Midterms are presupposed to be the time for the opposition party to shine.
That ought to especially be the case when there’s once-in-a-generation inflation and when the overwhelming majority of Americans think the country is on the fallacious track.
As an alternative, President Joe Biden and the Democrats are in position to have certainly one of the 4 best midterms for the party controlling the White House within the last century.
So what just happened?
The GOP’s “candidate problem”
Analysts, myself included, noted that Republicans appeared to have a candidate likability problem. Pre-election polling showed Republicans in all the important thing races had negative net favorability rankings. Democrats were broadly higher liked than their opponents.
A lot of those Republicans were endorsed by former President Donald Trump and had falsely claimed — at the least at one point — that they believed he won the 2020 election.
The exit polls bear out Republicans’ “candidate problem.” In every Senate race (save Georgia) that Inside Elections rated as a toss-up or only tilting toward a celebration before the election, more voters said the Republican candidate’s views were too extreme than said the identical for the Democrat.
We see this in gubernatorial elections, as well. Republicans nominated 2020 election deniers for governor in quite a few blue or swing states. None of them has been projected a winner, and only Republican Kari Lake of Arizona has any likelihood of winning.
Two presidents on the trail
On the national level, there are two presidents within the highlight: the present one (Biden) and the previous (Trump). Each men sported negative net favorable rankings, per the exit polls.
The undeniable fact that you could have a current president and a former president who’re each unpopular isn’t unusual.
What’s unusual is that of the 18% who viewed neither Biden nor Trump favorably within the exit polls, 40% of them voted for Democrats. The backlash against one president this yr can have been canceled out by the backlash against the opposite.
“Abortion first” voters
Arguably, what truly made this midterm unique was abortion. Despite high inflation, only 31% of voters within the exit poll said it was a very powerful issue to their vote. A virtually similar percentage (27%) said abortion, and these voters overwhelmingly selected Democratic candidates for Congress.
This matches the dynamic we saw within the special House elections following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June. Democrats began doing considerably higher than before the Supreme Court ruling.