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A Quick Look Back at ’22: The Gubernatorial Elections
Stability was the theme in the 36 elections for governor in 2022, with the incumbent party winning 35 of them. Only Nevada changed hands, with Republican Joe Lombardo narrowly defeating Democrat Steve Sisolak. For our part, we called 35 of the races correctly, including that Nevada flip. The lone miss was Arizona, which we had at Tilt Republican on the eve of the election. It’s easy to dismiss Kari Lake now, in the aftermath of her refusal to accept the result of the election she lost and the ever-rightward and increasingly unhinged drift in her rhetoric. But in the fall of 2022, she led in almost every poll – though the final edition of two of the only higher-quality surveys (Siena and Marist) showed a tie and a one-point Katie Hobbs lead, respectively.
Most of those calls were pretty straightforward, of course. Even two of the flips (Maryland and Massachusetts moving from popular but term-limited moderate Republican governors to Dems) were essentially written in stone from the start of the cycle as Republicans lacked another candidate with the political skills or moderation of Larry Hogan or Charlie Baker. In fact, the GOP nominated hardcore Trumpers in both states, further ensuring Dem pickups in two of America’s bluest states.
Let’s review the other notable races, including a few where we were a shade too confident or not confident enough:
- Georgia: It never quite felt like Stacey Abrams was recapturing the magic of her near-miss in the 2018 race for governor. In part that stemmed from the nature of the two election cycles, each involving a president with declining popularity from opposite parties. It also had something to do with incumbent Republican Brian Kemp managing to thread the needle of backing Donald Trump without supporting the latter’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Predictably enraged, Trump endorsed Kemp’s primary opponent, former Senator David Perdue…and Kemp absolutely smoked him in the primary, 74%-22%. Creating that mostly one-sided separation in voters’ minds helped Kemp thrive even as the state’s high-profile race for U.S. Senate showcased Republican extremism and their tendency to nominate oddballs. We kept the race at Lean Republican throughout the cycle, and Kemp’s margin of victory of 7.5 points is indeed at the outer edge of that Lean band.
- Kansas: Democratic incumbent Laura Kelly was defending her 2018 win over far-right former KS Secretary of State Kris Kobach. It was a massive win in a Dem-friendly year and 2022 stood to be tougher – after all, it’s not like someone would ever nominate Kris Kobach again, right? This time the GOP nominated KS Attorney General Derek Schmidt. But just as Kobach’s extremism created room for Greg Orman’s independent candidacy in 2018, Schmidt’s relative moderation (by today’s GOP standards) allowed Dennis Pyle to run as the self-proclaimed “conservative” choice. Kelly’s 2.2% margin of victory was greater than Pyle’s vote share, though. Her popularity – along with the continued drift of pro-choice GOP moderates in eastern KS into the Dem column following the Dobbs ruling – bumped her vote share upward from 2018’s 48% to 49.5%. There wasn’t much polling here throughout the cycle, but the non-partisan polls showed her ahead. With a state like Kansas, you’re rarely if ever going to see a Safe or Likely Dem rating – but Kelly’s strengths allowed us to keep it in the Tilt Dem column throughout the cycle.
- New Mexico: Michelle Lujan Grisham was another Democratic incumbent who flipped a seat in 2018, in a much blue seat than Kansas. Grisham’s approval ratings were not quite as strong as Kelly’s, and she was not facing a fellow statewide officeholder this time around. But Republican meteorologist Mark Ronchetti had run a surprisingly strong U.S. Senate race in 2020 and was viewed as a solid recruit for this race. Most polling, including every nonpartisan poll, showed Grisham ahead…but the margin was narrowing as the election approached. As a result, we moved this from Lean Dem to Tilt Dem in our final Election Eve forecast. We could have left it where it was: that late movement in the polls turned out to be ephemeral if it was real at all, and Grisham won by nearly six and a half points.
