Good morning, everyone.
It’s been just over a week since the election, and we’re still working to nail down exactly what happened.
Unfortunately, it will be a while until all of the data is final. Votes are still being tallied across the country, and even once the count is finished it will be months until we have the exact account of who did or did not vote, along with detailed results by precinct.
In the meantime, a few notes on what we know so far.
The key events happened in 2021 and 2022
Many of this cycle’s surprising shifts were foreshadowed in the midterms.
The national popular vote for president in 2024 will look eerily similar to the popular vote for U.S. House in 2022. The winner by state will be exactly the same — at least if you take the combined Republican vote in Alaska in 2022. And many of the details will be similar as well, like Republicans’ big gains in Florida and New York.
As a result, the 2024 presidential election results by state correlate more closely with the swings from the 2022 midterm election in the U.S. House than with the result of the 2020 presidential election.
This is not what anyone would have expected two years ago. Usually, midterms don’t foreshadow the next presidential election. With Donald J. Trump running for a third time, the case to expect a simple repeat of the 2020 election was even better than usual.
But with hindsight, the 2022 midterm wasn’t an ordinary election. It was the first election after the pandemic and the upheaval that followed, and the lasting results suggest that many critical electoral shifts were already in motion two years ago.
As I noted before this election, the pattern suggests that Democrats lost many voters as a result of events in 2021 and 2022 — including rising prices, a crime surge, the debate over “woke” and resentment over school closures and pandemic-era restrictions.
This is a fact that I’ll keep in my head as I read the various arguments about what decided this election. The pattern makes it clear that Democrats were losing voters long before the campaign even began. Maybe Kamala Harris could have done something about it, but the case is harder to make.
Trump-Gallego voters?
Of all the analytical errors of the 2024 campaign, one of the most consequential was how Democrats interpreted the results of the 2022 midterms.
At the time, the midterms were seen as a repudiation of MAGA and Mr. Trump, whose allies lost every key race. Those results gave reassurance to wary Democrats that President Biden’s low approval ratings wouldn’t be an obstacle in a re-election bid. They gave license for Democrats to ignore the polls, which had promised a “red wave.”
This interpretation came crashing down last Tuesday, and one surprising reason is that the electorate seems to have a much bigger issue with Mr. Trump’s MAGA allies than with Mr. Trump himself.
Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona, is perhaps the best example. Two years ago, her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race helped make Mr. Trump seem like politically damaged goods. After all, she and Mr. Trump seemed like two peas in a political pod: They were MAGA allies, they both sought to overturn their election defeats, and they both managed to lose Arizona, a traditionally Republican state.
It turns out that Ms. Lake and Mr. Trump aren’t necessarily seen as so similar by Arizona voters. The Associated Press recently projected that Ms. Lake lost her Senate race, with the Democrat Ruben Gallego on track to defeat her by more than two percentage points. In comparison, Mr. Trump won Arizona this year by roughly six points.
Clearly, analysts weren’t wrong to see a candidate like Ms. Lake as a political liability. She isn’t just running eight points behind Mr. Trump; she’s also running six points behind the overall showing of Republican candidates for the U.S. House in Arizona. The mistake was in seeing Mr. Trump as just another Ms. Lake.
I’ll offer two thoughts for consideration.
First, Ms. Lake is indeed like Mr. Trump, but from an electoral perspective she’s more like the Trump of 2016, not 2024.
Eight years ago, Mr. Trump was deeply unpopular. He was seen as inexperienced and unqualified to serve as president. His favorable ratings were in the 30s. He divided the Republican Party. Much of the same can be said for Ms. Lake today, who divided her state’s party and lost a crucial sliver of registered Republican and Trump voters.
The same can’t be said for Mr. Trump today. Eight years later, he is a former president, and many voters thought with hindsight that he did a good job. The Republican Party is unified behind him. In a sense, he has the benefit of incumbency — something Ms. Lake doesn’t possess. His advantage over her, however, runs much deeper.
Second, Mr. Gallego isn’t exactly Ms. Harris. Ms. Lake’s liabilities are probably the bigger story, but Mr. Gallego — who is Latino and an Iraq War veteran — possesses some important strengths. While he had a progressive record in the House, he repositioned himself as a full-throated moderate, including bashing the usage of “Latinx” and focusing a lot of his ad campaign on tightening border security.
It’s hard to untangle how much Mr. Gallego’s strengths contributed to his win, as opposed to Ms. Lake’s weaknesses, but there’s room for both to play a role.
What’s left?
The presidential election may be over, but there are still a few key uncalled races.
First, there’s control of the U.S. House. Republicans have won 214 seats, putting them just four away from the 218 needed to win. They lead in eight seats, so they have a lot of opportunities to find the four they need.
But a lot of those seats are in California, where the count is painfully slow (and has been trending Democratic). Or the races are close enough that the votes will need to be completely counted or even recounted before Republicans can be projected to win. The Republicans may be very clear favorites, but it’s not clear whether we’re close to a verdict.
Second, there’s the Pennsylvania Senate race, where the Republican David McCormick leads the Democratic incumbent, Bob Casey, by 0.43 points, or about 29,000 votes.
Mr. McCormick’s lead will almost certainly shrink. A lot of provisional ballots are left to be counted, and provisional ballots lean Democratic in Pennsylvania. So far, Mr. Casey has led the provisional ballots counted by about 25 points, 60 percent to 35 percent.
Is it possible that Mr. Casey could overtake Mr. McCormick? It’s pretty unlikely. If Mr. Casey keeps winning provisional ballots by 25 points, he will need more than 100,000 additional provisional ballots, beyond 28,000 already counted, to close the gap. I would be very surprised if there were that many remaining, though perhaps Mr. Casey could do better with what’s outstanding. Nonetheless, the race will probably finish well within recount territory, and it’s hard to rule anything out in the murky world of provisional ballots.
The Pennsylvania Senate race won’t decide control of the chamber, but every extra Senate seat will make a big difference for Democrats over the next decade. They currently have 47 seats, putting them tantalizingly close to a majority, but there aren’t many great pickup opportunities.
In 2026 and 2028, there are only four Republican-held seats up for grabs in the Harris-or-purple states: two seats in North Carolina, and one each in Maine and Wisconsin. With so few opportunities, getting from 47 to 48 seats in the Senate today could ultimately decide whether the Democrats get a majority in the years ahead.
The post On Midterms’ Hints, Down-Ballot Republicans and the Race for the House appeared first on New York Times.
