Last month, I examined a series of what I called asterisk midterm elections. These were the midterms that were the exceptions to the rule: When the president’s party actually gained seats in the House, or at least fought things to a near-draw while gaining in the Senate. The elections were 1934, 1962, 1998 and 2002, and three of the four involved some type of national emergency (the Great Depression, the Cuban missile crisis and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks). The 1998 midterm was the exception to this, but it did have a national controversy of its own — a backlash to Republican overreach on the Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment trial. I argued that 2022 has some features in common with these elections, but it had the most in common with 1998 given the partisan overreach that is happening now.
In particular, the involvement of former president Donald Trump makes 2022 different than almost any other midterm…
And the amount of news interest in Trump has been increasing recently. Part of that is the string of endorsements he’s made in Republican primaries, but the bigger factor is the FBI’s seizure of classified documents he had in his possession at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.
When that seizure occurred, a certain strain of conventional wisdom suggested that this could help Republicans in the midterms, such as by increasing the enthusiasm of GOP voters.
If that’s true, it’s not showing up in the data. The past four special elections — two in New York, one in Alaska and one in Minnesota — all occurred after the seizure on Aug. 8, and they all showed excellent results for Democrats. And Democrats have actually gained about a point on the generic ballot since then, although it’s a small enough difference that it could be statistical noise.
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