The Media’s Delusional Midterm Coverage

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, November 01, 2022

 

It’s another “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills” morning.

 

The 2022 midterms are less than a week away. We don’t know precisely how the midterms will shake out, but Republicans entered the cycle needing to add six more seats to win control of the House of Representatives, and a pickup of one seat to control the Senate. The president’s approval rating is 42 percent, and he is making, in the words of the New York Times, a “remarkably low-key campaign effort” to support Democratic candidates this fall, although he will be attending two events today to support Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Crist, and Senate candidate, Val Demings.

 

Unemployment is low by historical standards (3.5 percent), but inflation is 8.1 percent and has been above 6 percent year-over-year for twelve months now. Grocery prices are 13 percent higher than a year ago. The national average for a gallon of unleaded gasoline is $3.75, and has been above $3 per gallon since May of last year.

 

About 67 percent of Americans tell pollsters that the country is on the wrong track; some surveys put that number above 70 percent. In the RealClearPolitics average, Republicans currently enjoy a 2.9 percent lead on the generic ballot.

 

This morning, Gallup unveiled a new batch of national numbers, and it concluded that, “The Democrats are especially vulnerable this year because the national mood is as bad, if not worse, than it has been in any recent midterm election year”:

 

Heading into Election Day, 40 percent of Americans approve of the job Joe Biden is doing as president, 17 percent are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S., 49 percent describe the health of the economy as poor (compared with 14 percent saying it is excellent or good), and 21 percent approve of the job the Democratically led Congress is doing.

 

Current ratings of the U.S. economy and national satisfaction are the lowest Gallup has measured at the time of a midterm election over the life of these polling trends, starting in 1994 and 1982, respectively. Congressional and presidential job approval are near their historical low marks.

 

Back in the day at RedState, Moe Lane used to look at numbers like that and declare, “DOOM.”

 

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal unveiled the results of its latest survey this morning, and the numbers indicate that the suburbs, which turned away from the GOP during the Trump years — and particularly in the 2018 midterms — have dramatically snapped back:

 

The GOP has seen a shift in its favor among several voter groups, including Latino voters and women, and particularly white suburban women. That group, which the pollsters said makes up 20 percent of the electorate, shifted 26 percentage points away from Democrats since the Journal’s August poll and now favors the GOP by 15 percentage points.

 

Even if you reject all polling data as unreliable, we know which districts and states the parties think are competitive by where they choose to spend money.

 

In the House, Democrats are spending $275,000 on television advertising to protect Representative Joe Morelle in New York’s 25th district, which includes Rochester. In 2020, Biden won this district, 60 percent to 37 percent, and Morelle won reelection, 59 percent to 39 percent.

 

NBC News reported on Sunday that in California, “Rep. Julia Brownley is making personal appeals to Democratic colleagues to send her campaign cash as her internal polls show a neck-and-neck race with her GOP challenger,” Matt Jacobs. This is in the state’s 26th congressional district, most of Ventura County, where Biden won, 61 percent to 36 percent, and Brownley won, 60 percent to 39 percent in 2020.

 

NBC also reported that, “Democrats have spent millions of dollars, raised from party entities and outside groups, to protect Rep. Jahana Hayes, the former Connecticut Teacher of the Year who cruised to decisive victories in 2018 and 2020.” This is Connecticut’s fifth congressional district, where Biden won, 55 percent to 44 percent, and Hayes won, 55 percent to 43 percent in 2020.

 

Axios reported Sunday that the National Republican Congressional Committee is making a six-figure buy in television advertising for Pennsylvania’s twelfth district, where Democrat Mike Doyle is retiring, and the Republican nominee is named . . . er, Mike Doyle. (Yes, fate brought about a version of The Distinguished Gentleman campaign. “Jeff Johnson, the name you know.”) Under the old district lines, the Democratic Doyle won with 67 percent of the vote in 2020.

 

The dynamics of campaign spending work in the other direction, too. In California’s 25th district, which covers northern Los Angeles County, Republican representative Mike Garcia should be high on any Democratic list of potentially vulnerable incumbents. Biden won here in 2020, 54 percent to 44 percent, while Garcia just barely eked out a win over Kristy Smith, 50.05 percent to 49.95 percent. But, as Politico reported, “Democrats have barely spent a dime on TV to take [Garcia] down.” There are just too many vulnerable incumbents elsewhere.

