Democratic data guru davidshor believes that his party won the midterm by persuading independents, not mobilizing their base. A conversation with EricLevitz
, I talked a lot about this concept of issue ownership or party trust: There are some issues that voters reliably trust Democrats on, and some they trust Republicans on, across election cycles. So, if you ask people, “Which party do you trust more on abortion or health care or crime?” you see a pretty common pattern that’s stable, both over time and really throughout the Western world. Center-right parties reliably get higher marks on immigration and crime, the center-left on health care, etc.
I think it’s important to emphasize that what happened with abortion is extremely rare. It’s very rare for party ownership of an issue to shift this rapidly. And I think it really boils down to this concept ofSo, the president’s party almost always does poorly in midterm elections. That’s a very consistent pattern going back to the 1930s. And we see a similar phenomenon overseas.
Certainly, Biden has enacted a bolder, more progressive agenda than Bill Clinton did between 1992 and 1994. And yet Biden’s first midterm went much better than Clinton’s. So it seems like it is possible to get voters to tolerate dramatic policy change. Although I do think there may have been one exception in terms of thermostatic backlash to policy change. The American Rescue Plan’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit did seem to trigger a backlash. That was probably the single policy I was most excited about. And both Democrats and Republicans expected it to be a political winner. But as the money actually went out, it really did become a lot less popular.
Sure. But one of the best messages that we’ve ever tested is the talking point “Social Security is not an entitlement: People pay into it and they’re just getting what they deserve.” There’s this really strong sense that middle-class entitlement benefits were earned. So people don’t see Social Security benefits the same way they see the Child Tax Credit.
The overall story with Latinos in 2020 was that we lost nine points of support from them nationwide, about 14 percent in Florida, and then something like 30 percent in parts of the Rio Grande Valley. Thirty percent is almost unheard of as far as drop-offs in support go. Whenever you make any kind of scatter plot of county-level results, those three or four counties in southern Texas are almost literally off the plot.
I think it’s important to remember that 2018 featured the lowest levels of ticket splitting in a midterm ever, and by a large margin. The fact that things may have gone up a bit is heartening. But ticket splitting was still lower in 2022 than it was in 2014. We’re talking about a pretty small uptick, if there was one. So it doesn’t change the structural challenges that Democrats face.
I think it’s obviously true that Trump’s endorsements made it harder for Republicans to win some key Senate and gubernatorial races. It looks like Fetterman is going to win by a comfortable margin. But in polling taken at the time of the Pennsylvania primaries, he was polling considerably below David McCormick. It’s hard to find a single instance where Trump didn’t endorse the less electable candidate.
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