By a number of conventional measures, the Republican Party should be headed for a huge loss in this November's House midterm elections. But some experts think the results will be much closer than originally thought. The problem for Republicans is those experts still think the GOP will lose, just not in an old-fashioned blowout.
The traditional factors seem to point in slightly different directions. Pointing toward a blowout is President Donald Trump's job approval rating -- long a predictor of a party's performance in midterms. At the moment, Trump's approval is 40.4% in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. In 2018, Trump's first midterm, his approval rating was in the low 40s, and the Republican Party lost 40 House seats. More generally, defeat is usually in the cards when a president's job approval dips below 50%.
But what kind of defeat? In the 2022 midterms, President Joe Biden's job approval was in the low 40s, and Democrats lost just nine House seats. To Biden's dismay, that was enough to lose the House. Now, with today's super-thin GOP margin in the House, even if Republicans were to lose, say, five seats, that would be enough to lose control of the chamber.
Then there is direction of the country. In the RealClearPolitics average, 59.3% of respondents say the country is going in the wrong direction, while 34.6% say it is going in the right direction. That sounds bad, but remember that most people, most of the time, say the country is going in the wrong direction. The current numbers are ugly, but they're not the worst -- in July 2022, during a particularly awful stretch of the Biden presidency, 75.5% said the country was going in the wrong direction. That was terrible. And yet Biden still lost just those nine seats.
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Then there is the most potent issue: the economy. In a recent CBS News poll, just 31% rated the condition of the economy as very good or fairly good, while 63% said it was very bad or fairly bad. That number is quite close to the RealClearPolitics average for Trump's approval rating on handling the economy: 35% approve, 61.3% disapprove. There's no interpretation of those numbers that is good for Republicans.
Then there is history. The president's party almost always loses House seats in midterm elections. Since the 1930s, that has been the case in every midterm except two -- the first time in 1998, during Bill Clinton's impeachment, and the second in 2002, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. If the predictive value of that bit of history is fading, it hasn't faded much.
There is one more traditional measure that seems to point toward a Republican loss but not a huge one. The generic ballot is the general question, "If the election for Congress were held today, would you vote for the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate?" Today, Democrats lead Republicans by 4.8 points, 47.9% to 43.1%, according to the RealClearPolitics average. That's a solid but not overwhelming lead. Back in 2018, heading into the defeat that cost Republicans 40 seats, Democrats led the generic ballot by 7.3 points. In 2010, a historic blowout in which Republicans won 63 seats, the GOP lead was 9.4 points. Today, things seem much closer.
Put everything together, and it seems to mean a non-massive Democratic victory is on the way. Why not a blowout? There are plenty of reasons that some of the more serious Republican problems listed above might not be devastating to the party this year. The biggest of those is the voting public's low regard for Democrats. In the RealClearPolitics average, the Democratic Party's favorability rating is just 36.5%, while its unfavorability rating is 56.1%. For Republicans, the numbers are 38.6% favorable and 55.3% unfavorable -- not much better than Democrats, but better. So even if Republicans are headed for a loss, the public's greater dislike of Democrats could limit the margin.
One more thing: A number of experts point to a structural cause to believe a blowout is less likely today than in the past. "The whole map has been gradually gerrymandered to the point were 80% of the congressional races are won entirely in the primaries," said one GOP strategist. In addition, the strategist continued, "There was a time when people would say things like, 'I vote for the man, not the party.' That 'middle' was as high as 25% of the vote. Now, the 'middle' -- swing voters -- is more like 12% of the voters. That prevents massive blowout swings in Congress."
Given all this, one can see 1) why the final result might be closer than some think, and 2) why Republicans fought for every possible seat available through redistricting. It probably still won't be enough for the GOP to win, but it will make the election closer.
Right now, the indicators still seem to point toward a House controlled by Democrats, but by a small margin -- say, 10 or fewer seats. Maybe the coming election will be a glimpse of the future, when the big wipeout midterm is something that happens less and less often. But for Republicans and for President Trump, in particular, life will still be miserable with a Democratic House, even if the margin is small.
This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/4621895/republicans-hang-on/.
Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner. Email him at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. For a deeper dive into many of the topics Byron covers, listen to his podcast, The Byron York Show, available on the Ricochet Audio Network at ricochet.com/series/byron-york-show and everywhere else podcasts are found.
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