- New York: Closer to home, the Empire State’s gubernatorial race turned out to be a tricky one for us to get our arms around. From the start of the race, our position was that Lee Zeldin was too conservative to thrive in a statewide race: an unapologetic supporter of Trump’s efforts to “investigate” and overturn the 2020 election, Zeldin was also staunchly anti-choice and had voted against marriage equality during his time in the state senate back in 2011. On both social issues and the democracy issues stemming from the January 6 insurrection, Zeldin was well to the right of the national electorate, let alone blue New York’s. And yet: he consistently dismissed those attacks, on the rare occasion incumbent Kathy Hochul or the state Democratic party attempted to make them. He was teflon. Hochul had risen to the position after the resignation of three-term governor Andrew Cuomo in the summer of 2021; she was probably damaged by the brief re-imposition of some COVID lockdown measures the following winter but much more so by the perception that crime was rampant – particularly in New York City. Dem vote shares had already slipped a bit in NYC’s Latino, Asian-American and Haredi communities in the 2020 presidential election, and that slide continued in 2022. It was clear to us as the campaign moved along that this was not a Safe Dem race like mot of NY’s recent gubernatorial elections, and we toyed with moving it from Likely Dem to Lean Dem in our final forecast. We stuck with Likely Dem, but should not have: Hochul only won by six points as the “red wave” that missed most of the country squarely struck New York – particularly on Long Island, but also neighborhoods of NYC that Republicans had not won in decades, like Brooklyn’s Chinatown(s). (note that while Zeldin claims victory in Manhattan’s Chinatown, he did not win a single precinct there. Zeldin is lying when he says that. He did reduce Dem margins there, though). With New York politics in a more dynamic state than we’ve seen in quite a while, forecasting elections here will again be a real challenge in 2024 and 2026, despite our proximity.
- Oklahoma: This race looked increasingly interesting as it unfolded. Incumbent Republican Kevin Stitt was less popular than one would expect in a deep-red state, and faced a competitive challenger in Rep-turned-Dem Joy Hofmeister, previously elected statewide as Superintendent of Public Instruction. Polling tends to be scarce in Oklahoma, with the better-rated pollsters rarely making a foray into the Sooner State. A series of Republican-affiliated pollsters descended up on the state in October, initially finding Hofmeister ahead – a directional difference from many swing state polls in ’22 where the Rep-affiliated companies were finding GOP leads that ended up far removed from the final result. With the better-rated Emerson showing a single-digit Stitt lead in late October, and a competitive high-profile race for Superintendent of Public Instruction involving the controversial Ryan Walters, our final forecast moved our rating from Likely Rep to Lean Dem, just in case something was really happening. In the end, Stitt won comfortably – albeit behind most of the Oklahoma GOP ticket, and far behind recent GOP presidential showings in the state. A 55%-42% margin of defeat passes for respectable these days in Oklahoma, but with Stitt and Walters continuing to stir up controversy one wonders if 2026 might be closer. We’ll have to be disciplined, though: the 2022 example (and some before that) indicates that pollsters understate GOP support in OK regardless of whether it’s a presidential year or not.
- Oregon: Throughout the 2022 cycle, Oregon looked like one of the GOP’s best opportunities to capture a governorship – something they had not done in Oregon since Victor Atiyeh was term-limited in 1986. Democrat Kate Brown was not running, having reached her term limit; the Dem nominee was former state House Speaker Tina Kotek. The GOP had a reasonably strong nominee in former state House Minority Leader Christine Drazan. Brown left behind abysmal approval ratings, while Democratic state senator Betsy Johnson was running as an independent candidate likely to eat into the usual Dem margins in Oregon. And sure enough, polling throughout the summer and early fall showed Drazan ahead, with Johnson polling in double-digits – occasionally passing the 20% mark. But as tends to happen, the autumn saw the independent/third party support drop off, and by late October Johnson had fallen into single-digits. Both major-party candidates saw their vote shares rising, but Kotek was gaining faster and leading more often than not down the stretch. We shifted our rating from Tilt Rep on October 21 and 27 to Tilt Dem as midnight struck on November 8, and that proved to be correct. Kotek prevailed 47%-43.5%, with Johnson trailing at 8.6%. The GOP drought in the Oregon governor’s mansion (I assume they have a mansion?) continues for another term.
