Midweek midterm elections update for March 7th - Who Would Control Congress today?
Bottom Line: We're up to our 8th midterm election update & there are big changes again this week. Here's what history tells us about midterm elections:
Since the advent of the current two-party system (39 midterm elections) we've averaged the President's party losing 4 Senate seats and 30 seats in the House. If that happens this year Democrats would retake control of both chambers of Congress. Democrats only need to flip two Senate seats to retake control and they need 24 seats in the House. History is on the side of the Democrats reclaiming control going into this cycle.
There are only three times that the incumbent President's party has gained seats (1934 during FDR's first term, 1998 during Bill Clinton's second term and 2002 during George W. Bush's first term) thus only 3 out of 39 midterm elections have resulted in the President's party gaining seats. Here's another way of looking at it... History suggests there's a 92% chance Democrats will gain Congressional seats this year. The question becomes how many. That's where it's helpful to look at the history of generic ballot polls and outcomes. These are the past four cycles:
The first number is the average generic ballot polling on Election Day and the second is the actual result:
2014: GOP +2.4 - GOP +5.7 = GOP+3.3%
2010: GOP +9.4 - GOP +6.8 = GOP -2.6%
2006: DEM +11.5 - DEM +7.9 = DEM -3.6%
2002: GOP +1.7 - GOP +4.6 = GOP +2.9%
The first takeaway is that the polls average being off by about 3% - however history has shown that the party with a generic ballot advantage has always performed the best in the midterm elections - so this perspective is highly predictive of which party is best positioned for the cycle. So next let's try to see what cycle this one most resembles. As of today, the generic ballot says...
Current: DEM: +4%
We had another huge shift this week. After an initial surge in the wake of the Parkland shooting towards Democrats we've seen that moderate considerably over the past week. Democrats held an average advantage of 8.8% - close to wave election territory last week. That lead has been more than halved this week. That big of a change also dramatically impacts the lay of the land if elections were held today as well.
A 4% advantage is actually the lowest average advantage we've seen thus far for Democrats and the result is that they likely wouldn't reclaim control of Congress if elections were held today.
Last week Democrats were on pace to add 29 seats in the House and 5 in the Senate. That'd be enough to reclaim complete control of Congress. This type of advantage portends much smaller gains. This week Democrats are positioned to gain 11 seats in the House and 1 seat in the Senate (recent redistricting in PA is the difference between Democrats gaining 8 vs. 11 seats). Were this to hold Republicans would narrowly hold on to advantages in Congress.
Until next week...