 

You see similar unusual spending in gubernatorial and senatorial races, too. For example, Democrats are rushing to save Governor Kathy Hochul in New York. Back in 2018, Andrew Cuomo won the New York governorship 59.6 percent to 36.2 percent.

 

Emily’s List spent $2.4 million in Washington State to help protect Democratic senator Patty Murray. The last three polls have put Murray ahead of Republican Tiffany Smiley by eight points, then six points, then one point. Back in 2016, Murray won 58 percent to 40 percent; back in 2010, she won 52 percent to 47 percent.

 

Campaign expenditures are a useful indicator, because a national party committee or like-minded super PAC isn’t going to spend $275,000 unless it feels like it really needs to do so. When Democrats and allied groups are spending six-figure sums in late October in districts where the incumbent Democrat usually wins by 20 points, that is a sign of a giant wave coming.

 

This doesn’t mean that Republicans will necessarily win those Biden-by-20-point districts; GOP candidates may well fall short in all of them. But if the national political environment is so bad for Democratic incumbents that Republicans have a shot in D+20 districts, then the GOP is in position to pull upsets in D+10 districts, and it should win a whole lot of D+5 and sweep the even districts.

 

You can even get a sense of the scale of the wave in Senator Chuck Schumer’s reelection numbers. Don’t get me wrong, Schumer’s going to win reelection without breaking a sweat, but the last four polls had him ahead by twelve to 14 points over Republican Joe Pinion, with Schumer polling in the low 50s and Pinion between 38 and 42 percent. Back in 2016 — admittedly, a year with presidential election-level turnout — Schumer won 70.6 percent to 27.2 percent. Six years before that, Schumer won 66 percent to 32 percent. This cycle, Schumer has spent $35 million on his reelection campaign; Pinion has spent $432,193. (No, I did not miss a decimal point in there; Pinion has spent less than half a million dollars.) No offense to Pinion, but he’s nothing special as a candidate. He’s running way, way better than the average Republican because the electorate is unhappy with the way Schumer and Democrats as a whole are doing their jobs. It is not crazy to envision Republicans running eight to ten percentage points higher than they usually do, across the board.

 

Now, with all of this in mind . . . do you feel as if most of the mainstream-media coverage of the midterms is giving you a sense of just how big of a GOP wave is gathering?

 

I don’t either. Thus, the sensation of “crazy pills.”

 

A week ago, on October 25, Nate Cohn of the New York Times wrote, “Let’s imagine that the polls are exactly right about the national political environment. If so, the race is in a very delicate spot. Everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total Republican rout becomes imaginable.” (Less than a month ago, on October 3, Cohn wrote, “It’s Time to Take Democrats’ Chances in the House Seriously.”)

 

If Democrats are spending money to defend D+20 seats, is a Democratic House majority really imaginable?

 

Cohn’s colleague, Blake Hounshell, offered an assessment yesterday that struck me as more clear-eyed:

 

[The Cook Political Report] also lists five open seats in its ‘likely Republican’ category, which it does not consider competitive. Democrats previously held four of those five seats, which suggests that Republicans will start the election night vote-counting needing just one pickup elsewhere in order to win the majority.

 

CNN started the week with this news:

 

With just over a week to go until Election Day, a collection of Democratic candidates and supportive groups are willing to try a strategy that several party strategists acknowledge has not been very successful so far. They’re hoping a late rush of targeted ads and direct door-to-door outreach focused on January 6, 2021, and the threat to democracy can anger and scare enough of their own base and peel off still undecided voters to counter the momentum they sense moving toward the GOP.

 

January 6? They really think that a last-minute push of ads focused on January 6 is going to change voter attitudes shaped by inflation, high grocery prices, high gas prices, high crime, and an open border?

 

A lot of the coverage in these final weeks has the tone or theme that “despite the historical pattern, Democrats are campaigning hard!” Yes, every candidate and every party campaigns hard, every cycle. But it’s exceptionally hard to defy politically gravity, particularly when “national satisfaction” is at an all-time low, as Gallup found.

 

Will the average news reader be surprised on election night? Will anybody be irked that the media coverage of the election led them to think Democrats had a decent chance to mitigate their losses?

 

ADDENDUM: At what point can we have a serious discussion about the need to enforce immigration law on those foreigners who overstay their visas?

 

This is on my mind because “David DePape, the suspect accused of beating Paul Pelosi in his home with a hammer after breaking in, is currently in the U.S. illegally as a ‘longtime’ visa overstay,” according to Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin.