Initial midterm election results are rosier than expected for Democrats, who appear poised to buck historical trends and avoid major losses in Tuesday’s races.
President Joe Biden told reporters ahead of Election Day that he was “optimistic” for Democrats. He hedged that he’s “always optimistic,” in the face of projections that Republicans would take a commanding House majority and could wrest Senate control from Democrats as voters grappled with decades-high inflation.
As results are reported across the country Wednesday, it appears Biden was right to be hopeful.
“It’s the most successful midterm for a Democratic president probably in history and certainly since the Second World War,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management. “They still might lose control of both houses, but it’s hardly the red wave that was being marketed in the media.”
Control of the Senate and House are still undecided, according to NBC News. Biden’s party picked up one GOP-held seat in Pennsylvania, and candidates are running neck-and-neck in races for three Democratic-held seats, according to NBC.
Meanwhile, NBC’s latest projections estimate Republicans could hold 221 House seats in the next Congress — enough to flip the chamber, but hardly the commanding majority the GOP imagined.
In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Biden pleaded with voters to make the midterms a “choice” for democracy and abortion rights rather than a “referendum” on his first term. Modern U.S. midterm elections held after a new administration are almost always a rebuke of the party in office, but despite economic concerns and low approval ratings for the president, Democrats avoided major losses, said Jess O’Connell, a Democratic operative and founder of NEWCO Strategies.
“While Democrats may ultimately lose the House, it will likely be by much less than Republicans would want,” O’Connell said. “The results so far don’t seem like a repudiation of Biden’s presidency, in fact, the opposite. By all accounts so far, close results like this are really a win for Biden and Democrats given the heavily redistricted maps and economic headwinds they’ve been navigating coming into these midterms.”
Biden accomplished many of his campaign promises in his first two years in office, even checking off items like capping the price of insulin that Democrats had tried to accomplish for years. Under Biden’s watch, Congress passed laws that aimed to address climate change, provided Covid-19 relief funds and invested $1 trillion in infrastructure.
He appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court and has proven himself to be a leader on the world stage amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Through executive action, Biden pardoned federal offenders convicted of “simple marijuana possession” and made good on his promise to forgive $10,000 worth of federal student loan debt for eligible borrowers, though that policy has been held up by legal challenges.
Pundits had predicted these wins would be overshadowed in voters’ minds by economic concerns as inflation, which the White House initially said would be transitory, lingered and rose to a four-decade high, pinching pocketbooks and increasing talk of a recession on the horizon. The national average price for a gallon of gas was $3.80 on Election Day, according to AAA. That’s down from the all time high of $5 set in June, but still above the $3.42 average it was a year ago.
Nearly every poll leading up to Tuesday showed voters listing inflation and the economy as their top concerns, but preliminary results show those issues didn’t completely eclipse fears around abortion rights and democracy.
“The story of 2022 is that the Roe decision did a lot to close the enthusiasm gap we were seeing a year ago,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and publisher of the conservative-leaning publication The Bulwark. “There was lots of Republican enthusiasm which led to big turnout and Democrats were able to match that largely because of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision. From there it became a dogfight for moderates and swing voters. Ultimately candidate quality really was the decisive factor and abortion is woven into that.”
Longwell said that when she conducted focus groups, certain voters would talk about their concerns about the economy, inflation and crime, but they would still opt for the Democratic candidate because they were concerned the Republican was too extreme and use the candidate’s stance on abortion as justification.
“Yes people are down on Biden, they’re down on the economy, they’re saying these things at the top, but when I ask them about what they’re voting on they say abortion,” she said. “For Republicans, it’s a candidate problem and that’s thanks to Donald Trump.”
While his approval rating fell from the honeymoon period high of 51% in NBC News’ poll in April 2021, Biden sat close to where the previous two presidents found themselves at this point in their first term. In the most recent NBC News poll released Sunday, Biden’s approval rating stood at 44%, compared with 46% for Donald Trump and 45% for Barack Obama in the final NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls taken before the midterm elections.
Early results, though, show Democrats far outpacing historic trends. With the exception of former President George W. Bush, the party of every president since former President Bill Clinton has lost between 40 and 60 seats in the House in the following midterm election.
“There’s no rebuke to Biden in any of these numbers. They could have been more triumphant, but no rebuke,” Sonnenfeld said. “The White House should have celebrated the very low unemployment and not fell into the trap of having that defined as the source of inflation because there’s zero data to support that.”