math was not there for that kind of policy ambition.Cain added:The best hope for the Democrats is that Trump will undermine some Republicans during his vengeance tour and that the weakness of the people who want to run under his banner will create some unexpected wins for the Democrats.Howard Rosenthal, a political scientist at N.Y.U., added this observation:Pundits, who have to earn a living, always want to impute causality to election losses. However, the midterm cycle is just normal. Voters tend to balance the president. Over time, they also create divided government at the state level.A surprising number of those I contacted made the case that the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan did more lasting damage to Biden than might have been expected.“The extended wall-to-wall media coverage of the hurried exit from Afghanistan probably served as a catalyst for some folks to ‘update’ their views on Biden’s performance and take into consideration both the foreign and domestic concerns,” Ted Brader, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, wrote in an email:I’m skeptical that those events themselves drove the lower assessments; Americans weigh domestic events much heavier than foreign affairs. But the heightened attention and criticism can serve as an attention-getting call to re-evaluate the president: “Wait, how well is he doing his job?” As political science research has convincingly demonstrated, bipartisan criticism, as we saw with the Afghan withdrawal, in particular, opens the door to weaker support among independents and members of the president’s own party.Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, wrote me that “things touching on competence (Afghanistan, border, congressional inaction) are probably the most important” in driving down Biden’s ratings, but “for the future, it is inflation and the general economy that will matter most, I think.”Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, contended in an email that the problems facing Biden and his Democratic colleagues run deeper than any single issue:Biden was elected as a moderate to put back some sanity into government through a steady hand and incremental reforms. Instead, a wing of the Democratic Party took the 2020 election in which the Democratic Party lost a surprising number of House seats as a voter mandate to implement a pretty fundamental program of social reform and sociocultural change. While I personally might like a lot of these policy initiatives myself, I also realize that this programmatic ambition is consistent with the wishes of only a minority of core Democratic voters, and certainly not that of the centrist voters who prevented Trump from being re-elected.The history of midterm elections suggests that substantial House losses for the party of the incumbent president are inevitable, barring such unusual circumstances as public hostility to the Republican-led impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks raising Republican support in 2002 — the only two times since that the incumbent party gained seats since World War II.In 2010, Joseph Bafumi, Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, political scientists at Dartmouth, Columbia and the University of Texas at Austin, published “Balancing, Generic Polls and Midterm Congressional Elections,” in which they argued that “between February and Election Day, the presidential party’s vote strength almost always declines.” But, they continued,the degree of decline is unrelated to the public’s evaluation of the president. Clearly, during the midterm election year, the electorate shifts away from the presidential party in its vote choice for reasons that have nothing to do with the electorate’s attitudes toward the president. By default, this is balancing: The electorate votes against the presidential party to give more power to the other party.In a 1988 paper, “The Puzzle of Midterm Loss,” Erikson examined every midterm contest since 1902 and explicitly rejected the theory that such contests are a “negative referendum on presidential performance.” Instead, Erikson wrote,A “presidential penalty” explanation fits the data nicely. By this explanation, the midterm electorate penalized the president’s party for being the party in power: Holding constant the presidential year House vote, the president’s party does much worse at midterm than it would if it did not control the presidency.While substantial midterm losses for the incumbent president’s party are inevitable under most circumstances, that does not mean external developments have no influence on the scope of the outcome.Kitschelt, quoting James Carville, noted in his email: “It’s the economy, stupid. And that means inflation, the supply chain troubles and the inability of the Democrats to extend the social safety net in an incremental fashion.”The inflation rate, Dritan Nesho, the director of civic technology and engagement at Microsoft and a co-director of the Harvard-Harris Poll, wrote in an email,is now outpacing wage growth. As a consequence close to 4 in 10 voters are saying that their personal financial situation is getting worse. This figure is up from the low 20s