Andrew Prokop writes today about the fact that the president's party usually loses midterm elections:
So why does this happen? There are a few clues that can rule out possible explanations. The trend predates World War II, so it’s not about recent developments. It happens in states (the governor’s party usually loses seats in off-year legislature elections), so it’s not just about the presidency. It’s not just an American phenomenon, either. “It also occurs internationally in systems where there is a chief executive election separate from a midterm,” says Matt Grossmann, a professor of political science at Michigan State University.
And the trend usually reverses itself — at least partly — by the time the next presidential election rolls around, since most presidents get reelected and their party’s down-ballot performance usually improves relative to the midterms.
I'll toss out an explanation: lots of people vote against presidents, not for them.
For example, suppose you voted against Donald Trump in 2020. He's not on the ballot in 2022, so your incentive to vote is low. Conversely, if you voted against Joe Biden, he's on your TV all the time and still out there to be voted against. So you do. The result, regardless of motivation, is that lots of Biden supporters stay home while Trump supporters are still eager to vote.
How would you test this theory? I'm not sure. I suppose I'd predict that midterm shifts would be especially strong if the previous presidential election was especially polarizing. Unfortunately, that just replaces one problem with another. How do you measure how polarizing a presidential election was?
Anyway, I happen to believe that much of presidential politics makes more sense if you view it through a lens of who people vote against, rather than who they vote for. This is why negative campaigning usually works so well.
Republicans can't believe that so many people voted for Biden in 2020. But I think that a big chunk of them voted against Trump. But republicans seem unable or unwilling to believe that. But I would have voted for a yellow dog if the democrats had nominated said dog to run against Trump.
Ditto.
Moreover, I think another factor is the constant whinging of the media that "the president's party ALWAYS, ALWAYS loses seats in the mid-terms -- LOTS of seats!" The self-fulfilling prophesy.
at this point, the Democrats are going to have an historic disaster in November.
They have managed to scare, or annoy, a significant part of the people who could vote either way.
I can't find the odds for how many house seats the Dems will have next year. At this point, they're be lucky to have 170 house seats.
The Dems need to listen to Kevin and stop scaring people.
Maybe I should have just shortened the comment to:
THE DEMOCRATS NEED TO LISTEN TO KEVIN DRUM
What is it about the Republicans that isn’t scary? They have fully embraced fascism and they think “freedom” means carrying an assault rifle with you when you go grocery shopping and spitting in the face of anyone worried about Covid. They actively embrace people who actually think Democrats kidnap children and drink their blood. Why is it that not scarier than some lefties are “woke”?
Lower-income Trump voters are scared of losing their white privilege. They think that Democrats are helping non-whites to take over the country. Youngkin, for example, tapped into this fairly directly when he made CRT the centerpiece of his campaign. Fox News is fairly explicit about "replacement theory" at times, but often they talk about Democrats being socialist or even Marxist, which is basically providing an excuse for those whites who don't want to admit to racism. Most lower-income whites are really for progressive policies, for example higher taxes on the rich, and would support them if only they weren't promoted by the party which is for racial equality.
Trump tells them what they want to hear - why would it be scary for them if he were in charge permanently? The extent to which people are concerned about democracy is greatly exaggerated - what they really want is their side (their race in the case of Trump voters) to win.
Trumpians are exactly what you said. The question is with regard to people who are supposedly “on the fence”. Our “wokes” are scaring them? But the lunatics on the right don’t scare them?
To at least some extent I think it’s messaging. The Republicans are good at it and they are good at exploiting or inventing Democratic weaknesses. The Democrats aren’t very good at it, and I think that needs to change. Republicans have their own brand of “woke” and that needs to be pointed out and exploited at every opportunity.
The question is with regard to people who are supposedly “on the fence”. Our “wokes” are scaring them? But the lunatics on the right don’t scare them?
January 6th was more than a year ago, and will be about 22 months in the past at the time of the midterm election. For better or worse, that means a lot of "up for grabs" voters will have forgotten about or will no longer be concerned about the GOP's violent and authoritarian tendencies. They're low-info voters, and I fear the bulk of them just "tune out" a lot of political news as inherently partisan. And so they discount the very real awfulness of the Republicans. IOW, by nature (they're "up for grabs" voters, after all) they believe both parties are equally virtuous (or sinful). Which is nuts, but there you have it.