- Rhode Island: Man, I don’t even remember precisely why we thought this was Likely Dem instead of Safe Dem. It probably owed to a mix of factors – starting with the lack of any public polling after the first week of October, which did show a closer-than-usual contest in the Ocean State, and the RI-2 open seat race was understood to be quite competitive. And Dems were tearing each other up in various primaries up and down the ballot. But Dan McKee won by 19 points, running only slightly behind the baseline Dem performance here. We hedged the appropriate amount, but no serious person would have looked askance at a Safe Dem call here, either.
- South Carolina: The Palmetto State is really the inverse of Rhode Island: with former one-term Congressman Joe Cunningham carrying the torch for Dems, there was a chance this race could pop. Summertime polling showed a single digit lead for incumbent Republican Henry McMaster, and then pollsters disappeared from the scene entirely a week into September. That necessitated a bit of hedging to Likely Rep, but no one on the ground was saying Dems really had a shot here down the stretch. Sure enough, McMaster won by a little over 17 points. Our hedging had some logic but as with RI, few would quibble with a Safe rating in a state with such a strong partisan lean.
If we wanted, we could probably add Michigan as a state where we were too conservative at Lean Dem, as incumbent Gretchen Whitmer ended up with a comfortable double-digit win over GOP challenger Tudor Dixon. All told, though, pretty solid work. Wish we had nailed Arizona, obviously, to get all of these correct.
That wraps up our look back at the ’22 elections. Next up, it’s time to put together some assessments of the present state of affairs in what has rather suddenly turned into a dynamic 2024 election cycle.
A Quick Look Back at ’22: The Senate
Let’s continue the review of Within the Margin’s 2022 forecasts with the Senate races. One overarching narrative of the year was the Republican Party’s nomination of an array of underachieving candidates who were too conservative, too bizarre or too distant in terms of recent residency from the states in which they were running. In some cases, like Herschel Walker in Georgia, all three factors applied. Meanwhile, Democrats had particularly solid incumbents running in Arizona and Georgia who had just won 2020/2021 special elections and had not made notable errors in the time since – not a guarantee of re-election, but helpful in enduring a less-than-favorable political environment. In addition to candidate factors, the Dobbs decision in June of 2022 provided a midterm enthusiasm boost often lacking for the party that won the previous presidential contest.
Our October 30 Senate forecast predicted a 50-50 chamber – maintaining the same partisan breakdown as the 2020 elections yielded – with Democrats flipping Pennsylvania and Republicans flipping Nevada. We were correct about Pennsylvania flipping despite John Fetterman’s post-stroke debate struggles. Longtime collaborator Matt Clausen took the lead on keeping that race at Tilt Dem despite all the noise, and he was correct: despite Fetterman’s health struggles, he defeated Dr. Oz’s ludicrous candidacy by a fairly comfortable five-point margin. In fact, voters may have responded poorly to Republican efforts to capitalize on those health issues…and the New Jersey doctor recently known for selling quack supplements might not have been the best choice to make the case against a quintessentially Pennsylvanian figure in the first place.
Left to his own devices, Matt might have wisely kept Nevada in the Democratic column as well. In that race, first-term Democratic incumbent Cathy Cortez Masto faced Adam Laxalt. Like Masto, he was the state’s former attorney general; unlike Masto, he was defeated in a 2018 run as the Republican nominee for governor. Polling throughout 2022 indicated a difficult cycle for Nevada Dems, despite Masto not having any particular weaknesses beyond being a Dem facing midterm headwinds…and despite Laxalt’s sometimes-fringy, often-Trumpy political persona. More reputable pollsters tended to show a narrow Laxalt lead or a tie, as did the Democratic-aligned Data for Progress. More controversial (and GOP-aligned) entities like Trafalgar, Insider Advantage and Cygnal found larger Laxalt leads. Jon Ralston’s always-sharp turnout analysis left the Senate race truly too close to divine from the early voting and mail ballots…and I fell on the side of Nevada being a place where the vaunted Dem turnout machine would be a little bit weaker than other years. I saw economics trumping Dobbs, in a place where the Dem coalition leans more working-class than some states. And I saw a pretty rough poll out of Emerson, one of the few theoretically non-partisan pollsters to drop a Nevada poll down the stretch. Ultimately, Masto won by just under a full percentage point, securing a 51-49 Senate majority for Dems (a net pickup of one seat in a cycle once forecast to be a bloodbath).
