What a Neutral Environment Would Look Like

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Last night's victory for Pat Ryan in New York marks the fourth special election since the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling that showed a clear move toward the Democrats.  While we are still waiting on the results of the Alaska At-Large seat (which thanks to RCV should almost completely be thrown out but is probably going to be a decent return for the Democrats when all is said-and-done), this is a clear indication that something is happening, something we wouldn't normally anticipate happening when a Democratic president is in the White House.  There are a lot of reasons that Democrats could outperform in special elections, perhaps the biggest being the Democrats' new alignment with college-educated voters, who tend to turn out for off-cycle elections.  If this is the case, Republicans may see a realignment back to at least an environment that favors them come November 8th, as lower propensity voters (specifically blue-collar white voters who favor Republicans) turnout in bigger numbers.

But there's another aspect of this that we can no longer ignore-that Democrats are, in fact, going to get a good-to-neutral environment in November, potentially on par with 2020, when they won the White House, Senate, and House for the first time collectively since 2008.  In the 21st Century, it is rare for a party-in-the-White-House to do well in a midterm...indeed, only in 2002 did the White House party gain seats in a midterm in the House.  But if we have a 2020-style election, the rules have to be rewritten, and with Donald Trump dominating the news and Republicans running hard-line abortion takes while Democrats are passing a massive haul of popular legislation...it's possible that the Democrats might get a neutral environment, so it begs the question of what that might look like.

While gubernatorial races and state legislative races are important, I'm going to focus this entirely on federal elections, specifically for control of the Senate and the House because they are the most susceptible to a wave environment.  Looking at 2020, we see that there were a shockingly small number of crossover districts (i.e. districts that Joe Biden won that also elected a House Republican and districts Donald Trump that also elected a House Democrat).  Nine of these districts were Biden/House R while seven were Trump/House D.  The largest break was David Valadao in CA-21, who won a district that Biden won by 10.9%, but only in California did we see a district like that.  It's also worth noting that a phenomenon we saw in both 2010 and 2018 could be important here-without a presidential candidate at the top of the ticket, the only way to show your support/disgust at a specific party is to vote for/against their federal candidates.  It's possible that someone like Valadao would lose in a midterm environment where Democrats haven't already thrown out Trump; that is, in fact, exactly what happened in 2018 when Valadao lost his House seat.

Let's start at the basics-the maps we will see in November will contain (according to Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, one of the leading political prognosticators in the country) 226 Biden districts to 209 Trump districts, which is up slightly from 2020's election, where it was 224 Biden districts to 211 Trump districts.  As a result, both men kept about 96% of their seats in this map.  If we went solely on that number, the Democrats would have roughly the same amount of seats if both parties only lost 4% of their Biden/Trump districts, and thus maintain the majority if we saw an environment just like 2020.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)

However, it's worth noting two things.  First, even a small shift against Biden in 2020 and the Democrats lose the House-11 House Democrats lost by less than 3-points in 2020...just five of those go to the Republicans, and you've got a situation where Kevin McCarthy is Speaker.  It's also worth remembering that we don't have the same maps as we did in 2020.  That means politicians running in new territory and a lot more open seats for Democrats, who had more retirements this year than Republicans.  But conversely, Republicans also had 11 Republicans win by less than 3-points, and perhaps more pertinently, they had five win by less than 1-point.

I'm going to now make some blanket assumptions, essentially assuming, like in 2020, that almost none of the districts that Joe Biden won 53% or more of the vote are going to be competitive, and conversely, all of the districts that Donald Trump won 54% of the vote or more are not in play.  That would give Biden 202 seats and Trump 190 seats.  Just 43 seats are on the map right now where Biden won between 47-53% of the vote.  In a normal midterm, most of these would go to the Republicans, and likely the 32 seats that Biden won between 53-55% of the vote in would have at least a couple of seats going to the Republicans.  But in a neutral environment, one party would likely split this or at least least get 40% of the seats, so we could assume that the Democrats would get somewhere between 17-26 seats.

Rep. David Valadao (R-CA)

You don't have to be great at math to see that adds up to barely 218, which is the minimum the Democrats need for a majority.  There would be an intense amount of pressure on Democrats, in this scenario, to win some seats that are difficult for them to win, mind you.  For example, several key incumbents like Mike Garcia, David Valadao, Don Bacon, & Michelle Steel, all of whom won in 2020, would need to lose and while incumbency isn't what it used to be that's easier said-than-done.  You'd also have to compete in at least a couple of districts like CA-40 and MI-10 that Democrats have so far shown little interest in winning (in terms of monetary investment).  But it also means that we maybe should rethink some of the stretch districts that pundits have called as Tossups .  Using the Crystal Ball again, right now they've got CA-13, IN-1, NY-3, & OR-5 all listed as Tossups right now, despite all going to Biden by at least 8-points in 2020.  IF we assume that 2022 will be a neutral environment, these seats would almost certainly end up blue on November 8th.

The Senate is much more digestible.  Using the 47-53% metric, only ten states on the map did Joe Biden get between 47-53% of the vote: Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, & Florida.  Two of those states (Michigan & Minnesota) don't have a Senate election this year.  That leaves eight, and while there are other competitive races on the map (namely Ohio), these are likely the eight states that decide the majority.  This would put the Democrats somewhere between 46-54 Senate seats, but there's a catch here.  In the past two presidential elections, only one senator (Susan Collins) won her state while her party lost the presidential election, and while in 2018 there were three Democrats (Joe Manchin, Sherrod Brown, & Jon Tester) who won Trump states, they all did so as incumbents, whereas only two of these eight seats feature a Republican incumbent.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV)

If you look at it this way the math becomes sunnier for Democrats.  Of those eight seats, Joe Biden won six of them, and Biden's win margin in at least New Hampshire was large enough (7.4 points) that it shouldn't really be in the same conversation as the other seats (incumbent Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan would be heavily favored in a neutral environment).  If Democrats were to just stick to Biden districts, they'd have a majority that could likely break the filibuster with picking up Wisconsin & Pennsylvania.  Additionally, unlike House races where there are enough races that a spare bad challenger doesn't hurt too much, Georgia, Pennsylvania, & Arizona have challengers that have continually underperformed on the campaign trail, and in the case of the latter two, this has reflected continually in polls.  Assuming that Marco Rubio wins (the safest of the eight seats for the Republicans given his incumbency and Florida's consistently pink hue), this means that the Democrats are really looking more at a 49-53 seat ceiling...almost all of which points to a majority.  At this point, while it's easy to see a world where Republicans (especially if they gain more steam as the election closes) wins the Senate, they cannot be considered favorites to do so.

All of this is to say we're in uncharted territory.  A 2020-style environment for Democrats in 2022 would make the Senate a slight favorite for the incumbents and the House a tossup.  We don't know if we're in such an environment yet, and unless polls start to break in an odd way, we likely won't know until November 8th. But based on the special elections in a post-Dobbs world, it's not out-of-the-realm of possibility that Democrats are looking at a "blue moon" style election, where they might pull off the impossible-extending a trifecta two extra years.