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On Tuesday, elections will be held for all 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats, 36 governorships, many other local officials, and 129 ballot measures in 36 states. The Guardian
As of Sunday night, FiveThirtyEight gave Republicans an 82 percent chance to win the House and a 54 percent chance to win the Senate. FiveThirtyEight
The right is optimistic about the election.
“We’re seeing some odd final arguments from Democrats and their allies. Biden is pledging that ‘Democratic election wins will bring a ‘fundamental shift’ on economy,’ which is an odd argument from a president whose party has controlled Congress for the past two years. The Nation laments that the country is in a ‘polycrisis,’ which doesn’t exactly sound like a ringing endorsement of the party that’s been running things since January 2021…
“Biden didn’t inherit high gas prices, but he and his policies helped create them — or at minimum, exacerbate them… Biden didn’t inherit high rates of illegal immigration, he and his policies helped create it… Then there’s the lingering high crime rates and the general sense of dangerous anarchy in America’s biggest cities, accompanied by a seeming explosion of homelessness, the ongoing baby-formula shortage, the rapid rise in interest rates and its effect on the housing market…
“Americans are the most frustrated, sour, and disappointed about the state of the country as they’ve ever been around a midterm election. To hear Biden and the Democrats tell it though, it’s all just bad luck. Don’t blame them. They just work here.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“Suburban women are shifting Republican — by 27 points, a Wall Street Journal poll found, with 74% saying the country’s headed [in] the wrong direction… Even in 2020, The Atlantic reported that parents in New York, worried about crime and bad schools, were taking over the education of their kids. Since then, as schools did a worse and worse job, more and more parents decided to educate their own kids…
“For suburban women, the past couple of years have been an unpleasant, in-your-face lesson in the incompetence of Democratic Party governance, and the (huge) extent to which Democrats care more about their interest groups, like teachers unions and racial activists, than about the people they are supposed to be working for. In 2021, voters in normally blue Virginia elected Republican Glenn Youngkin over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in response to similar concerns…
“Democrats might have learned from McAuliffe’s defeat, but mostly doubled down, with the addition of hysteria about abortion and Jan. 6, issues that have far more resonance with the political class than most voters.”
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, New York Post
“In 2008, the Democrats branded themselves as the party of hope and change. President Biden is the farthest thing from a face of change, and fear of Mr. Trump has characterized the party’s messaging far more than any sense of hope. The Democrats are defensive, and what they’re defending seems to be naturally decaying — a political consensus that has disappointed Americans, fulfilling neither the demands for justice of the passionate left nor the middle class’s expectations for economic growth and stability at home and abroad…
“[Meanwhile] The Republican Party’s embrace of apparently high-risk candidates is a sign of confidence… The party’s voters feel strongly enough about the populist, pro-Trump positioning that they have supported them over more experienced and less controversial figures. This reinvention is presenting midterm voters with something that looks fresh and new, at a time when the old party identities, and old norms and institutions, seem feeble and impotent…
“The G.O.P. is exciting, for good and for ill, in a way that the Democratic Party has not been since Barack Obama’s re-election. Boldness pays dividends.”
Daniel McCarthy, New York Times
The left is worried about the election.
The left is worried about the election.
“[For Democrats] there’s no message that can change the reality that prices have been rising faster than incomes. The main reason is Americans were given a lot of money, both under Trump and in Biden’s first year in office, at a time when most of them had reduced their spending because of the pandemic. Now the spending constraints are off, so people are drawing down the savings they built up during the pandemic…
“One can debate the wisdom of the decision to send out that extra round of money in early 2021. But… At the time it happened, the American people were really enthusiastic about it. Unfortunately, voters are not always fair in their judgments, or willing to admit that they bear some responsibility for the downsides of policies they themselves asked for. This tendency toward myopic voting is [normal]…
“To the extent that anything has really gone wrong for Democrats over the past two years, it’s that in spending so much time worrying about the possibility of election subversion, they have not worried quite enough about the risk of losing elections the normal way.”
Matthew Yglesias, Bloomberg
Yet “What Republicans are offering, if they win the 2022 elections, is not conservatism. It is crisis. More accurately, it is crises. A debt-ceiling crisis. An election crisis. And a body blow to the government’s efforts to prepare for a slew of other crises we know are coming… Start with the debt ceiling… If the U.S. government defaults on its debt, it would trigger financial chaos. (I guess that’s one way to deal with inflation: Crash the global economy!) Republicans have been perfectly clear, though: They see the debt limit as leverage in negotiations with Biden…
“[Furthermore] The 2022 elections are very likely to sweep into power hundreds of Republicans committed to making sure that the 2024 presidential election goes their way, no matter how the vote tally turns out. Hardly anything has been done to fortify the system against chicanery since Jan. 6…
“What if congressional Republicans refuse to certify the results in key states, as a majority of House Republicans did in 2020? What if — when Trump calls Republican secretaries of state or governors or board of elections supervisors in 2024, demanding they find the votes he wishes he had or disqualify the votes his opponent does have — they try harder to comply? The possibilities for crisis abound.”
Ezra Klein, New York Times
“If Democrats are smart, they’ll take away an important lesson from this election: There is no one way, no right way to be a Democrat. To win or be competitive in tough years in places as varied as Arizona, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, we need to recruit and give support to the candidates who might not check the box of every national progressive litmus test but who do connect with the voters in their state…
“Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Ryan offer good examples. Both have been competitive in part because they broke with progressive orthodoxy on issues like fracking (in Pennsylvania, Mr. Fetterman was called the ‘enemy’ by an environmentalist infuriated by his enthusiastic support for fracking and the jobs it creates) and trade deals (in Ohio, Mr. Ryan has bragged about how he ‘voted with Trump on trade’)…
“It also means lifting up more candidates with nontraditional résumés who defy political stereotypes and can’t be ridiculed as down-the-line partisans: veterans, nurses, law enforcement officers and entrepreneurs and executives from the private sector… It all comes down to two words: ‘candidate quality.’”
Lis Smith, New York Times