We moved Arizona from Lean Dem to the tighter Tilt Dem in our final forecast. As it turns out, we could have kept it on the safer side: Mark Kelly dispatched venture capitalist and noted weirdo Blake Masters by about five points. Refusing to believe the GOP hype about Herschel Walker in light of countless flaws that would make it quite difficult for late deciders to choose him, we kept Georgia in the Lean Dem column. I should note here that this Georgia election makes for an interesting case. Incumbent Raphael Warnock led by a point (49.4% to 48.5%) in the November first round, then won by just under three points in the December runoff. That points to a Tilt Dem rating being closer to the mark, but…there are races where the tremendous flaws of the candidate create a ceiling and Walker might have had that to an extent beyond even, say, a Donald Trump (Walker couldn’t quite replicate Trump’s raw vote margins in some of Georgia’ rural counties). It’s worth pointing out, too, that Warnock runs damn good campaigns from an organizational and strategic standpoint, and that’s a difference-maker in close races.
A Rep-held seat where the Lean Rep rating should have been the closer Tilt Republican? Wisconsin, where incumbent Ron Johnson took a break from trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election result to seek re-election himself against Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes. But we followed the polling, where Barnes’ brief time in the polling lead in August was followed by a much longer stretch of small but consistent Johnson leads. There were signs – both in polls and anecdotes that the race was closing in the final week, so a Tilt Rep would have been justified…and indeed, Johnson ended up winning by only a point. He did not attempt to overturn that result.
One race where I’m particularly proud of our steadfastness is Washington, where a flood of GOP-friendly pollsters raced to match the narrative coming out of National Republican Senate Committee headquarters about Tiffany Smiley. To hear them tell it, their candidate (a nurse and veterans advocate making her first bid for public office) was setting hearts ablaze, closing fast and headed for an upset win over longtime, fairly uncontroversial Dem incumbent Patty Murray. One after another, a series of Republican pollsters found a tied or inside-the-margin-of-error race in the final weeks – in stark contrast to what independent pollsters were showing. Matt and I did not believe the hype and kept it at Likely Dem – a seat that would probably only go red in a wave election. That wave did not come, and Murray won her sixth term comfortably, with 57% of the vote. Simon Rosenberg often overstates the case for Democratic optimism – but he was on the mark late in the 2022 cycle with his comments that certain pollsters were trying to flood the zone and build the narrative of an impending red wave. In theory, the market will now correct itself, as Nate Silver suggested on the eve of the election: the poorly-performing polls will lose business and credibility, and they’ll address their biases (whether intentional or simply based on bad modeling) this cycle.
In sum, our Senate forecast mainly reflected a cycle where Dems tended to nominate stronger candidates and Republicans fell prey to their 2012-era bugaboo of nominating bizarre people or simply poor fits for their states – helping Dems maintain a polling advantage ultimately confirmed by the results. The toughest choice to make was trusting the electorate’s sympathy for John Fetterman in PA, and that choice was vindicated.
A Quick Look Back at ’22: The House
It’s been a minute! And despite thinking often about the need to do an accountability check on our 2022 work, I haven’t gotten to it…until now. So let’s take a look at each of the three sets of predictions (House, Senate, Governors) and see what was on target and what missed the mark – and importantly, the thought processes driving those calls at the time. That’ll set us up to do some baseline work on 2024, which is shaping up somewhat differently than other presidential years of recent vintage. We’ll start today with the House of Representatives.
