Traditionally, Labor Day is when elections really kick into gear. Democrats are in a surprisingly good place, based on historical midterms precedents, but they’ll still need some big breaks if they want to hang on to Congress.
Traditionally, Labor Day is considered the time when general election campaigns really kick into gear. That’s not always true these days, and a few states — Delaware, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Louisiana — have yet to even hold primaries. But there is some genuine suspense as we head into the fall season, as Democrats are doing far better than expected. It’s a good time to look at some historical precedents and consider where things stand, and what we can expect in the last two months of the midterm cycle.
The two parties are basically tied in the most reliable indicator of midterm voting intentions, the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they want to control the U.S. House of Representatives (it’s an approximation of the national House popular vote). Presently, Republicans lead by 0.2 percent in the RealClearPolitics averages, and Democrats lead by 0.9 percent in the FiveThirtyEight averages. This situation has actually been stable for a while: the margin between the two parties has been under one percent for over a month in both data sets.
So how much could this change in the coming weeks? Bill Scher at RealClearPolitics took a long look at late trends in the generic congressional ballot in recent midterms and found a common pattern, with a couple of exceptions:
In 2010, Republicans took a generic ballot lead in July that steadily widened until Election Day. In 2018, Democrats led post to post, and their margin began to swell steadily in mid-August. But the trend lines for 2014, a midterm that has been often compared to 2022, should create some jitters for the currently ebullient Democrats:
Republicans flipped the Senate hard in 2014, netting nine seats. But there is no predictable relationship between the national House popular vote (and the generic ballot that predicts it) and Senate results, which depend heavily on the specific “landscape” of seats at stake; only one-third of Senate seats are up in any election. This year’s Senate landscape is pretty balanced, and at the moment FiveThirtyEight gives Democrats two-to-one odds to hold onto the chamber.