in May and importantly, majorities of voters are not confident in either the Biden administration keeping inflation at bay (56 percent not confident/44 percent confident) and also of the Federal Reserve (53 percent not confident/47 percent confident).In addition, Nesho said,over two-third of voters (68 percent) believe illegal monthly border crossings have increased since Biden took office, 65 percent blame Biden’s executive orders for encouraging illegal immigration, and 68 percent want stricter policies to reduce the flow of people across the border.In January 2021, the month Biden took office, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index stood at 79. By Nov. 1, the index had fallen to 66.8, the lowest it has been since November 2011. Richard Curtin, director of the consumer sentiment survey, wrote in a commentary accompanying the report: “Consumer sentiment fell in early November to its lowest level in a decade due to an escalating inflation rate and the growing belief among consumers that no effective policies have yet been developed to reduce the damage from surging inflation.”Similarly, when Biden took office in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the inflation rate was 1.4 percent; as of October this year, the rate had risen to 6.2 percent.Perhaps nothing better encapsulates the problems Democrats face than the price of gas at the pump, which has risen, in the nearly 10 months Biden has been in the White House, to as high as $4.21 a gallon in California, $3.94 in Nevada and upward of $3.60 across the Mountain West.And no one foreshadows the dangers ahead more succinctly than Larry Summers. In his Nov. 15 Washington Post column, Summers, a former secretary of the Treasury, warned: “Excessive inflation and a sense that it was not being controlled helped elect Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and risks bringing Donald Trump back to power.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      For a Clue About the 2022 Midterm Elections, Look at 2 Ohio Races

      by

      Neither race received much national attention, but there’s a long history of special election results foreshadowing the next general election.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.A lot seems to be going poorly for Democrats right now, including President Biden’s sinking approval ratings and the results of this month’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey.But two obscure special elections in Ohio’s 11th and 15th congressional districts, where Democrats and Republicans each retained long-held seats, revealed a possible bright spot for Democrats and faintly signaled that political conditions may not be as dire for Democrats as they seem.Neither race received much national attention. Neither race was especially competitive. And neither had a high turnout. But unlike in the flashier races for Virginia and New Jersey governor, the two Democratic candidates in the Ohio congressional races ran about as well as Democrats usually do. They ran far closer to the party’s recent benchmarks, including Mr. Biden’s showing in the last presidential election, than Democrats did in Virginia, where Terry McAuliffe lost to the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, and in New Jersey, where Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, won by a slim margin.While it would be a mistake to read too much into these two low-profile affairs, it would also be a mistake to ignore them. The two House races didn’t receive much attention for a simple reason: Neither party had any reason to contest them. Ohio’s 11th District is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the 15th is firmly Republican.Yet in both races, the Democratic House candidates ran only three percentage points behind Biden’s showing against former President Donald Trump in last year’s election. The margin is nothing for Democrats to brag about, but it’s simply not the same as what they experienced in Virginia and New Jersey, where the Republican candidates ran 12 and 13 points ahead of Mr. Trump.Of the two districts, Ohio’s 15th is more competitive — and the most representative of next year’s battlegrounds. It stretches from the suburbs around Columbus to the conservative working-class countryside of south-central Ohio. Unlike the House battlegrounds, this is not a district where Democrats have a chance to prevail, even under favorable circumstances: Mr. Trump won the district by 14 points while the incumbent Republican, Steve Stivers, won it by 27 points last November.But despite a more favorable national political environment, Mike Carey, a Trump-endorsed Republican and coal lobbyist, defeated Allison Russo, a Democratic state representative, by a fairly typical 17-point margin — a bit better than Trump, and quite a bit worse than Mr. Stivers.While the results of the Virginia election spurred talk that the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch on race and cultural issues might be hurting the Democrats in the suburbs, Ms. Russo won 55 percent of the vote in the Franklin County portion of the district, home to the Columbus suburbs, nearly matching the 56 percent won by