MWI Weekly 11.4.2022

"polling booth" by mandamonium is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

This week: Our biannual Election Special takes a look at the midterms.

This is our last newsletter before Election Day. And what an election it's promising to be. The polling is a bit jagged (more on that in a minute), but it's clear the overall margins between the two parties are very narrow. As always, a lot will depend on who actually votes; the old saw "turnout is everything" has always been true, but maybe never more than now.

If the last presidential election was any indication, we could be in for a record number of midterm voters this cycle. Which is, in and of itself, encouraging in a lot of ways. Our democracy functions best with an engaged electorate. And the more people who vote, the less likely it becomes for an activist minority to bend things their way.

But even with the high turnout in 2020, about a third of eligible citizens didn't vote (and we still lagged behind most other developed countries). In fact, if you include nonvoters in the final results, they would have finished second, just behind Joe Biden -- and Donald Trump would have come in third.

How those voters would have broken had they exercised their franchise is anyone's guess, of course. We do know younger voters turned out at a lower percentage than older voters, and they tend to skew Democratic. Higher turnout among them likely means more Democratic votes.

But there are no guarantees. In fact, go back over 20 years and young voters were almost evenly split between the parties. Democratic dominance of that demographic didn't arise until the mid-2000s.

All we can know for sure is, of the people who did vote, the 18-34 age group had the biggest increase in turnout over 2016 (8 percent), which almost certainly benefited Biden and the Democrats. But they still were the lowest turnout age group by a considerable margin: 12 percent lower than the 35-64 group, 17 percent lower than voters aged 65 and older.

If the pattern holds in the midterms, or young voters backslide (which is possible), the overall advantage will likely go to the Republicans.

And turnout in general tends to fall off from the usual participation in presidential elections, although 2018 was a record midterm turnout year in advance of 2020's record turnout:

Election results, 2020: Analysis of voter turnout - Ballotpedia

That also will likely benefit the GOP, if this turns out to resemble a typical midterm.

Yet, there's a lot of noise in the data. For one thing, party bias in the polling tends to swing back and forth (much as the electorate itself does), which often gives the appearance of one party or the other having an advantage in the run-up to the vote, only to have the actual numbers turn out to be much closer.

For another, standard polling methodology hasn't quite caught up to our evolving communications technology. It's hard to correct for bias in online polls, or the prevalence of caller ID and the sharp reduction in the general use of landline phones, or a host of other factors.

One way to get around the problem is to create a set database of voters and poll the same people over and over. It's the methodology used by Siena College (full disclosure: I attended Siena and helped develop the methodology as a young PoliSci undergrad in the early '80s) and the New York Times in a lot of their polling.

In 2016, the Siena Research Institute selected a representative county in Florida, created a database which closely resembled the overall demographics of the country, and polled them on a weekly basis. It was one of the few polls to catch the massive 10-point swing against Hillary Clinton among independent voters after the release of the Comey Letter.

According to the polling by SRI, Clinton's advantage shrank over a weekend from +12 percentage points to just +2, which is right where the live election ended up. So, it is possible to get an accurate feel for where the electorate is actually headed.

Whether the public data we're seeing now is accurate is still an open question. Some polling outfits are biased by design and construct their polls to benefit one side or the other. Others just aren't very good.

Which is why many outlets combine several different polls to create polling averages in an effort to smooth out the rough edges and get a clear picture of where things stand. Of course, those outlets themselves can lean one way or the other, or be outright biased, and their polling averages are only as good as the polls they include in them.

Every Picture Tells a Story

So, where do things stand right now?

According to FiveThirtyEight, one of the better aggregators, the data indicate the red wave many were projecting early this year has subsided to a red ripple, and the blue wave many saw coming after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade has virtually evaporated. But the margins are very, very close: Republicans Are Just A Normal Polling Error Away From A Landslide — Or Wiping Out | FiveThirtyEight

There are a lot of caveats, not the least of which is the impossible task of matching the voter registration bump of the summer with the party identification of actual voters. The consensus view is it favored the Democrats, and a similar consensus has developed regarding the significant in-person early voting and absentee or mail-in ballot numbers, especially in Michigan, and perhaps in Georgia as well.

