2022 Election Forecast

Republicans Look to Make Big Gains in the House, Senate/Governorship Remain Far Less Certain

There are a lot of big races to be decided in nine days. Let’s take a look at the state of the race.

U.S. House

The Republicans have always been presumptive favorites to pick up the House. They’ve only needed 5-6 seats to do it. Any idea of Democrats holding the House has been the most ridiculous of wishcasting.

At times, I thought the most optimistic Republicans overstated their case. Due to Gerrymandering on both sides, there’s a limit to how many competitive districts there will be and there are also some pick-up opportunities for Democrats such as Peter Meijer’s 3rd district seat which nominated conspiracy theorist John Gibbs against Democrat Hillary Scholten.

Still, Democrats are in for a rum night. I thought at one point that Democrats could hold their losses to twelve seats, but I expect a GOP Pick Up of 20-25 seats, and 30 seats seems possible.

U.S. Senate

The Senate is trickier to figure out and obviously more interesting. The unreliability of polling has made things very tricky for election prognosticators in dealing with a 50-50 senate.

Core Seats:

There are three seats that are most likely to change party hands:

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV)

Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA)

Pennsylvania: Open (R)

Cortez Mastro (D-NV)’s seat is the most likely Senate seat to flip in the mid-terms. But even here, her challenger Attorney General Adam Laxalt (R-NV) isn’t running away with it. Both in terms of polls and who’s actually shown up to vote, this remains a tight race.

As a veteran ex-Republican, I’m used to this senate seat (held by the late Senator Harry Reid until his retirement in 2016) looking like a grand opportunity for the GOP only for Nevada voters to do their Lucy with the football impersonation:

This was due to the strong organization Reid had and turnout in the Hispanic community. Of course, the Hispanic vote has been shifting to the GOP and even a whiff of that in Nevada could doom Senator Cortez Mastro (D-NV). However, such national shifts need to be taken with a grain of salt. It has been said that there’s not a “Hispanic vote” but Hispanic vote(s). Hispanic is a somewhat lazy demographic term for people whose ancestors hail from places as different as Mexico, Ecuador, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. It would be like lumping Italian and Irish voters as European voters.

The extent to which the old Reid organization survives and thrives in the Hispanic population in Nevada will most likely determine Cortez Mastro’s fate.

In Georgia, despite fathering multiple children out of wedlock and being an absent father for most of them, Herschel Walker’s (R-GA) chances of winning the senate race have never looked better. The national political environment has helped and Walker is riding the coat tails of Governor Brian Kemp (R-GA) whose having an easier than expected time winning re-election against Stacy Abrams (D-GA). At the same time, unlike many neophyte candidates, Walker has recognized where he needs help and has made smart hires.

While Walker has often not seemed all there with quotes like this about gun violence: “What about getting a department that can look at young men – that’s looking at women – that’s looking at social media.” It’s a heck of a word salad and I still don’t know what he’s talking about. Yet, Democrats made the same mistake most people who run against gaffe-pone candidates make and played this up as if Walker was incapable of any coherence. They set the bar ridiculously low for the only debate and Walker cleared it easily.

Walker’s best chance to win the election is to do so by getting a majority on November 8th. Failing to do that will send the race to a run-off which would have a far from certain outcome. The runoff would see many reluctant Warnock and Walker voters stay home. How many each would be an open question. Kemp wouldn’t be on the ballot to boost Walker in the runoff.

In addition, a lot of events could influence the runoff such as good economic news, a particularly egregious Walker gaffe. Imagine if the GOP wins 51 seats on Election Day without Georgia. While hardcore partisans will want more senate seats like dragons want gold , Walker being surpluse to requirements for a GOP Senate majority could pursuade soft GOP voters to re-elect Warnock.

In Pennsylvania, Lieutenant John Fetterman (D-PA)’s double digit lead from the Summer over Mehmet Oz (R) has all but evaporated as question about his health and fitness for office after a stroke before the Democratic Primary in April. In the only debate between Oz and Fetterman, Fetterman failed to clear the bar that Walker managed to leading to questions about his fitness. Fetterman’s campaign could have made the stroke a point of public sympathy if he’d been an honest about it from the start. I warned back in July that Fetterman’s failure to come clean would hurt him and I’ve been proven right.