Mr. Biden.Ohio’s 11th District is even less competitive. The majority-Black district, which snakes from Cleveland to Akron, favored Mr. Biden by a whopping 61 points last November. The previous Democratic representative, Marcia Fudge, who is now the secretary of housing and urban development, won by 60 points. The result was similar this time: Shontel Brown, the establishment-backed Democrat who narrowly defeated the progressive favorite Nina Turner in an August primary, won by 58 points.It might seem odd to draw attention to the results of uncompetitive races, but special congressional election results often do a decent job of foreshadowing the outcome of the next midterm elections. Four years ago, special elections were one of the first signs of Democratic strength after Mr. Trump was elected president. So far this cycle, other special election results have tended to resemble the modest Republican gains in Ohio more than the significant G.O.P. swings in Virginia and New Jersey.Another reason to pay attention is that the special congressional elections are contests for federal office, not state or local government.While politics has become increasingly nationalized in recent years, it remains quite common for voters to split their tickets and back the other party in down-ballot races for governor or other local offices. Maryland and Massachusetts elected Republican governors in 2018, despite the so-called blue wave that year. Local issues, like education or property taxes, naturally play a much bigger role than they do in federal contests. And it is much easier for a relatively moderate candidate for local office to shed the baggage of the national party. After all, a vote for Youngkin as governor of Virginia is not a vote to make Kevin McCarthy the House speaker or Mitch McConnell the Senate majority leader.Democrats and Republicans were deadlocked on the generic congressional ballot, a poll question asking whether voters would back a Democrat or Republican for Congress. Historically, the measure tracks well with the eventual House national vote. On average, Republicans lead by less than a percentage point, according to FiveThirtyEight — they took the lead while I wrote this newsletter.A roughly tied House national vote would most likely mean clear Republican control of the chamber, thanks to partisan gerrymandering and the tendency for Democrats to win lopsided margins in reliably Democratic areas. But it would be a much closer race than one might guess based on Virginia and New Jersey.And it would be roughly in line with the results in Ohio: a four-point shift to the Republicans, compared to Biden’s four-point win in the national vote.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      How Republicans Have an Edge in the Emerging 2022 Congressional Maps

      by

      On a highly distorted congressional map that is still taking shape, the party has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.WASHINGTON — A year before the polls open in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans are already poised to flip at least five seats in the closely divided House thanks to redrawn district maps that are more distorted, more disjointed and more gerrymandered than any since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.The rapidly forming congressional map, a quarter of which has taken shape as districts are redrawn this year, represents an even more extreme warping of American political architecture, with state legislators in many places moving aggressively to cement their partisan dominance.The flood of gerrymandering, carried out by both parties but predominantly by Republicans, is likely to leave the country ever more divided by further eroding competitive elections and making representatives more beholden to their party’s base.At the same time, Republicans’ upper hand in the redistricting process, combined with plunging approval ratings for President Biden and the Democratic Party, provides the party with what could be a nearly insurmountable advantage in the 2022 midterm elections and the next decade of House races.“The floor for Republicans has been raised,” Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the chairman of House Republicans’ campaign committee, said in an interview. “Our incumbents actually are getting stronger districts.”Congressional maps serve, perhaps more than ever before, as a predictor of which party will control the House of Representatives, where Democrats now hold 221 seats to Republicans’ 213. In the 12 states that have completed the mapping process, Republicans have gained an advantage for seats in Iowa, North Carolina, Texas and Montana, and Democrats have lost the advantage in districts in North Carolina and Iowa.All told, Republicans have added a net of five seats that the party can expect to hold while Democrats are down one. Republicans need to flip just five Democratic-held seats next year to seize a House majority.