Final topline seat prediction: 224 Republican, 211 Democratic (Republican net gain of 11 seats)
Actual result: 222 Republican, 213 Democratic (Republican net gain of 9 seats)
The leading forecasters spent much of the cycle, including in their final predictions, predicting significantly bigger gains for the Republicans. This was in line with typical recent midterm landslides. They did this despite polling throughout the cycle showing closer races. Most of those forecasters, of course, included two- or three-dozen toss-ups, whereas we make a final call on each because, well, you the reader already generally know the races are close; anyone can give you a list of close seats. I think it’s more interesting to actually come down on one side or the other, even if we’re gonna miss on some of them. That’s because getting to that level of commitment forces us to think critically about each race and gives readers more insight into our thought process. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, to their credit, did so: they ended up with a 237-198 edge for Republicans. FiveThirtyEight (in its final election under Nate Silver’s guidance) used “toss-ups” as terminology for races within a certain margin but their model still provided a vote share forecast for each seat, even those characterized as toss-ups. Under their Classic model, their final prediction had the Republicans with 226 seats; the Deluxe model (which incorporates ratings from non-FiveThirtyEight experts in addition to the features of the Classic model) put them at 225.
Decision Desk HQ had fewer undecideds than most; they gave the GOP a 223-200 lead along with a dozen toss-ups. The others (Cook, Inside Elections, Politico, RealClearPolitics, Fox News, Economist) projected the Republicans from 208 (Economist) to 227 (RCP), with anywhere from 20 to 38 of these elusive toss-ups. For what it’s worth, if you think of these as 50-50 chances and simply distribute half to each party, the Economist comes closest to the actual result (221.5 seats for the GOP) and RealClearPolitics is furthest away (246).
On October 21, our House forecast had the breakdown at the eventually-correct 222-213. The two changes from October 21 to the November 2 forecast were a pair of Nevada seats, NV-1 and NV-3, and on November 8 I caveated that moving NV-1 back into the Dem column warranted serious consideration. My recollection is that collaborating analyst Matt Clausen was always more confident about Nevada than me during the ’22 cycle, and the results validated his instinct. But at 224, we can still feel pretty good about how we did and can make a case – depending on how you want to view those toss-ups – for coming in second-best among this group of race-rating entities.
Let’s go under the hood, though – because it also matters which races we nailed and which ones we missed! I’ll start with the misses:
- There’s 16: nine where we predicted a Rep victory but the Dem won; and seven where the opposite occurred.
- None of the seats we identified as Safe for one party were won by the other. One seat we rated as Likely R went to Dems, though, as Marie Gluesenkamp Perez flipped Washington’s 3rd district (Vancouver and southwest Washington). It was Dems’ first win here since 2008, made possible in part by Trump’s fatwa against those Republicans who voted to impeach him – like WA-3 incumbent Lisa Herrera Beutler. She finished third in Washington’s top-two primary behind Joe Kent, a far-right Trump endorsee. Gluesenkamp Perez, a mechanic and small business owner, ran as a very different sort of Dem candidate than we’ve seen much of lately and defeated Kent by a little under one percentage point.
- Three seats rated as Lean to one party went to the other:
- OH-13 (Akron, Canton): won by Democrat Emilia Sykes by almost five and a half percentage points.
- NC-13 (southern edge of the Research Triangle region; Goldsboro): won by Democrat Wiley Nickel by a little over three percentage points. To be honest, I think I intended to shift this to no more than Tilt R and simply forgot in the maelstrom of the campaign’s final days.
- CA-13 (San Joaquin Valley, inc. Merced, Madera and southern Modesto):won by Republican John Duarte by under 600 votes (less than half a percentage point) in one of the country’s closest Congressional races.
- The rest of our misses were seats we had listed as Tilt (our closest rating).
- Four of these were in NY.
