Within the Margin

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.