In comparison to expectations and actual advantages? If so, to what extent? (Encompassing all races, not just for federal government, thus why I started a new thread.)
Related question: how did the polls perform?
According to this article in the New Yorker last week, Republicans were talking big:
If that is an accurate summary of the Republicans’ “inside baseball” expectation, then yes, they did underperform.
Electoral-vote.com, which is an independent poll aggregator, had a final prediction for the Senate on November 7 as ending up 50-50.
Of the three Senate seats that are currently undecided, they predicted that Arizona and Georgia would be “barely Democratic”, and Nevada would be “likely GOP”. Isn’t that pretty close to what the situation is right now, although votes are still being counted?
Since that site relies on independent polls, unconnected to any political campaign, those predictions suggest that the polls had it right.
Don’t have any info on state races, sorry.
In Pennsylvania, Oz has already conceded to Fetterman. And in Arizona, Mark Kelly and Katie Hobbs hold slim leads, although the vote count isn’t yet complete.
The Republicans put on the wrong show-they thought people were looking for Trump clones, and either even Republicans are tired of Trump 24/7/365, or people just recognize desperate shmoozing when they see it.
Well. The Dems lost fewer seats in the House of Representatives than any Democratic president’s first midterm election in at least 40 years. More recently…
Obama lost 63 seats
Clinton lost 52 seats
Reagan lost 26 seats
Carter lost 15 seats
Biden…less than 15, for sure.
And they had the best midterms for Governors since 1986.
Reagan??
Not listing Dems, listing recent Prezzes….
But by that standard you left out the two recent Presidents who don’t support your point – W. actually gained 4 seats in his first midterm, and his dad only lost 8.
Still, the overall trend since WWII is that the President’s party loses on average 26 seats during midterm elections. Clearly Republicans did not meet expectations.
Republicans thought there was blood in the water, with inflation being such an issue.
It turned out to be Kool-Aid.
Yeah, the Democrats did well for being the party in power during this inflation crisis and general economic/societal pessimism.
Fair. I was cherry-picking! Still, as you note, this was a good cycle for Dems.
For what it’s worth, the guys at the bar I go to were all blaming the lack of a red wave solely on Trump and expressed a unanimous opinion that it’s time for him to ‘go away’. These were all fervent Trump supporters a year or so ago.
They’re not alone:
On the one hand, yes, it’s true, the GOP has transitioned from merely talking a big game to actively drinking their own koolaid. They used to manufacture an artificial truth for their rube base; they now believe in it themselves. This election, absolutely, has been a rude awakening that their fantasy does not actually align with hard reality.
On the other hand: rude awakenings suck. And rather than adjust their tactics to accommodate the real world, we should expect the GOP to double down on their destruction of democracy, such that future elections can be guaranteed to conform to their self-serving illusions.
Some of us recognized that the current administration is not to blame for this “inflation crisis” which is global and in most places worse than the US.
Every damn ad I saw from a Republican candidate this time around was “OMG! BE AFRAID! THE WORLD IS SHIT BECAUSE OF THEM, VOTE FOR US OR IT WILL GET WORSE! BE AFRAID!” Not one word on how the current pile of mess would be fixed, or at least addressed.
Democrats were “we’ll back this legislation, we are for this, we disagree with that and will try to pass legislation to protect your rights” with a side order of fear/vote for us.
Guess which way I voted.
I don’t want to hear complaints or someone telling me the world sucks when they’re a candidate for office - if I want that I turn on the broadcast news. I want a political candidate telling me what they’re going to try to do.
I think the elephant in the room for the GOP (pun intended) was the SCOTUS decision on Roe.
I think it motivated a lot more people to vote who may have otherwise stayed home. If that decision had not happened, say the court kicked it back to the state or simply didn’t hear it this time around, I believe the red wave would have been massive compared to what it was(n’t). Always be careful of what you wish for.
This was part of it, but another big part of it was trump’s meddling and the promotion of inferior R candidates who were pro-trump election deniers. Since, after the 2020 election, otherwise good Repubs had the sheer audacity to not illegally invalidate the vote count in states where Biden won, such as SOS Raffensperger in Georgia, trump pushed for pro-trump election denialists in as many states as possible. The litmus test was not how well-qualified they were for the office, but how much they paid lip service to and bowed down to trump. As with everything trump is involved in, it was not about party, it was only about trump.
Back in the 2018 midterms in which the House went D, the 2022 GA runoff that resulted in the Senate going D, and of course the Presidency going D, a very strong argument can be made that that all happened due to trump’s meddling, incompetence, and utter disregard for anything other than his own good fortunes. It still did not seem to lessen his grip on the party. Maybe the 2022 midterms will be the final straw that gets the Republican party to shed the albatross around their necks that is trump and trumpism.