We preview the 2022 Midterm Elections. What's at stake at the local, state and Federal levels? And how is radicalism driving voters to the polls? Jonathan Bernstein joins.
We're listening to Boomberg Opinion. I'm Vonnie Quinn. Well, the midterms are finally upon us. I spoke with Bloomberg Opinions Jonathan Bernstein to get the state of play just a few days out. Jonathan, let's start with the Senates. Obviously, polls changing by the day, by the hour, but it looks a lot closer than it did just a couple of weeks ago. Well, it's look close the whole time. It was sort of close with a little tilt of the Democrats six weeks ago. Six weeks before that, it was close with little tilts of the Republicans. Now it looks like we just don't know. And it's seat by seat. There's several seats that could go either way, and so we can't even say, ah, well, if Pennsylvania goes to the Republicans, then we don't know the answer. There's about five or so seats that are still up for grabs, which means that even though it's sort of a dead heat in terms of what the polls say about who will have the majority, we still could have fifty three Republicans. We could still have fifty two Democrats, three Democrats, even perhaps even more so, there's a lot of them. Certainty, we just have to wait. Now, do we know yet what voters are going to vote upon? Oh? I think that it looks more or less like what we thought from the beginning, which is that it's going to be a good year for Republicans because there's a Democrat in the White House. In mid terms, the normal reaction is to vote against the party that has the presidency, and in particular, if the president is unpopular, which Biden remains, then that puts the Democrats even farther behind the eight ball. Part of that has to do with the economy. Part of why Biden is unpopular is because people have a perception the economy is terrible. The perception is even worse than the reality based on the statistics. If you look sort of at the formula for what's supposed to happen, if we have a president at around approval, you would expect the Republicans to win a large number of House seats and certainly take at least the one seat they need to get the Senate majority. It looks right now possible that Republicans will get the sort of forty to forty five seats that the fundamentals would predict, but more likely they're going to fall short of that, and they could follow quite a bit short of it. So why is that happening? I think it still seems likely that abortion is the thing that's driving Democrats to have only a bad year instead of a terrible year. And we have to wait and see just how many young people and suburban women come out and vote as well. We don't know what those are exactly. Pennsylvania, it's an interesting Senate race, has been all along. Is there anything that can go wrong for either Candida between now and the actual election day? You know, probably not. Probably At this point, it's just a question of you know, they all have their turnout machines working their best to get voters to the polls at the last minute, and they'll do their best at that. You know, every candidate who has a decent chance is advertising now, whether it's directly or through support from one of the party committees or from a superpack or something like that, so that tends to sort of cancel each other out. So, you know, at this point it seems pretty unlikely that the last minute event could really make much of a difference. And yet President Biden is dumping their old day Saturday along with Barack Obama. Don't fall for that, Okay, do well? And Donald Trump is also going to be in the state. They're obviously putting a lot of time and effort into Pennsylvania. Will it be a disaster for the party that doesn't win. You know, each seat matters a lot, and Pennsylvania matters a lot because it has both a very contested Senate seat and also has a very contested gumatorial seat. It's true, on the one hand, we don't expect the last minute campaigning to shift vote very much, but that's because both parties do the last minute campaigning. If only Republicans campaigned in Pennsylvania over the last forty eight hours, then perhaps that would help them a lot. But it's sort of a zero sum game because both parties go full out, and they both go full out in all of the relevant districts. They all have their internal polling, and in addition of the external bowling, they know which races are closed, you know where to put their resources in at the end, and they come up with the same answer, whether it's seats that originally leaned one way or the other. At this point, they know which close races are, and all of those are going to be fully funded and have surrogates and have all the other resources that a party can put into it. And that's why the last minute stuff sort of canceled each other out because there's so much of it on both sides. Michigan is a fascinating I mean, there's so many fascinating ones, but Michigan is particularly fascinating. I guess because a it's so close and be yours and know of Liz Cheney endorsing Elisa's Latkin, does that make a difference