Add to this, the national economic environment, and an Oz wins seems plausible. Third place MAGA primary finisher Kathy Barnette who held off on endorsing Oz announced that she’s voting straight Republican and encouraging her followers to do so which indicates reluctant Republicans are coming home to back the former TV talk show host.

Yet, despite some GOP momentum, there are factors working in Fetterman’s favor that still make this close. First, there’s the risk of overreach. MAGA Republicans love to own the libs and there’s no such thing as too far in that world. But in the normal world it is, there’s a fine line between pointing out that someone doesn’t seem up to the job of being a Senator and bullying a stroke victim.

Second, I think Republicans underestimate the power of the body blows that Fetterman landed against Oz as a carpetbagger from New Jersey, an out-of-touch elite who uses hoity toity terms like crudité instead of veggie tray, and a quack. Oz’s approval rating sunk into the 30s and I don’t think it’s really recovered.

Of course, that has to be balanced against voters economic insecurities but the problem for Oz is that if voters have decided they don’t like him, it may not matter who’s running against him. In 2000, when Missouri votes decided to vote out Senator John Ashcroft, they voted for his opponent even though he’d died. That’s a fact that ought to haunt Oz’s campaign.

Stretch Seats

Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ)

North Carolina Open (R)

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT):

Blake Masters may be elected to the Senate despite being a terrible candidate (clumsily editing his own website to change his position on abortion and embracing the Unabomber as a positive political opponent) who’s been outspent 9:1 by a likable moderate Democratic in astronaut-turned-Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ). Add to this that the Arizona GOP is a hot mess that’s at constant war with itself and you have a recipe for a Kelly victory. Yet Masters is hanging in there and within striking distance of an upset in most polls.

What’s behind it? It may partly be the national political environment and acute problems with the border that the Biden Administration is not addressing. It may also be GOP Gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake (R-AZ) who has the edge over Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in most polls and has held numerous rallies with her fellow first-time candidate. She seems to sense that having a lackey in the Senate would establish her a player on the state and national stage. If she can pull it off, it’ll help her stand out from the MAGA crowd as a potential VP for Trump in 2028 or as a national candidate later on.

Still, I’d give a slight edge to Kelly. Kelly’s a likable relatively moderate candidate faced up against a state GOP that’s a basket case, to put it mildly.

The North Carolina Senate race between Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC) and former State Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley (D-NC) is that Senate race everyone forgets about because it’s so relatively normal. Neither candidate is making national news or being foolish.

The polls have been incredibly tight throughout, however, the narrative has been pretty clear: a single digits lead for Budd (R-NC) with the even or one point lead for Beasley polls being an anomaly. This race is one that could go for Democrats in another year but barring a political earthquake or a major polling miss, the GOP probably holds this seat narrowly.

We’ll talk more about the McMullin-Lee race after dealing with another category of seats because I have a lot to say on that.

Moonshot races:

Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH)

Ohio: Open (R)

Colorado: Michael Bennett (D-CO)

Washington: Patty Murray (D-WA)

Senator Hassan (D-NH) was supposed to be one of the GOP’s great pick up opportunities. That all fell apart when the GOP failed to recruit Governor Chris Sununu (R-NH) and instead nominated conspiracy theorist and Brigadier General Don Bolduc (R). While some polls have shown the race close, national groups have pulled money from the state likely indicating the polls are overstating Bolduc’s support.

Representative Tim Ryan (D-OH) has run a superb campaign against Hillbilly Elegy Author JD Vance and did the best job of any candidate of co-opting MAGA imagery and ideas and casting himself as a defender of the working class. Yet, there’s been a political “gravity” that has eaten into and then erased Ryan’s lead caused by the political environment. In addition, Vance has added to spend less time acting the roll of the unhinged idiot than he did in the disgraceful GOP primary.

Some polls show the race tight, and others even show it tied. But this seems less a result of Ryan actually still being in contention and more the polling errors that have plagued midwestern races in the last two cycles rearing their ugly head. Ryan is going to lose, though likely by less than the eight point margin the President lost the state by in 2020.

