Don't Dismiss Democrats' Electoral Chances Just Yet

Don't Dismiss Democrats' Electoral Chances Just Yet

Yes, the next two election cycles are shaping up to be very challenging for the party. But bold predictions are still premature.

Lots of tough seats.

Lots of tough seats.

Photographer: Kevin Dietsch/Getty

Predictions are difficult, as the old saw goes, especially about the future. But I’ve noticed that strongly confident political predictions seem to be in vogue these days. This seemed particularly so after I posited one underrated electoral scenario: that Republicans could win a majority in the House, or even in both chambers, next year, only to have Democrats rebound to win unified government again in the 2024 elections.

Calling things underrated or overrated is always a bit tricky, because it’s hard to know exactly how they’re rated in the first place. Some baseball players have spent their whole careers being called underrated by sportswriters, which suggested that maybe they were actually rated pretty highly. But I was more or less vindicated by an avalanche of replies claiming I was nuts — surely gerrymandering would prevent Democrats from winning back the House, and the Senate map in 2024 made winning even a single seat impossible for them. As far as I could tell, these comments were mainly coming from pessimistic Democrats, rather than smug Republicans, for whatever that’s worth.

Look: It’s true that the available Senate seats in 2024 will be extremely challenging for Democrats. There are no obvious pick-ups — no states that President Joe Biden won that are currently represented by a Republican — and several Democratic seats that will likely be very difficult to defend. One, Senator Joe Manchin’s seat in West Virginia, seems almost certain to flip to Republicans. If that happens, and Democrats need even one net seat to win a Senate majority, they would have to hold several other tough seats while finding two or more unlikely wins.

So yes, betting more than three years in advance, I wouldn’t take even odds that Democrats would win a new majority in 2024. But it’s one thing to assess the odds; it’s another to be too confident about the future. It’s not hard to come up with a few ways Democrats could win a seat or two.

For one thing, it’s possible that Democrats will win the presidency in 2024 by a wide margin (indeed, it’s also possible 2024 won’t be a good year for them at all, with Republicans winning the presidency and several Senate seats; I’m only looking at one direction here, but most of this could happen just as easily in the opposite direction). Yes, it’s been a long time since the landslide re-elections of 1964, 1972, and 1984, and that kind of massive victory is probably out of the question given today’s partisan polarization. But a 2008-sized win, or even a bit larger, is plausible, and that could be enough to allow Democrats to defend most of their seats and have a chance to pick up, say, Marco Rubio’s in Florida or Ted Cruz’s in Texas. Likely? No, not at all. Possible? Perhaps.

That’s one way it could happen. Another? As many observers have noted, Republicans have at best a mixed record of nominating strong candidates. Now, Democrats aren’t going to win in (say) Nebraska or Indiana just because Republicans choose a somewhat suboptimal candidate. But it wasn’t that long ago that Republicans managed to lose a Senate election in Alabama, of all places, by nominating someone unacceptable to many of their own voters. Could they repeat that in one or more state in 2024, either through a primary challenge or in an open seat should a current Republican senator retire? Of course. 

And there’s yet another possibility. We are, after all, only a few months out from an election cycle in which Democrats gained not one but two seats — in Arizona and Georgia — after a Republican-held vacancy produced a special election. It could happen again. Of course, that too is an unlikely sequence of events. But hardly impossible. 

Add all of this up, and it’s possible that Democrats could actually gain a seat or two in the Senate, despite a dismal-looking map for them at this point. Again, this is not to predict anything about 2022 or 2024. The point is that long-term electoral trends have gigantic error bars. Prediction isn’t entirely impossible, but certainty is always misplaced. 

1. Adam E. Casey, Dan Slater and Jean Lachapelle at the Monkey Cage on the Taliban.

2. Scott Lemieux on vaccine mandates and the courts.

3. Christina A. Cassidy on how bogus Republican efforts to find election fraud may be making future fraud more likely.

4. Harry Enten on Biden’s approval ratings.

5. Glenn Kessler with a useful fact check on the number of U.S. citizens in Afghanistan.

6. Jamelle Bouie on the Marquis de Lafayette.

7. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson on climate and the New Jersey shore. 

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