The Midterms as Choice Election

They weren't a referendum on the party in power after all.

Conventional wisdom is that the party with the presidency generally loses in the midterms because midterms are a referendum on the party in power. In other words, during midterm elections, people evaluate what’s going on in their lives and the country, and if they don’t like it, they vote to throw the bums out.

You can see, by that reasoning, why midterms are usually not so great for the party with the presidency. The country almost always faces some difficulties for which people want to blame someone. This year, in particular, inflation is high and there’s a pandemic no one wants to talk about which continues to kill more than 2000 people a week. The nation is bitter and divided. Half the people in the nation have lost their constitutional right to reproductive services and bodily autonomy. Things aren’t great.

Of course, that last one—the catastrophic loss of freedom of women and pregnant people—isn’t the fault of Joe Biden or the Democratic party. It’s the fault of a christofascist Supreme Court controlled by the Republicans. Which is part of the reason this election was different.

It’s hard to remember the last time the party out of power implemented such a sweeping (and deeply unpopular) policy win. For many people in the country, it doesn’t feel like the Democrats are really in control for the simple reason that they aren’t; the Supreme Court is functioning more and more like a tyrannical one legislative ruling body.

In addition, the Republican party doesn’t these days offer a generic, amorphous alternative to Joe Biden. It offers instead Trump—the former Republican president, who wants to be the next Republican president, and is constantly in the news. Throwing the bums out in this case means bringing these other quite unpopular and well known bums back in.

That’s why these midterms felt, and functioned different than midterms in the past. This wasn’t really a referendum on the party in power. It was a choice election.

Presidential contests are usually considered choice elections, in which voters have two clear options (Obama and Romney for example) and have to pick one or the other. In 2020, the voters had a choice between Biden and Trump. And this year they had a choice between…Biden (in office now) and Trump, thanks to his Supreme Court, is also effectively very much in office.

The Biden/Trump contest in 2020 resulted in a narrow but convincing Biden win. The 2022 Biden/Trump contest in 2022 resulted in…much the same outcome, from what we know of the tally so far. Democrats may get another seat in the Senate, and Republicans will cut Democratic lead in the House and possibly flip the chamber. In legislative and governor’s contests, Democrats slightly outperformed their showing in 2022 overall, with the exception of a few states (Florida, New York, Iowa.)

I’ve seen some analysts say that we spent billions on an election just to stay in the same place. It’s sort of true…but I’d say it misses how strange, and important, the underlying dynamic here is. Usually, a midterm should not be a rerun of the last presidential election. This one was because of (a) the Supreme Court’s vicious and cruel overreach, and (b) Trump’s insistance that the GOP become his personal vessel.

In short, GOP authoritarianism and extremism completely changed the dynamic of a race that the party should have won easily. It turns out that turning your party into a fascist clown car does have some substantial electoral consequences. Given a choice, people chose democracy. That’s a hopeful sign.