But most mail-in and absentee ballots won't be counted until Election Day itself, and none of the results of early voting will be posted anywhere before the polls close. So, once again we only have the public polling to go by. (Parties and candidates do their own highly accurate internal polling, but they quite understandably tend to keep the results to themselves.)

The most likely outcome at the federal level is a Republican majority in the House and a Senate either evenly split again, or with a bare majority of one or two seats for one party or the other. In the states, there are far too many tossup races to call one way or the other. So, it's going to be a dramatic Election Night.

All eyes will surely be on Arizona, with its slate of Republican election deniers running for statewide office. And what is happening in the Grand Canyon State may point to the real problem we're facing: If the election swings against the bloc of candidates who claim the 2020 election was outright rigged -- by our latest count, there are 211 of them running for office at the state level or above nationwide -- after the polling got their hopes up (or not) there is every chance they'll refuse to concede.

That puts our country in a very perilous place. The one thing we must be able to count on is the accuracy, security and legitimacy of the vote.

And as a practical matter, we can. Our federal election officials worked very hard to ensure the security of the 2020 vote and have taken even more actions since to bolster state election officials in their efforts.

Not to mention, elections are administered locally. It's one fact the election deniers gloss over or ignore entirely: The people who actually run elections aren't located in some far-off secret facility overseen by some James Bond movie villain. They're our friends and neighbors, the people who stand next to us at the grocery store checkout line or sit next to us in church. Their kids are friends and classmates of our kids. They live in the same places we do, living the same lives and wanting the same things for themselves and their families.

When looked at through the lens of reality, all the conspiracy theories start to look like nonsense. The picture does indeed tell a story. And it's not a still frame from The Matrix. It looks . . . well, it looks a lot more like a Norman Rockwell painting.

But It Could Have Been A Blowout

The great irony is, the blue wave which seemed to be building over the summer was, in fact, real. It broke for a lot of reasons, including some rough economic news and a bump in the crime statistics, both of which opened the door to Republican attack ads, many of which -- regardless of truth, honesty or accuracy -- have been highly effective.

There is nothing new in that, of course. Fear and anxiety are great motivators around election time, and Democrats have done their own work by stoking fears in a number of ways through the years [link to YouTube video].

But differences in kind, character and degree matter. However commonplace fearmongering may be, it should at least be loosely tethered to the truth, and not tethered at all to election denial. There is boundless danger in the toxic stew we see brewing. If one side claims they are the only ones who can protect us, get a significant percentage of the population to believe them, and then convinces that same percentage of the population the only way they can lose is in a rigged election, we have an unprecedented problem on our hands.

And it's a problem the Democratic Party may have been able to avoid, or at least render moot, with a big win on Tuesday. It doesn't appear there's much of a chance for that. But as Democratic poohbah Rux Teixeira has been repeatedly pointing out, the path to accomplishing that victory has been open all along. And it runs through the center:

A Three Point Plan To Fix the Democrats and Their Coalition (substack.com)

The median Democratic voter seems to know it, too. By our count, there were 26 Democratic Party primaries for House seats where a centrist Democrat was opposed by someone from the progressive wing of the party. The centrist won in 22 of those races.

Yet here we are.

Just to cite one example of the disconnect, Democrats have been running on abortion rights rather than the more centrist issue of personal autonomy, which would have appealed to many people (especially women) who are opposed to abortion itself on moral or religious grounds but take a more nuanced view on how the law should treat it than the Republican view. And it would have cost them none of the supporters who were already with them on the issue.

If anything, it's a failure to listen as much as a failure of campaign strategy. And as the tide of wokeism -- itself a failure to listen -- has broken among the populace (although perhaps not so much, or at least not yet, in the gilded halls of power and within the ivy-covered walls), the cultural agenda of the Left, which has come to mean so much in Democratic politics, has become an albatross.

