Where we are right now with the midterms

Here we are on Thursday morning, a day and a half after the 2022 midterm polls closed, and on some level it feels like the midterms are still just getting started. There are still a large number of uncalled races and unresolved questions, but now feels like a good time to assess what we do know.

First, the Senate. The Democrats currently have 48 seats secured, while the Republicans currently have 49 seats secured. But it’s fair to argue that the Democrats have the better odds of keeping the Senate majority, because at this point I believe they’re slightly favored in each of the three remaining races – and they only need two out of the three in order to win a de facto majority.

We know the Georgia Senate race is going to a runoff. I believe Raphael Warnock has the advantage, both because he won the first round by roughly 15,000 votes over Herschel Walker, and also because this time around Walker won’t get a bump from having the more popular Brian Kemp on the ballot.

The Senate races in Nevada and Arizona continue to be confusing even as the numbers keep coming in. But the vote batches announced in Arizona on Wednesday evening appear to be good news for Democrat Mark Kelly. And while we might have to wait several more days for Nevada to count the mail-in ballots, the overall number of mail-in ballots appears to be good news for Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto.

All three of these Senate races could still go either way. But I see the Democrats favored in Georgia, and slightly favored in Arizona and Nevada, which means I’d rather be the Democrats than the Republicans right now.

The House majority is a much more complex prospect. The Republicans are favored to win the House, as they have been throughout this entire election cycle. But gone are the projections about the Republicans winning a twenty or thirty seat House majority.

Instead the Democrats actually still have a fairly viable path to winning the House majority. It does require the Democrats to win perhaps three-quarters of the few dozen super close House races that are still uncalled. This sounds daunting. But the kicker is that thus far the Democrats have been winning most of the super close House races. That’s not luck, it’s a trend resulting from the work that people like you put in on these “toss up” races over the past few months. So if the Democrats keep winning most (not all, but most) of the close House races that are still being called, they actually could win a slim House majority. This is a fluid situation that changes every time a race is called. But it’s clear the Republicans will not have the kind of comfortable House majority that would allow them to easily bring their increasingly unhinged caucus under control.

Remarkably, the Democrats’ biggest and most fundamental gains in the 2022 midterms are in a handful of states that were completely transformed overnight. Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin won their Governor races. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota also flipped their state legislatures from Republican to Democrat. And key roles including Secretary of State also shifted from Republican to Democrat in some of these states. The approach the Democrats have taken in these four states is now a roadmap that can be used in other demographically equivalent states going forward.

Of course the Democrats utterly failed in their 2022 attempts at transforming Florida, Ohio, and Texas from red to blue, meaning the national Democratic Party will need to take a completely different approach to those states in 2024, or focus on other states bluer.

This is already one of the most unusual midterm elections in modern U.S. history, and there’s going to be a lot for the Democrats to learn from once we finally get the full results across the board. But for now, the trend remains: on the whole, the Democrats did far better than a new President’s party could typically ever hope to do in a midterm election. Now we wait to see how the Senate and House majorities will play out.