- As pessimistic as we were once the Hochul campaign’s weaknesses became apparent in the final stretch, we still didn’t quite realize how bloody it would be for Dems. My final House post did note that I was giving strong consideration to moving NY-3 and NY-4 (both primarily in Nassau County on Long Island) into the Republican column. But – noting the weak Republican candidate in NY-3 and the heavy partisan lean of NY-4 – I stuck with the Tilt Dem rating. That Republican candidate, by the way, was one George Santos. That seat has already flipped back to Dems, in a February 2024 special election won comfortably by Santos’ predecessor, Tom Suozzi, following the scandal-plagued Santos’ resignation.
- In the Hudson Valley’s NY-17, we knew that DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney was distracted by national concerns and had never established as firm a grip on his district as one might have thought. His prior margins just weren’t that impressive. And we knew first-term Assemblymember Mike Lawler was a hard-working candidate with a lot of connections throughout GOP politics. But we felt the final indications were that Maloney had stopped the freefall and might still eke out a win in a district Joe Biden carried by ten points in 2020. We were wrong.
- Further north in the Hudson Valley and out through the Catskills and Southern Tier, NY-19 was incredibly difficult to call politically – and perhaps, for once, made more difficult by geographic proximity. Though not an inch of my home county of Dutchess lies in this district, Dutchess County executive Marc Molinaro was oddly running for this seat. He had spent his (failed) summer special election campaign in his old district lashing out at people tweeting about him, complaining about news coverage, and dodging any attempts to make him say something coherent about the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. Seeing him squirm so uncomfortably then and in the months that followed may have left me too optimistic. We had it at Tilt Dem, but Molinaro squeaked by with a narrow win.
- In the other direction, Dems avoided the worst-case scenario in Nevada – not unlike Harry Reid’s legendary 2010 win in the Silver State. This time not only saw Dems hold the Senate seat (now in Catherine Cortez Masto’s hands) against a strong challenge, it featured wins in NV-1 (southeast Las Vegas metro) and NV-3 (western LV metro) which we had labeled as Tilt Republican.
- The last few:
- Forecast for Democrats but won by Republicans:
- CA-27 (northern LA County and the Antelope Valley)
- VA-2 (Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk, southern Delmarva peninsula)
- Forecast for Republicans but won by Democrats:
- NM-2 (southwestern NM, plus a small portion of the ABQ metro)
- OR-6 (Salem, McMinnville and the southwest Portland suburbs)
- PA-7 (Lehigh Valley and Jim Thorpe/Carbon County)
- RI-2 (southern and western Rhode Island, downtown Providence, Federal Hill, Olneyville). Matt was always more skeptical that Allan Fung could actually swing this one, and he was right.
- Forecast for Democrats but won by Republicans:
- Four of these were in NY.
You’d rather win ’em all. But on most of these, the other forecasters had them as too close to call – no one’s posting their perfect bracket when it comes to ’22, after all. What are some of the correct calls we should feel particularly good about?
- We were correct on 17 of our 29 “Tilt” calls – those are the seats frequently being called toss-ups by other forecasters. 59% of the supposed coin-flips isn’t too shabby.
- We were 16 for 19 on “Lean” Calls – so 84% in races where we were expressing more confidence. That seems right. Likewise, 32 for 33 (97%) on Likely ratings, and 100% on Safe ratings. Now, on a number of those the margin ultimately warranted a more-or-less confident call in either direction, and that’s something to hone going forward.
- CO-8 (northern Denver metro inc. Westminster, Thornton, Commerce City and Brighton; Greeley). Cook and Politico had this brand-new district as a toss-up; everyone else had it Lean or Likely Republican. We did not: from the beginning, I thought state representative and pediatrician Yadira Caraveo was a strong fit for this district, which has the largest Hispanic population of any Colorado seat. Historically, candidates who have helped deliver people’s babies or keep them alive during their childhood years fare well with candidates. And then there’s the Colorado GOP, who never miss an opportunity to nominate a fool: conservative senator Barbara Kirkmeyer. This anti-abortion, anti-contraception, secession-curious candidate was a marked contrast to the modern, practical Caraveo, whose relative youth could also appeal better to a district full of transplants and young families. In a district most expected to flip to the GOP, Caraveo won by seven-tenths of a percentage point to narrowly vindicate our Tilt Dem rating.
