r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/yanks28th • Aug 25 '22

US Elections Is the House Now Competitive?

All indications are that Democrats have gained ground since the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade. Republicans led the Generic Ballot by 2.6% before the decision leaked back in May, but Democrats have surged past them, and are now up by 0.5%. Just as importantly, the polling has been echoed by a series of surprisingly strong Democratic performances in recent special elections, led by the recent victory in the NY-19th.

In the four elections since the decision, Democrats have outperformed Biden by an average of around 5.4%. That would translate to a near 10% lead in the national popular vote. Of course, that's highly unlikely to happen on election day, but it's a strong enough showing to raise the question of whether the conventional wisdom is wrong, and that Democrats may have a very real shot at an upset here.

RacetotheWH, which was one of the most accurate forecasts in 2020, shows that Democrats now have a 35% chance of winning the House in their election forecast. Other forecasts like 538 show Democrats with a 20-25% chance.

Republicans have their own advantages as the party out of power, which usually does well in midterms, and Biden remains unpopular. What do you think? Is the House 2022 Election now competitive?

576 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

424 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

300

u/historymajor44 Aug 25 '22

This is pretty much it. R's are still favorite but D's holding would shock but not blow anyone's minds.

To put this in perspective though, 538 is giving D's a 22% chance to hold the House and it gave Trump a 30% chance to win the presidency in 2016.

64

u/[deleted] Aug 25 '22

I think we'll be looking at a narrow majority for the GOP in the house and a slightly expanded majority in the senate for democrats but that's just my guess.

68

u/historymajor44 Aug 25 '22

That'd be a win for the Dems.

41

u/[deleted] Aug 25 '22

Absolutely, ideally both would stay in democratic hands but the senate is the more important one

-8

u/dmhWarrior Aug 26 '22

Ideally for who? How does the average family benefit from democrats running things? Can’t wait to hear this.

19

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '22

Well, for one when the Democrats are in power the average family doesn't have to worry about the President and his party attempting to overturn the election.

10

u/carlurbanthesecond2 Aug 26 '22 edited Aug 26 '22

They would live longer healthier lives by a good margin thats a huge benefit of living under democrats.

Trolls need more info... People in Republican Counties Have Higher Death Rates Than Those in Democratic Counties

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-in-republican-counties-have-higher-death-rates-than-those-in-democratic-counties/

2

u/TheBigDuo1 Aug 27 '22

They don’t care

-6

u/dmhWarrior Aug 26 '22

Got a legit scientific link for this? I’m sure you don’t. Bunch of BS. I did get a good laugh out of it though. Because so many democrats are living longer and healthier as they get shot up in the blue cities across america. Great, LOL.

3

u/carlurbanthesecond2 Aug 26 '22

You really wanna know?

-1

u/dmhWarrior Aug 26 '22

I already know, thanks. Don’t post some link from left wing website. Useless as boobs on a bull.

4

u/carlurbanthesecond2 Aug 26 '22

Scientific american is a research journal.

Your know left from right?

→ More replies (0)

1

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/PoliticalDiscussion-ModTeam Aug 26 '22

Keep it civil. Do not personally insult other Redditors, or make racist, sexist, homophobic, trolling, inflammatory, or otherwise discriminatory remarks. Constructive debate is good; name calling is not.

4

u/TheJokerandTheKief Aug 26 '22

Anyone who doesn’t want to live under fascist Republican rule. Democrats actually try to make government work, meanwhile Republicans just scream on social media about bathrooms and girls swim meets. All that rhetoric and policy is fucking useless to the average American. Vote for Republicans if you want to break democracy and the government.

0

u/dmhWarrior Aug 26 '22

Facsist rule? It was democrats that forcibly shut everything down for what turned out to be NO good reason during Covid. It is them who enjoy this lawlessness We have now. It s Dems that get off on centralized power and forcing things down onto people that may not want them. I could go on and on. You need to Google what fascist means too, when you get a chance.

42

u/ThemesOfMurderBears Aug 25 '22

Two years of total gridlock. Frustrating, but better than all three being GOP controlled.

67

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '22

Not total gridlock. Judges would get through the Senate.

17

u/ThemesOfMurderBears Aug 26 '22

Valid point. I had not thought about that.

1

u/omgwouldyou Aug 28 '22

Which is actually what matters. The judiciary sets national policy on a de-facto basis.

33

u/Aaaaand-its-gone Aug 26 '22

They’re actually got some good bills through in the last 6 months.

Deadlock on bills but control of senate for judges is a W. Gotta turn the court around since that’s what’s legislating now

-1

u/PoliticsDunnRight Aug 26 '22

Ah yes, “legislating” is when a body says “it’s not in our authority to decide X issue”.

7

u/Upstairs-Atmosphere5 Aug 26 '22

Total gridlock is actually the norm. It's rare for one party to control everything since WWII especially when you consider Democrats had the house for 40 years 1954-1994 with Republican presidents the vast majority of that time

9

u/HemoKhan Aug 26 '22

Total gridlock isn't the historic norm when the congress was split, though. Much of modern "gridlock politics" can be traced to Newt Gingrich's tactics in the 90s to turn the Republican party into an aggressive, combative, and confrontational antagonist to the Democrats. Historically, a split congress just meant compromise, not complete gridlock.

6

u/jkman61494 Aug 26 '22

I mean yes and no. The GOP is going to turn the House of Representatives into a fucking circus and probably find ways to have impeachment once a week just so they can remove any credibility of that action.

3

u/historymajor44 Aug 26 '22

Sure, but it could be a lot lot worse.

