The Dobbs effect is also noteworthy in Florida, where Republicans did very, very well. As one friend who works on reproductive rights quipped to me repeatedly this fall, “Dobbs is our 9/11” – a shocking and traumatic event that can suspend the laws of political gravity. But that unusual quality is likely why this election broke the pattern of midterms past. It’s unusual for a party with concurrent governing majorities to face a policy setback on the scale of the Dobbs decision. What made it possible was the US supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, a fairly predictable consequence of recent appointments but one that still seems to have shocked many Americans out of a sense of complacence. Of course, that’s not a strategy conjured out of thin air. So they tried it, and it seems to have worked – an inference further bolstered by the fact that Democrats seem to have held their own particularly strongly in places with large numbers of secular white people. By contrast, driving up the salience of abortion really did change minds in Democrats’ ad-testing experiments. But the logic of the abortion-first strategy’s advocates was that even though inflation mattered more, there wasn’t much Democrats could say or do to move voters on that topic. This abortion-heavy strategy prompted a fair amount of naysaying and skepticism, for the very solid reason that most voters said it wasn’t the most important issue for them in the race, with inflation and the cost of living clearly taking the crown. ![]() The Democrats raised lots of money and spent lots of money on running lots and lots and lots of ads, mostly about abortion. ![]() It’s genuinely hard to know what would explain such a paradoxical result, but a good guess is that Democratic party campaign tactics worked. Those results weren’t replicated nationwide, but they were certainly visible across large swathes of the country – much larger than you normally see in a presidential midterm year. Maggie Hassan not only held her Senate seat in New Hampshire but, like Bennet, ran stronger than Biden did two years earlier. Michael Bennet romped home in a Colorado Senate race that been projected to be close. Democrats never gave up on re-electing Spanberger, but it was clearly going to be an uphill fight the whole way, given she had been a reasonably loyal political ally of the unpopular president. How could a Democrat like Abigail Spanberger survive in a swingy district in Virginia in a climate like that?īiden carried her traditionally Republican seat by a decent margin in 2020, but it swung back hard to the right in 2021 and voted to elect the Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor. Biden’s approval rating, by contrast, is literally the worst on record for any postwar president at this point in his term, according to the polling site FiveThirtyEight. Of course, a wildly popular president is going to be hard for the out party to deal with. The 2002 outlier is easily explained by Bush’s freakishly high approval ratings. But Democrats’ more modest success is nonetheless, in some respects, more puzzling. Of course, 2022 is not going to go down as that year’s equal. Yet Bush and his political team were merciless in milking the “rally round the flag” effect for partisan gain. Criticizing the incumbent administration was seen as dangerous and potentially even unpatriotic. ![]() George W Bush’s approval ratings shot up to a stratospheric level. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 just over a year before the voting hung heavily. That leaves 2002 as the only real example on record of a more successful midterm defense.įor those who remember it, that was a bizarre midterm year.
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