The 5 big questions on Election Day 2022

Comment

Gift Article

It’s Election Day. What will decide the 2022 election? And what might we be talking about in the days and weeks to come?

Below are several questions we’ll be watching closely.

1. How quickly will we know?

The bad news if you’re staying up late Tuesday night is that it’s possible no amount of sleep deprivation will allow you to make sure you find out who takes the Senate.

That’s because slower vote-counting in states like Arizona and Pennsylvania could extend things — as could a very possible runoff in Georgia if neither candidate gets 50 percent plus one. Those three races account for 3 of the 4 that the Cook Political Report rates as “tossups” — i.e. they’re the pivotal ones.

The Post’s Early 202 last week had your full download on the ways in which the 2022 midterm results could be prolonged. And Philip Bump adds a useful piece noting that many race calls take 12 hours or more — in contrast to the Trump allies who misleadingly argue that all votes should be countable (and counted) on election night, or even that such a thing is somehow suspect.

When polls close — and how long counting votes might take — in each state

To the extent that the balance of power is still in doubt on Wednesday morning or even afterward, that’s probably a good sign for Democrats, because it would suggest a Republican wave hasn’t materialized. But we should all be prepared for a situation like in 2020, when we had to wait for Georgia’s voters in January before we knew who controlled the Senate.

The good news if that happens? Georgia’s runoffs are now in early December.

2. How much do (Trump’s) bad candidates matter?

To the extent Republicans underperform on Election Day — and especially if they fail to take the Senate — it’s quite likely that we’ll be talking a lot about Donald Trump.

The reason: The flawed candidates he helped to saddle the GOP with.

It’s possible the GOP will win those races anyway. But there’s no question that Trump’s chosen candidates have made that more arduous.

Midterms almost always favor the party that’s not in the White House, and factors like inflation and President Biden’s poor approval rating mean this should, by all rights, be a good GOP year. Combine that with the narrow gains the GOP needs to take control of the House (a handful of seats) and Senate (just one), and it’s pretty shocking that the latter is even in doubt.

The reason it’s in doubt is pretty clear, though. In addition to the looming issue of abortion rights (which we’ll get to), Republicans have fielded several nominees that voters don’t particularly like. In Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where Trump candidates prevailed in the primaries, the popularity gaps were once immense and lingered long after. And even as some of these candidates have gained in the polls, it’s clearly owed more to Republican-leaning voters coming home than to voters suddenly deciding they really like Blake Masters, Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz and J.D. Vance.

Candidates matter less and less in today’s politics, with voters viewing them more as warm bodies and a means to an end — i.e., 1 vote out of 100.

If the power of partisanship is not enough, though, you can bet there’ll be a bit of a reckoning, even as Trump lines up a potentially imminent campaign to return to the White House. And if it is enough, the GOP may actually be hurt by avoiding a potentially beneficial reckoning ahead of 2024. Because it never should have been as close as it seems to be.

3. Whither — and wither — the polling?

As someone who relies upon polling for his job, this election makes me wince.

The polls have been off a fair amount in recent elections — often overestimating Democrats’ performances, though sometimes misfiring in the other direction — which obviously leads us to question just how much we can trust them.

And the 2022 election has occasioned an especially sizable gap between establishment media polls — which estimate that the Democrats have a much better shot to hold the Senate, and also rate them more highly on the generic ballot — and lower-quality polls conducted by GOP-aligned groups.

While polls aren’t predictive, it’s not difficult to predict what that gap portends if there’s a GOP sweep this year.

The logical question is which group of polls will wind up being closer. In some ways, that misses the point. It’s possible that the flood of GOP-aligned polls will be closer to the results. But it seems unlikely because they have some kind of special sauce that the more experienced pollsters lack. More likely, they might be closer to the results because elections tend to break in a certain direction and because polling — particularly in an age in which poll response rates are so low — is an increasingly difficult exercise.

But that’s also kind of the point. If polling is becoming more difficult and we should trust it less, then we should do so regardless of the reasons it was off — and regardless of whether GOP-aligned pollsters got lucky.

That doesn’t mean we’d throw the baby out with the bathwater; polling can tell us plenty — such as about where Americans broadly stand on an issue — when we’re not trying to glean whether a four-point “lead” is going to hold up. We just notice its flaws more when the margins are so fine and those margins make the difference between winning and losing.

4. Which issues drive the day?

Rarely has an election involved the two sides talking so extensively about such different things. Republicans have been laser-focused on inflation and the economy, as well as perceptions of crime, while Democrats have focused more on abortion rights and threats to democracy.

This is perhaps the defining issue choice of the 2022 election, as we’ve noted before.

The signs seem to suggest that voters are more preoccupied with the former. But it matters just how heavily that outweighs other factors.

As we wrote last month, the reason the economy often ranks higher on people’s list of priorities is that many Democrats also rank it highly — even though that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll vote against the president’s party. That’s a contrast to abortion, which is simply now much more of a priority on the left than on the right, knocking it down on the overall pecking order.

But abortion rights still may not be the same driver on the left that inflation is on the right — and independents still might break for Republicans because of the economy.

Indeed, it’s very difficult for the president’s party to win — or even hold — ground in a midterm, and midterms held amid spiking inflation are some of the worst for the president’s party on record in the last 100 years.

(One thing we can say pretty authoritatively: Democrats haven’t really driven home the “threat to democracy” issue.)

By the same token, Democrats clearly got a shot in the arm after Roe v. Wade was overturned. They not only gained ground on the generic ballot, but they also over-performed their 2020 vote margins in every special election held afterward.

That energy edge was always going to be difficult to sustain in a higher-turnout general election and as Roe’s overturning drifts further in to the rearview. But Democrats hope it’ll at least be enough to turn out their base and perhaps give moderate votes pause about voting for candidates order would ban abortion — something that polls very unpopularly and has led to some telling walkbacks by Republicans in key races.

5. Do Republicans make headway on Latino — and even Black — voters?

This is something that some smart Democrats are increasingly warning about.

Renowned Democratic pollster John Anzalone told the Wall Street Journal this week: “I think that this could be a paradigm-shift election, where Republicans are not only making inroads with the Latino vote, but they’re now making inroads with the African-American vote.”

That paradigm shift has in some ways already begun, at least with Latino voters. Despite Trump’s 2020 loss, he gained significantly from his 2016 margins with this demographic. The GOP gained especially among Latinos in South Texas and South Florida, and it even flipped a heavily Hispanic, South Texas seat in a special election held before Roe was overturned.

Plenty of polls suggest Democrats’ usual margins among Latinos have shrunk. And the Journal’s poll even showed 17 percent of Black voters going GOP — double Trump’s 2020 and the GOP’s 2018 totals.

If Democrats can’t rack up the kind of margins they once did among these groups — or even just one of them — that would suggest not just a bad 2022 election, but more difficult ones in the years to come.

Loading…

Source: WP