Once that point is reached, it's just a matter of which of the various micro-controversies affect them, and what objective conditions (economy, war/peace, covid) are like.
Also, one further point: a lot of BS controversies that Republicans manage to viralize touch ordinary people, and speak to their fears. Gee, my 13 year old daughter might have to share the restroom with a trans sex criminal! Gee, Democrats hate Abe Lincoln! Gee, Democrats want to force teachers to tell their students white people are evil!. Gee, Democrats are handing out crack points to the homeless people in the park near my office! (and so on).
Democratic-generated equivalents too often seem like insidery, DC baseball that focuses on process stuff that's not nearly as relevant or concrete to their daily lives.
The dress-wearing trannyrapist in the Northern Virginia high school bathroom turned out to be as real as Ralph Northam's time as the Jazz Singer.
But ask a Gov. Vest supporter, & they will tell you different.
To be fair, many on the Fauxgressive Bernie Left would join the Hillpeople of various J.D. ANTIVAXXX stories in supporting a return to the safety net as FDR envisioned it: NO Blacks Allowed.
Precisely.
>Democrats … have managed to scare, or annoy, a significant part of the people who could vote either way.
No, right-wing propaganda has made people who need to be frightened of, and hate, some other group of people, to be frightened of and hate Democrats. Those people were never likely to vote for the big-tent, ethnically diverse party. The propagandists have massively improved their game in recent decades. This is now layered on top of the mid-term-loss phenomenon.
I would say the slogan
Staying Home is a Vote for Trump!
just works. Carpet bomb the world with yard signs.
Americans don’t actually want good governance from the feds. That’s why they always fail to give a new president the tools to implement some proposed agenda. And, of course, this serves the interests of just about everyone since we all prefer the status quo. Incremental change at best… no change is preferred.
I'm assuming that, by "Americans" you do not mean the active, voting, base of the Democratic Party. The people of color and women. Don't feel bad! We're still working to finally be considered as "Americans"!
On one level it is, of course, about voter turn out. if a president gets 80 million votes, they need senators and reps to get the same 80 million votes at mid term. So by Americans I mean the the 20 or 30 million Biden voters who will not vote in November. They will “fail” to give him the support needed.
The Dems had best start pulling together or we are lost forever.
“Why do presidents (almost) always lose midterm elections?”
I think the answer is basically quite simple: with rare exceptions, Presidents start out by overpromising and underdelivering. The public doesn't like that, even though - perhaps especially so - they fall for the first promises each and every time.
This seems plausible, and more importantly, possibly testable. One could attempt to score a President’s accomplishments relative to promises - actually, one would correlate voters’ perceptions of accomplishments relative to recollections of promises, with electoral results.
I'll offer another explanation: the media. Since they decided long ago that their mission is to hold those "in power" accountable (expressed in various too-clever canards like 'comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,' 'hold their feet to the fire,' 'ask the tough questions') -- rather than something unthinkable like making the voting public better informed -- they put all their energy into tearing down the person "in power" regardless of how tenuous that "power" is and what the consequences of weakening it might be. They even have a backroom expression for bringing down a politician: "collecting a scalp." So of course the midterms are always a disaster! The party that is out of "power" is supposedly the "underdog," so the narrative is always massaged, subtly but relentlessly, in order to make life a living hell for the recently elected president. Anything else would be considered "carrying water" for the person in "power."
If you doubt this, ask yourself this question: if a newly elected government did everything right, how would we know?
Exactly right.
From Drum's data, if your thesis about the media is correct, then it is a universal condition for new organizations throughout the world.
And that idea I find myself a bit skeptical.
Well, in modern times, it seems it might be more about persona and events, not promises.
In the 21 midterm elections held since 1934, only twice has the president's party gained seats in both the Senate and the House: Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first midterm election and George W. Bush's first midterm election.
On four other occasions, the president's party gained Senate seats, and once it was a draw. On one occasion, the president's party gained House seats. The worst midterm losses tend to occur in a president's first term.
By the way, FDR has the record of most losses - 1938, losing 71 House seats, and 6 of the then 96 Senate seats. The second was Obama in 2010, 61 House seats, and also 6 Senate seats.
Trump's 2016 one of the anomaly midterm elections. He "lost" 41 seats in the House, but gained 2 in the Senate, where the Republicans already enjoyed a majority.
Sounds bogus to me. Republican stupidity is regularly in the news, and voting against it is easy to do.