to her? You know, I think that there's very few endorsements that make a big difference in the end. Liz Cheney also endorsed the Democrat in the Ohio Senate race. The only endorsement that I've seen that might move a few votes because of so unexpected is in Oklahoma, where there's a surprisingly competitive race. Former Republican and Sooner football star J. C. Watts has endorsed the Democratic candidate for governor in expected to be a surprisingly close race. So maybe because that was sort of unexpected and you know, it would make some difference. But the truth is, in a Michigan House race in Ohio Senate race. People who would be listening to Liz Cheney have already made up their minds long ago. Yeah, that's such a good point. Georgia, does it go to a runoff? My bet and I don't bet on politics and bet on horses. Um, I would guess that Georgia certainly seems like it's headed for a runoff. And that's very interesting because, just as we had two years ago, it's very possible that control of the Senate could come down to a runoff in Georgia. And even if it doesn't, one would suspect that, you know, it could change the race in all kinds of different ways to have it coming once the rest of the Senate is already set, assuming that it is, it could take weeks to decide some of these races. Well, that's the other question. I mean, Nevada is also both condidates pulling identically. Now, so whoever comes into the runoff with the lead traditionally has had an advantage, especially if it's a challenger. But whether that's true in a situation where you know, all of a sudden, the race would be even more nationalized than it is, especially if we know the control of the Senate is at stake More next on Boomberg opinion. I'm Vonnie Quinn. What are your thoughts, Jonathan on whether the pol's button is hit after Tuesday night and we have to wait many days, many weeks for many of the outcomes. Yeah, I think that's how the system is set up, and we should all be very aware of it that depending on which state it is, even sometimes within the state, it takes longer to do the votes for sometimes for very good reasons, sometimes for reasons that one of the parties wanted it to be that way. But you know in some states they accept ballots that are postmarked by election day, Well, that takes some time. In Pennsylvania, notoriously, the Republican legislature has not allowed pre opening and pre preparing ballots that come in the absolute ballots to be ready to be counted in advance, and so that means that they have to start sorting them in all that which takes time not until after the polls closed, which means we won't find out about Pennsylvania right away because the ballots take time. So, and this is in the normal proceedings. Do you imagine that there will be people contesting results, and that there might be you know, sort of election denial going on. Again, it seems likely. I think Bloomberg counted something like two sixty five Republican candidates who are supporting the false idea that election was decided by fraud. Presumably some of them are going to yell fraud if they lose, even if they lose by quite a bit. We saw that in the primaries. We saw some Republican candidates lose Republican primaries in Republican states and still refused to concede it. It used to be you needed something, some kind of irregularity, something that looked funny at least, and now that's not true. They are ready to say that normal procedures and because Donald Trump pioneered this, that normal, regular counting procedures must have been fraudulent if you lose. And we also should be careful because we're also going to see from both sides legitimate election challenges, because that happens also not because of terrible fraud or anything like that, but because sometimes there are things that the parties can legitimately claim went wrong and they can go to court and try to determine it. And one of the things for us as observers to do is to make sure we can say, oh, yes, that's normal, going to court the way you do it normally, a little aggressive maybe, but then others are, Wow, this is something that is really a threat to democracy. What happens, Jonathan, If Republicans have their best case scenario, what do they get to do for the next two years? You know, it's a great question. Republicans are post policy party. They have been running, for example, on inflation. They don't have a policy agenda on inflation. They've been running on crime, which is mostly a state and local issue anyway, but a lot of federal candidates have been running a crime They don't have an agenda on crime. Their main agenda on crime appears to be, if you look at their commercials and a rhetoric, that they are against the funding the police forces. But Democrats, except for a handful of them, aren't for defundings. In fact, Democrats at the congressional level have sent tons of money to local police forces in the last two years. So you know exactly what Republicans would do differently is very hard to tell. The main things we have to worry about are that Republicans would take anti democratic measures and would