“They’re really taking a whack at competition,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The path back to a majority for Democrats if they lose in 2022 has to run through states like Texas, and they’re just taking that off the table.”Competition in House races has decreased for years. In 2020, The New York Times considered just 61 of the 435 House elections to be “battleground” contests. The trend is starkest in places like Texas, where 14 congressional districts in 2020 had a presidential vote that was separated by 10 percentage points or less. With the state’s new maps, only three are projected to be decided by a similar margin.Redistricting, which happens every 10 years, began late this summer after states received the much-delayed results of the 2020 census. The process will continue, state by state, through the winter and spring and is to be completed before the primary contests for next year’s midterm elections.How Maps Reshape American PoliticsWe answer your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.In most states, the map drawing is controlled by state legislators, who often resort to far-reaching gerrymanders. Republicans have control over the redistricting process in states that represent 187 congressional seats, compared with just 84 for Democrats. The rest are to be drawn by outside panels or are in states where the two parties must agree on maps or have them decided by the courts.Gerrymandering is carried out in many ways, but the two most common forms are “cracking” and “packing.” Cracking is when mapmakers spread a cluster of a certain type of voters — for example, those affiliated with the opposing party — among several districts to dilute their vote. Packing is when members of a demographic group, like Black voters, or voters in the opposing political party, are crammed into as few districts as possible.The Republican gains this year build on what was already a significant cartographic advantage. The existing maps were heavily gerrymandered by statehouse Republicans after the G.O.P.’s wave election in 2010, in a rapid escalation of the congressional map-drawing wars. This year, both parties are starting from a highly contorted map amid a zero-sum political environment. With advancements in both voter data and software, they have been able to take a more surgical approach to the process.Republicans are cautious about doing a premature victory lap in case the country’s political mood shifts again over the next year. Democrats believe that while keeping their House majority will be an uphill battle, they have a stronger chance of maintaining control in the Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris currently breaks a 50-50 tie.Republicans also argue that there could in fact be many newly competitive House districts if Mr. Biden’s approval ratings remain in the doldrums and voters replicate the G.O.P.’s successes in elections this month.Democrats, without much to brag about, accuse Republicans of being afraid of competitive elections.“Fear is driving all of this,” David Pepper, a former Ohio Democratic Party chairman, said on Wednesday at a hearing to discuss a proposed map that would give Republicans 13 of the state’s 15 congressional seats. “Fear of what would happen if we actually had a real democracy.”More districts are certain to shift from Democratic to Republican in the coming weeks. Republican lawmakers in Georgia and Florida will soon begin debating new maps..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Several other states have completed maps for the 2020s that entrench existing Republican advantages. Republicans in Alabama and Indiana shored up G.O.P.-held congressional districts while packing their state’s pockets of Democrats into uncompetitive enclaves. In Utah, a new map eliminates a competitive district in Salt Lake City that Democrats won in 2018. Republicans have made an Oklahoma City seat much safer, while Colorado’s independent redistricting commission shored up the district of Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican and Trump ally, so much that her leading Democratic opponent, who had raised $1.9 million, dropped out of the contest to defeat her.And in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a map that protects the state’s 23 Republican incumbents while adding two safely red seats, a year after the party spent $22 million to protect vulnerable House members.“The competitive Republican seats are off the board,” said Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s clearinghouse for designing new maps.Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, at an event on redistricting this month. Democrats in the state may draw its lone Republican congressman out of a district.Brian Witte/Associated PressIn one of the few states where Democrats are on offense, Illinois will eliminate two Republican seats from its delegation and add one Democratic one when Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs the map that the state’s Democratic-controlled Legislature approved last month. New York is likely to add seats to the Democratic column once the party’s lawmakers complete maps next year, and Maryland Democrats may draw their state’s lone Republican congressman out of a district. Democrats in Nebraska also managed to preserve a competitive district that includes Omaha after initial Republican proposals sought to split the city in two.Calling the Republican moves an “unprecedented power grab,” Kelly Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said that the G.O.P. was “not successfully taking over the battleground” but instead “proactively and intentionally trying to remove competitive seats.”Several other states where Republicans drew advantageous districts for themselves a decade ago will now have outside commissions or courts determining their maps.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