Senator Michael Bennett (D-CO) is being challenged by a moderate Republican Joe O’Dea whose a moderate in the mold of former Colorado Senators Hank Brown/Ben Nighthorse Campbell. Bennett’s lead is in mid-single digits. This is really nothing extraordinary as Bennett won his previous term by 6%.

Similarly Patty Murray holds a single digit lead in Washington over former nurse and veteran’s activity Tiffany Smiley. Washington is a state that hasn’t elected a Republican Senator since 1994, hasn’t voted Republican for President since 1984 and hasn’t elected a Republican Governor since 1980. It’s also got more socially liberal enclaves and more reason for a Dobbs backlash than other states. That Patty Murray is up by an average of 3 points in the Real Clear Politics average is proof this is a wave year but it isn’t likely she’ll lose.

If either O’Dea or Smiley get within a point of their opponents, we’re not looking a red wave we’re looking at Red Tsunami that will have washed in the GOP candidates in all the top races. That just doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

I also think candidates like Lt. Govenor Mandela Barnes (D-WI) and Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) aren’t going to come close at all. Demings might in a better year and when not saddled with the laughable gubernatorial campaign of Charlie Crist.

What’s Up in Utah?

Now let’s talk about that Utah Senate race between Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and former Independent Presidential Candidate Evan McMullin. This is a race that I think Lee should end up winning by a good margin although perhaps not relative to Utah history. If McMullin were to lose by 12 points, it would be the closest general election U.S. Senate campaign in Utah since 1976. If were to get within 9 points, it’d be the closet senate election since 1974. And if McMullin were to get within 5, it’d be the closet election since 1962.

This is all nice trivia but it’s not worth half the national print the race has gotten from panicked voices on the right. We’ve seen a ridiculous amount of press, along with pleading for Mitt Romney to, at this late date, step in and endorse Lee’s re-election bid. There have been a flurry of contradictory think pieces from the Right with often contradictory arguments. Some argue that McMullin is going to break his word if elected and caucus with the Democrats, other argued that he’ll keep his word and hurt Utah citizens by denying them committee representation. Others have pointed out that his campaign has hired many Democrats as proof that he’s a Democratic stalking horse, while the Lee campaign claimed if the race were actually serious, the Democrats would be putting money into his campaign.

Some foes have landed solid body blows on McMullin. Dan McLaughlin in a single graph nails what many find so problematic about McMullin’s campaign and his image makeover:

Treating American democratic politics like just another intel op in which he goes undercover as a new identity does not speak well of McMullin’s character, or even his respect for democracy. That is ironic, because character and alleged threats to democracy are the entire basis for McMullin’s argument against Lee.

Yet, I don’t think anyone has given a satisfactory defense of Lee and the biggest concerns raised against him. First, was his comparison between President Trump and the LDS religious hero Captain Moroni, a major faux pas. This is an important concern where a supermajority of the state are members of the LDS Church.

Second is his advocacy for Trump post-election that went much further than he publicly admitted. We learned of this from his text messages from the era were leaked where he spoke of trying to get states to appoint alternate slates of electors, told Trump’s Chief of Staff that he was spending fourteen hours of a day trying to get this fixed and promoted the work of John Eastman and Sidney Powell who proposed the most utterly unhinged election lies. Eastman would go on to propagate a theory that Vice-President Pence could overturn the election himself.

Most less than MAGA apologists for Lee such as McLaughlin admit Lee made mistakes but do their best to minimize them. This could be an effective approach. If Lee acknowledged he went overboard made a mistake, the voters could forgive him and move on.

The problem? Lee doesn’t acknowledge that he did anything wrong. From the moment that the text messages leaked and showed that Lee had been less than honest, he doubled down on his original story and essentially demanded of voters, “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

Lee is gaslighting his own constituents. His behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election may have gone too far for most reasonable people but according to the one person who matters in the GOP, he didn’t go far enough. If Lee were to own going too far for Trump, it would hurt him with the Far Right. His actions are the equivalent of Trump’s “perfect phone call” with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine where he held up congressionally approved military aid to pressure Ukraine into creating a scandal to hurt Joe Biden.