promote chaos. So, you know, we have to worry about the possibility of a government default over the debt limit. We have to worry about a shutdown once it's time to pass new appropriations bills, So that kind of thing we have to worry about. We have to worry about the possibility they're going to start impeaching the president, the vice president, cabinet members over nothing. So that's a concern. Other than that, you know, the parties have proved time and again that they are capable sometimes of getting a lot done during divided government, but this Republican Party, I'm not so sure. It doesn't seem very likely. Do we need to be worried about violence at all, Jonathan, You know, you hope not. You also hope that police forces, that the FBI are working on it. There was a warning earlier about the possibility domestic terrorism. You know, we had the attack on Nancy Closi's house just recently, We've had other situations and we've seen, you know, some very inflammatory rhetoric coming almost not i wouldn't say exclusively from Republicans, but mainly from Republicans, And you know, we do have to worry about that, certainly after what we went through in the last general action. Yeah, Jonathan, So that the day comes and the results start rolling in, or at least the early returns. What states are you watching most closely? Obviously you're watching all of them, I know that, But what once mostly be forward to watching. Well, I guess the thing that that I'll try to keep an eye on. In particular, in addition to majorities in Congress and the governor's is some of these lower profile races that could be very important, including the secretary of state races in states where we have some you know, election deniers UM who have made some very extreme comments may have been nominated by Republicans, and it's just not clear if we could guarantee free and fer elections going forward. So that's something that obviously it is a little bit is quite a bit scary, I would say, and I'll be watching that in particular. When the history books are written eventually, do we look back at this period as a turning point? Do these mid terms change anything about the nature of politics and how it's conducted in the United States? You know, I think that we have to wait. You know, I've been listening a bunch of things that are quite frightening, and they are legitimately frightening. It's also possible that candidates can back off. It's possible that some of the candidates who have been saying the most extreme things once they're in office, um may calm down and basically behave themselves as normal conservative politicians. Nothing wrong with conservative politicians, not a threat to democracy. It's the radicalism that is. And we don't know yet to what extent we could be sating against radicalism at multiple state and local and federal levels, and to what extent that we'll just get Republican policy, which you know was normal regular parts in politics again as opposed to sort of crazy partis in politics. But I guess it's it goes in psychos right, Other than I we've had this throughout history where things get whipped up and suddenly there's a period of normalcy or quote unquote normalcy, and then suddenly there's a period of insanity again. It just it happens a lot. Well, if you look at the history of it. You know, violence in American policies is nothing new. You know, we had up through the Civil War, slavery was inherently violent, in the full century after the Civil War, we had a violent white supremacy aligned with a political party, the Southern Democrats, with the agreement from other Democrats and from Republicans in most cases to look the other way. And historians and political scientists looking at America through nineteen often say, we think of it as a democracy, but really was it, especially in parts of the country. Maybe somewhat in some parts and some whatnot in others. And we'll say, well, you know, American doxy really only dates back to the sixties. And then we had a wave of left wing violence in the late sixties and early seventies which was very destructive, a lot of people killed, um and that did not have the sport of political party. Now, this wave of violence very well, maybe alive with a political party. And that seems to be what the January syst Commission is telling us about what happened on January six. We don't know yet how close the ties were, but ties between the Republican Party, the White House, Donald Trump, and some of these paramilitary groups and so you know, yeah, that's very scary, and we don't know how it would turn out. It's tempting to think, well, it's cyclical. We'll go through a bad phase and the land again like Captains in the early seventies, but we don't know that it could get worse. Noomberg Opinions Jonathan Bernstein. Catch Boomberg Opinion with me Bonnie Quinn on Boomberg Radio weekends and every Friday as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform, and do join in. Comments and opinions always welcome. I'm at Bonnie Quinn on Twitter or email a vic In at Bloomberg dot net. Until next time on Bloomberg Opinion, h