    • 175 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Why Democrats May Have a Long Wait if They Lose Their Grip on Washington

      by

      Voters’ reflexive instinct to check the party in power makes it hard for any party to retain a hold on both the White House and Congress for long.Usually, it’s the party out of power that frets about whether it will ever win again. This time, it’s the party in control of government that’s staring into the political wilderness.Democrats now have a Washington trifecta — command of the White House and both chambers of Congress. If the results of last week’s elections in Virginia and elsewhere are any indication, they may not retain it after next November’s midterm elections. And a decade or longer may pass before they win a trifecta again.The unusual structure of American government, combined with the electorate’s reflexive instinct to check the party in power, makes it hard for any party to retain a hold on both the White House and Congress for long.Since World War II, political parties have waited an average of 14 years to regain full control of government after losing it. Only one president — Harry Truman — has lost Congress and retaken it later. In every other case, the president’s party regained a trifecta only after losing the White House.It would be foolish to predict the next decade of election results. Still, today’s Democrats will have a hard time defying this long history. Not only do the Democrats have especially slim majorities, but they face a series of structural disadvantages in the House and the Senate that make it difficult to translate popular vote majorities into governing majorities.The specter of divided government is a bitter one for Democrats.The party has won the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections but has nonetheless struggled to amass enough power to enact its agenda. That has added to the high stakes in the ongoing negotiations over the large Democratic spending package, which increasingly looks like a last chance for progressives to push an ambitious agenda.And it has helped spur the kind of acrimonious internal Democratic debate over the party’s message and strategy that would usually follow an electoral defeat, with moderates and progressives clashing over whether the party’s highly educated activist base needs to take a back seat for the party to cling to its majority. The strong Republican showing in Virginia and New Jersey last week has prompted yet another round of recriminations.But with such a long history of the president’s party struggling to hold on to power, one wonders whether any policy, tactic or message might help Democrats escape divided government.Some Democrats worry that they could be reduced to just 43 Senate seats by the end of the 2024 election.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe political winds seem to blow against the president’s party almost as soon as a new party seizes the White House. For decades, political scientists have observed a so-called thermostatic backlash in public opinion, in which voters instinctively move to turn down the temperature when government runs too hot in either party’s favor. The pattern dates back as long as survey research and helps explain why the election of Barack Obama led to the Tea Party, or how Donald Trump’s election led to record support for immigration.The president’s party faces additional burdens at the ballot box. A sliver of voters prefers gridlock and divided government and votes for a check and balance against the president. And the party out of power tends to enjoy a turnout advantage, whether because the president’s opponents are resolved to stop his agenda or because of complacency by the president’s supporters..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}While Democrats can still hope to avoid losing control of Congress in 2022, Mr. Biden’s sagging approval ratings make it seem increasingly unlikely that they will. Historically, only presidents with strong approval ratings have managed to avoid the midterm curse. And with Democrats holding only the most tenuous majorities in the House and the Senate, any losses at all would be enough to break the trifecta.If the Democrats are going to get a trifecta again, 2024 would seem to be their best chance. The president’s party usually bounces back when the president seeks re-election, perhaps because presidential elections offer a clear choice between two sides, not merely a referendum on the party in power. And in the House, a Democratic rebound in 2024 is very easy to imagine, even if far from assured.Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      How Likely Is a Democratic Comeback Next Year?