President Trump was impeached for the action but ultimately acquitted. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) after voting to acquit Trump, stated that she hoped President Trump had learned his lesson. Eleven months later, Collins saw what lesson Trump learned when he incited a mob on January 6th. McLaughlin is the Susan Collins of political writers, telling us that he’s sure Mike Lee learned his lesson. Despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The only doubt that Lee pulls this out is that Utah is a very different state. A super majority of Utahans are LDS. For various purposes, many like to pretend LDS voters are pretty much the same as Evangelicals and Catholics. While there are some similarities, there are big differences, particularly in Utah.

In Utah, the LDS church is intertwined with the state’s politics and economy in a way that’s just not true anywhere else in the country. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) has an impeccable pedigree in the LDS Church tracing his ancestry back to some of the the LDS Church’s earliest leadership. Romney has chosen official neutrality in the Senate contest which has sent a message that has led to Lee and so many national figures on the right to beg Romney to side with Lee to no avail.

What has national pundits bothered is that they don’t really know what these voters are going to do in the privacy of the voting booth. We’ve truly not seen a race like or circumstances like this in Utah. Will Utah voters let Senator Lee get away with disgracing the state, cheapening its predominant faith for political purposes, and then out and out lying about it.

If I had to guess, I think that Lee probably wins by 5-9%, but this could be a race to watch.

Overall, I think Republicans are going to end up taking control of the Senate. We’re looking at a gain of +1 or +2 most likely although that could go higher.

Gubernatorial Elections

Democrats are sure to pick up the State Houses in Maryland and Massachusetts due to the retirement of moderate Republicans. This doesn’t mean a whole lot to Democrats because this isn’t the Senate and these states are blue in the ways that matter most at the national level.

The swing states they may have hoped to pick up have been duds. In Arizona, Katie Hobbs’ lackluster campaign has been a dud and Kari Lake will likely hold the seat for the Republicans making the Democrats’ amoral decision to promote Lake come back to bite them. In Georgia, Stacy Abrams second Gubernatorial campaign has been a dud that’s vacuumed campaign contributions, but she loss ground to Kemp compared to their previous race in 2018.

Republicans have got many legitimate pick-up opportunities, many are kind of razor-thin. I could see Nevada or Wisconsin going either way, but I think you have two first term incumbent Governors in swing states with a lousy economy and that rarely adds up to re-election. Oregon is a state many have looked at as a potential pick up with a strong third party candidate seen as taking votes from Tina Kotek (D), but the polling has been very close in Oregon and that state has a history of posting polls that show the GOP with a chance only to disappoint them in the end.

I think the Democrats have a better shot at holding Michigan. Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) made some controversial decisions during the pandemic. She’s hated by Republicans, but she drew a weak opponent who could still win, but probably not. Governor Laura Kelly (D-KS) is generally popular. That doesn’t always save Governors in wave years but her opponent’s weak and doesn’t appear able to close the deal.

In New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM) is facing a spirited challenge from Mark Ronchetti. I think she’s going to hold on but win by significantly less than she did in 2018.

One of the biggest signs of trouble for Democrats is New York being listed as a competitive race. Since New York’s last Republican Governor George Pataki (R-NY) left office in 2007, the state has had a series of scandal-plagued Democratic Governors, most recently Andrew Cuomo. Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) faces Trump ally Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY). If elected, Zeldin could issue state pardons to Trump and his family, and business partners, thus throwing monkey wrenches into the state of New York’s investigation of the former President. Trump has been notoriously stingy with the money he’s raised but gave $1.5 million to Zeldin. Regardless, I think Hochul will probably hold on given the partisan tilt of New York. However, I expect her margin to be around 5 points.

Overall, I think we will probably see Republicans pick up Nevada and Wisconsin to counter Democratic pickups in Maryland and Massachusetts. The result would be that America would have 28 Republican Governors and 22 Democratic Governors. However, election-denying Tim Michaels would become Governor one of the states that proved decisive in the 2020 elections.

What will this all mean? We’ll talk about in coming weeks after the votes have all been counted.