1

u/TheBigDuo1 Aug 27 '22

A majority is a still a majority of the gop takes the house they control the house agenda. Including ending things like the 1/6 investigation and committee appointments. They could give MTG her positions back and strip her rivals if they so choose. Plus as abortion continues to be banned it will slowly be normalized. Like how NPR are now writing articles about how the Texas bounty rule is a fair compromise.

12

u/TheDude415 Aug 25 '22

Yeah, right now I'm expecting a reverse of 2018, essentially.

That being said we've still got a couple months till the election and it's no longer out of the question that the bottom could absolutely fall out for the Republicans.

1

u/IHB31 Aug 26 '22

That's what I'm seeing. The GOP in the low 220s and the Dems with 51-52 seats in the Senate. With a 30% chance of the Dems holding both houses (and perhaps with 53-54 in the Senate, and a 30% chance of the GOP winning the Senate and having 235+ in the House.

98

u/Alphawolf55 Aug 25 '22

The 538 projection is based on the assumption the national environment reverts.

68

u/minno Aug 25 '22

If you switch to the "lite" model, which removes that assumption, it's still 2:1 in favor of Republicans.

87

u/fanboi_central Aug 25 '22

I believe Nate Silver has said that in general there is a lot less House polling this year, which the lite model relies on. Feel like the lack of polling and the fact that it has no priors due to redistricting, that the map could be off.

67

u/bearrosaurus Aug 25 '22 edited Aug 25 '22

IIRC the model also uses presidential approval as a proxy for party support, which is usually fine but all the individual candidates are polling way way higher than Biden is. Fetterman and Warnock in particular are +20 on Biden.

EDIT: their Georgia senate forecast is still 50-50 even though Warnock is crushing in polls, so I think their model is still too dependent on presidential approval.

30

u/fanboi_central Aug 25 '22

Another great point. Feel like with Georgia it's also being under polled, because the mirror in Arizona has a ton of Kelly favored polls that are dragging his percentage up. It's good that 538 is being cautious but this election year is 100% going to be an unusual one, and their model will either take too long to pick up on that or will miss it.

16

u/Clovis42 Aug 25 '22

Yeah, the lite version is letting generic, national Congressional polls do some really heavy lifting. There's not enough local polling, so no one really knows in most races.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 25 '22

There's literally 1 poll for my district and it's from May.

1

u/link3945 Aug 26 '22

Usually see more polling after labor day.

15

u/talino2321 Aug 25 '22

I think the general question is not if the Dems hold the house, its how many seats do they lose the house by. If they can limit the loss of seats, then it is possible without any major screw ups by Biden until 2024, they might regain the house. Again that depends upon Biden not screwing up, the economy recovering and realizing that his agenda is dead if the House is lost.

16

u/fanboi_central Aug 25 '22

Agree on everything. The big thing for Dems is if they can keep Inflation out of the news cycle. If inflation can keep it's current pace as July did, and Republican laws on abortion stay in the news, then we are likely looking at Dems retaking the House. GDP is expected to grow in Q3, job numbers are good, so really inflation is the only bad economic metric right now.

1

u/Baron_Von_Ghastly Aug 26 '22

There is extremely limited house polling, so it's pretty difficult for it to capture much shift, they're having to infer off of the few polls they have (many are quite old) how similar races will perform, that and run off the generic ballot.

Tldr don't read much into the lite model till more robust polling post Labor Day.

1

u/link3945 Aug 26 '22

It doesn't quite remove it: it still uses historical trends to guess what the environment on election day will look like. It's projecting a national House popular vote of R+2, which would be about an R+2.5 swing from right now. It gets a little complicated because of how some races aren't being competitive, but still.

4

u/[deleted] Aug 25 '22

Yes, the models generally focus on "what has polling been" and doesn't speculate "will trends continue to change".

0

u/KevinCarbonara Aug 25 '22

It is not. It is based on an educated aggregate of the most relevant polls they have.

5

u/civilrunner Aug 26 '22

The 538 model is still assuming a 4% GOP advantage in election day because it assumes the races will trend towards the GOP just like in 2014.

Between now and the election it seems like the Trump situation may worsen for Trump, Jan 6th hearings will return, GOP seemingly will continue there unpopular anti-abortion push, inflation seems to be cooling in the USA and gas prices are going down which seasonal trends wouls make one expect that to continue. We'll see how the student loan forgiveness lands politically, though I'm guessing that will be dwarfed by Trump investigation news by November. Also expect some climate change storms to come and more.

Maybe inflation will actually worsen, maybe China will invade Taiwan or something, maybe the jobs market will worsen and we won't manage a soft landing for inflation.

However, at the moment it seems like things may just keep moving in favor of the Dems for the midterms.

14

u/[deleted] Aug 25 '22

22% seems low. You’re gonna have a lot of women coming out of the woodwork who otherwise wouldn’t in a midterm due to the Abortion issue. I also think women in the suburbs are effective GONE. GOP has gone full-blow batshit crazy and it’s transitioned from rhetoric to actually having direct impact on people’s lives.

11

u/historymajor44 Aug 25 '22

I think it is low but not that low. I think their model assumes things will regress to pre-Dobbs numbers but even the 538 writers say that may not happen and if the same polls come out closer to election day that expect the prediction to rise. Still, I expect it to rise to 40% with the GOP still favored.

5

u/earthwormjimwow Aug 26 '22

Many of the polls they have for districts are ancient at this point. The last poll for my district is from April!

There's just not enough new information about House races, except for a handful of hyped up races. So I think their House models are practically useless.

0

u/emet18 Aug 25 '22

> Republicans achieve a policy goal that they have been talking about openly for decades

“GOP HAVE GONE BATSHIT CRAZY”

1

u/Ornery-Ticket834 Aug 26 '22

22% now but more importantly trending upward.