All of which means most of us, in all likelihood, are going to wake up Wednesday morning feeling dissatisfied once again [link to YouTube video].

There are good reasons to feel that way and bad ones. If we're fortunate, the worst of the characters we're stuck choosing from this election cycle will lose and it will be the good ones. And if we're smart, we'll ignore the inevitable chaos to come regardless of who wins, separate the signal from the noise and stay focused on what really matters.

After all, in a democracy we get the government we deserve. But it's up to us as a People to insist on it being the government we need.

Odds and Ends

Of course, this is an especially bad time to have a feeble, disjointed government wrapped up in its own head. Not that there's ever a good one. But at the moment we face a growing geopolitical threat, and not just in Europe with Russia's brutal invasion of sovereign Ukraine. Things are getting increasingly tense in Asia, too.

The ongoing menace posed by an erratic Kim Jung Un is one obvious problem. The latest barrage of missile tests by North Korea (not all of which were successful) represented a tangible escalation of Kim's saber rattling. And the fact they fired so many missiles in such short order could be an indication they've substantially built up their inventory over the past several years.

Whether the North Koreans are contemplating immediate further action or simply setting the stage to ratchet up the pressure on South Korea and Japan remains to be seen, but they're clearly following China's playbook of developing ever more dangerous capabilities in order to enhance their strategic position.

Meanwhile, the Chinese have been busy themselves. In their case, the most pressing concern is Taiwan. And by all appearances China is looking to make the possibility of any potential military action against the island more credible: Satellite images show air base in southern China receiving makeover (defensenews.com)

There's no indication they have any imminent plans, either. And they're a long way from being able to challenge us militarily. But the fact remains, this is a particularly bad time to have a political circus at home.

Which fact may not have gone completely unnoticed abroad. In another twist to our election saga, two of the members of the Federal Election Commission (both Democrats) have formally protested the vote by the two Republican commissioners to not investigate the use of foreign funds by domestic political campaigns, which is still very much a violation of federal law even under our dramatically loosened regulations.

The investigation by the FEC's Office of General Counsel discovered a pipeline of money from Russian oligarchs running through a series of shell companies into the coffers of at least one campaign for federal office, at least one state-level PAC and at least one Super PAC. While the amounts involved are small in the grand scheme of things, the existence of such pipeline at all is deeply concerning. (What’s worse, it may have been a test.)

Once again, the need for better oversight of the money sloshing around our politics is obvious. If some Russian oligarchs can do it, so can other Russian oligarchs; or the Chinese; or the North Koreans; or the Iranians; or anyone else who would benefit from a weakened, inward-looking, conflicted and distracted United States.

Whatever the outcome Tuesday, there's only one truly patriotic stance on this issue. And if any candidate or officeholder won't take it, it's perfectly legitimate for us as the People to ask why, and whether it's because their own power is more important to them then our national security.

As always, however, all is not doom and gloom, and even where circumstances become dire there is often a silver lining, as we now see in Europe (and around the globe): While the invasion of Ukraine has been horrible for the Ukrainians, and those of us who are not under physical threat have at least in part also paid at least some kind of price for it, Russia's action has triggered a more determined move away from fossil fuels than we otherwise may have seen: World Energy Outlook 2022 shows the global energy crisis can be a historic turning point towards a cleaner and more secure future - News - IEA

So, once again humanity, in its sometimes halting and often roundabout way, is turning a negative into a positive. If anything, that thought alone should be a reason for hope. Things often get worse before they get better, but once they start getting better, they can eventually get very, very good.

And with that, I wish you a safe and fun weekend. As always, it's a pleasure to be at your service. Please do remember to vote. See you next week.

Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhig.org. When not engaged with the Institute he publishes independently to Commentatio on Substack.

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The Modern Whig Institute is a 501(c)(3) civic research and education foundation dedicated to the fundamental American principles of representative government, ordered liberty, capitalism, due process and the rule of law.