      by

      The election results from last week reconfirmed a basic reality about American politics: For either party, holding the White House comes with significant power, but in off-year elections, it is often a burden.Democrats hoped that this year would be an exception. By trying to focus the electorate on Donald Trump, they sought to rouse the Democratic base. This approach would also avoid making elections a referendum on President Biden and his approval ratings, which have sagged after months of struggles with the Afghanistan exit, Covid, gas prices, inflation and congressional Democrats.In other words, Democrats hoped that the usual rules of political gravity would not apply. But we should not be surprised that the familiar force endured.Republicans performed well in races across the country — most notably in the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, states that Mr. Biden won by double digits in 2020. Vote counts are still being finalized, but it appears they shifted almost identically toward the Republicans compared with 2017, the last time those governorships were on the ballot — margins of about 11 points. Virginia provides a striking example of how often the presidential party does poorly — the White House party candidate has now lost the gubernatorial race in 11 of the past 12 elections.Unfortunately for Democrats, political gravity is also likely to act against them in 2022 — and they face real limits on what they can do about it.There were signs of Democratic decline in all sorts of different places. The suburban-exurban Loudoun County in Northern Virginia is an example. Terry McAuliffe carried it, but his Republican rival in the governor’s race, Glenn Youngkin, campaigned aggressively there on education issues and basically cut the margin compared with 2017 in half. Places like Loudoun are where Democrats made advancements in the Trump years. To have any hope of holding the House next year, the party will have to perform well in such areas.Turnout in terms of raw votes cast compared with the 2017 gubernatorial race was up all over Virginia, but some of the places where turnout growth was smallest included Democratic urban areas and college towns.But Republicans had no such trouble: Their turnout was excellent. In New Jersey, the county that saw the biggest growth in total votes compared with 2017 was Ocean, an exurb on the Jersey Shore, which Gov. Phil Murphy’s Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, won by over 35 points.Democrats have also struggled in rural areas, and the results last week suggest that they have not hit bottom there yet. In the Ninth Congressional District in rural southwestern Virginia, Mr. Youngkin performed even better than Mr. Trump did in 2020.This combination — even deeper losses in rural areas paired with fallout in more populous areas — would be catastrophic for Democrats, particularly in the competitive Midwest, where Mr. Biden in 2020 helped arrest Democratic decline in many white, rural areas but where it is not hard to imagine Democratic performance continuing to slide.Like this year, the fundamentals for the 2022 midterms are not in the Democrats’ favor. Midterms often act as an agent of change in the House. The president’s party has lost ground in the House in 37 of the 40 midterms since the Civil War, with an average seat loss of 33 (since World War II, the average is a smaller, though still substantial, 27). Since 1900, the House has flipped party control 11 times, and nine of those changes have come in midterm election years, including the last five (1954, 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2018). Given that Republicans need to pick up only five seats next year, they are very well positioned to win the chamber.It is not entirely unheard-of for the presidential party to net House seats in the midterms. It happened in 1998 and 2002, though those come with significant caveats. In ’98, President Bill Clinton had strong approval in spite of (or perhaps aided by) his impeachment battle with Republicans and presided over a strong economy; Democrats had also had lost a lot of ground in the 1994 midterm (and made only a dent in that new Republican majority in 1996). They gained a modest four seats.In 2002, Republicans were defending a slim majority, but they benefited from President George W. Bush’s sky-high approval rating following the Sept. 11 attacks and decennial reapportionment and redistricting, which contributed to their eight-seat net gain.So against this political gravity, is there anything Democrats can do? The passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill as well as the possible passage of the party’s Build Back Better social spending package could help, though there is likely not a significant direct reward — new laws aren’t a magic bullet in campaigning. But a year from now, Democrats could be coming into the election under strong economic conditions and no longer mired in a high-profile intraparty stalemate (the McAuliffe campaign pointed to Democratic infighting as a drag).Factors like gas prices and the trajectory of Covid may be largely beyond the Democrats’ influence, but it is entirely possible that the country’s mood will brighten by November 2022 — and that could bolster Mr. Biden’s approval rating.When parties have bucked the midterm history, they’ve sometimes had an unusually good development emerge in their favor. If there is any lesson from last week’s results, it is that the circumstances were ordinary, not extraordinary. If they remain so, the Democratic outlook for next year — as it so often is for the presidential party in a midterm election — could be bleak.Kyle Kondik is the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and the author of “The Long Red Thread: How Democratic Dominance Gave Way to Republican Advantage in U.S. House Elections.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More