- CT-5 (northwest Connecticut: Danbury, Torrington, parts of Waterbury, and the Litchfield Hills). Two-term incumbent Jahana Hayes faced a GOP rising star (they hoped) in George Logan, a former state senator who also fronts a Jimi Hendrix tribute band. It was a rare battle of two Black candidates in a mostly-white district, and Republican operatives thought they had the momentum as the campaign entered its final weeks. My own drive-by observations found a better-organized Dem operation on the ground, even in Republican-leaning Torrington. We had the race at Tilt Dem for the final call; Sabato had it flipping Republican and most others had it in their toss-up categories. Hayes indeed won, by eight-tenths of a point. She and Logan will face each other in a rematch this year.
- IL-17 (Quad Cities, Rockford, Galesburg, Peoria, Bloomington). This gerrymandered monstrosity was drawn to keep the district in Dem hands despite Cheri Bustos’ retirement. Joe Biden had carried it fairly comfortably in 2020, but Bustos had only won by four points; this terrain has given Democrats problems in tough years. Three of the raters had it flipping to Republicans; two had Dems keeping it and the rest listed it as a toss-up. We kept it in the Tilt Dem column throughout the year in no small part due to meteorologist Eric Sorensen’s local name rec and relentless campaigning. He ultimately won by four percentage points.
- ME-2 (northern and Downeast Maine, inc. Augusta, Bangor and Lewiston). This is the much more rural of Maine’s two congressional districts and shifted sharply to the right after 2012, voting for Trump twice by solid margins. Despite that, Jared Golden was elected in 2018, re-elected in 2020, and struck us as a solid favorite in ’22 against the man he defeated the first time, Bruce Poliquin. We rated it as Lean Dem; six of the nine national forecasters rated it a toss-up. Golden led by four points after the first round of the ranked-choice election, and won comfortably (by slightly over six points) after reallocation. Golden has serious chops: against a strong Republican nominee we’d have hedged more with a Tilt rating, but Poliquin’s weaknesses seemed clear to us. The other forecasters were leaning too heavily on district fundamentals on this one.
- OH-1 (Cincinnati and most of its metro area, inc. Warren County). Historically, Cincinnati was one of America’s largest Republican-voting cities. That reputation was fading by the Obama Era, but decennial Republican gerrymanders splitting the city – and the strong GOP lean of many Cincinnati suburbs – ensured that the various iterations of this seat stayed in GOP hands from 1994 through to 2022, with one blip in 2008. But two factors converged to make the seat vulnerable to a Dem pickup in ’22. First, the Trump Era rapidly shifted many suburbs blue, and Cincy’s eastern suburbs were not immune. Second, the 2022 elections were fought under a map that kept the city unified, giving it a slight Dem edge (D+2 according to Cook’s Partisan Voting Index). Given that Steve Chabot was never hugely popular and had achieved longevity primarily through favorable mapping, we liked this as a potential Dem flip and rated it Tilt Dem. The other forecasters? Four went Lean R; five went Toss-Up. We were correct, as Democrat Greg Landsman defeated Chabot 52.8%-47.2%.
- PA-8 (Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton, the Poconos). This might be a cheap one to claim insofar as we were perhaps too optimistic for Dems with our Lean D rating…but two forecasters saw it as Lean R and seven as toss-up, making them collectively a shade too pessimistic relative to Dem chances here. Ultimately, five-term Democratic incumbent Matt Cartwright won re-election by two and a half percentage points, so the “correct” prediction here was probably more like Tilt Dem. Still, that puts us slightly closer to the mark than the collective wisdom.
Alright…I’m happy to have a little closure on the 2022 House results. The next post will take a look at the Senate forecast and results.
Within the Margin 