Longtime election analyst Charlie Cook has a piece up on his Substack looking at the fast-approaching midterms. It’s an interesting piece, an artifact of the moment, not simply because of what it predicts but because of the nature of the writing in which Cook seems to be grasping for metaphors about just how bad a situation Republicans face — a bit more stream of consciousness and performance art than one is used to in election analysis.
Let’s start with the lede …
With 64 days before Election Day (although the first mail-in ballots will go out in a matter of days), Republicans should brace themselves: The three most plausible outcomes are that it will be bad, really bad, or truly horrible.
A few sentences later he describes what he considers the most likely scenario.
Let’s start with the most likely scenario: that this is a “really bad” election for Republicans, losing between 26 and 35 seats in the House, and either four or five seats in the Senate.
He then describes a less drastic and merely “bad” scenario in which aggressive gerrymandering on both sides keeps House losses in the 15 to 25 range. But he thinks that this scenario still nets Democrats four to five Senate seats. He calls the GOP’s worst-case scenario the same 26 to 35 House seats lost but “at least six” Senate seats gone too.
A few small points. Cook is absolutely not discounting the role of gerrymandering. In 2010, Republicans picked up 63 House seats, though it’s always important to remember that that came after two successive Dem wave elections in 2006 (+31) and 2008 (+21). In 2018, Democrats picked up 41 seats. Cook’s predicting a blowout that is a bit hard to describe, and even in his GOP worst-case scenario Democrats gains are still relatively modest by historical standards. That’s almost all due to gerrymandering plus the fact that they’re only a few seats out of the majority to start with. Cook doesn’t say this directly. But he seems to be saying it’s possible for Republicans to hold the Senate but no more than that. In every likely scenario, Republicans lose control of the House.
For a while, this cycle has reminded me of 2006. Twenty years ago, there was every sign of a blowout almost a year out. And yet conventional D.C. opinion, even with the top tier prognosticators, was quite late to the game, only starting to see and predict what was coming in September. It was the so-called Foley scandal that opened the flood gates. And it became a kind of retrospective excuse for why they hadn’t seen it earlier. (“Well, they still had a chance to pull it out until the Foley thing happened.”)
It’s been at least a bit similar this year. A lot of that is the simple fact that the national political press remains largely wired for the GOP, for reasons that can’t be reduced to simple “bias” in the colloquial sense of the word. What I told TPM reader JL a short time ago is that the more generous read is that Donald Trump has been underwater in the polls almost every single day during the decade of U.S. politics he has dominated. He underwent a massive political repudiation through his reelection defeat and subsequent attempted insurrection, then managed to get elected again four years later. There are good reasons not to count someone like that out. But for those and other reasons, a lot of mainstream political discourse has been slow to recognize the sheer extent and intensity of opposition to President Trump.
Are there other reasons? One is how long people held on to the so-called “vibe shift”, the idea that what was actually a pretty small electoral shift represented a sea change in U.S. politics and and a decisive shift to the populist right. But I’ve also wondered how much of it is the venue where the “vibe shift” and so much else took hold: X.
It is difficult to overstate the degree to which a mix of tilted algorithms, withdrawal of non-right-wing voices and the specific algorithmic funny-business tied to Elon Musk’s own account has created not just a right but far-right echo chamber. We hear a lot about how Bluesky is an echo chamber. And it’s certainly true that it’s basically a Democratic or center-left to left-wing space. But I don’t think anyone on Bluesky thinks they’re interacting with a cross section of the American population or getting a vibe that is in any sense representative of the country. To a much greater degree, a lot of people do think they’re getting that on X.
What is dangerous about that, of course, is that X is big enough that it can kind of change reality. Many people tend to adjust or acclimate to something along the spectrum of accepted/normative opinion. If you shift those goal posts to the right, that’s going to have a big effect. Normally it’s extremely difficult to do that without hard coercive state power. There are just too many inputs. Controlling an ecosystem like X is a very different matter. I’ve actually watched this happen to a number of prominent people over the course of time in which Musk has owned X.
But that’s not the only possibility. Even before Musk, what made that platform much more important than it’s user base was how intensively it was used by journalists. I can’t prove this. and I don’t suggest it as more than a hypothesis. But I do think it’s seriously worth considering the degree to which political journalists’ presence on X has in some meaningful way distorted their collective impression of just where the country is. For those of you who haven’t followed this closely, this isn’t a fuzzy or subjective thing. If you own the company and take it private, all the levers and dials are yours. You can dial up one opinion space and dial down another. There’s no question this is happening to a significant degree. Just how much is uncertain.
I’m sure there are more than a few of you saying: Josh, aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? Don’t jinx it! Don’t be overconfident. I hear you. I definitely recommend that everyone act like Democrats are behind. And for what it’s worth, in my own private and inward calculations, a big disappointment is still well within the realm of possibilities. But we’re also not witchdoctors. We can discuss things as they presently look, try to make sense of what they mean and the gods won’t strike us down. The tide of history will wash over us as it chooses to regardless of what we were expecting, what we think … just not necessarily what we do. Our actions matter.