Republicans' Midterm Failure Is Sign 'Waves' Are Now Myth

Republicans had anticipated a red wave—some, even a red tsunami—in the midterm elections. But as election eight wore on, it became clear that the GOP had missed what was supposed to be a handily won midterm, and experts said Tuesday's results suggest that congressional "waves" are a thing of the past.

Historically, the president's party almost always has a bad midterm election. During President Barack Obama's second term, Republicans saw the largest Senate gain for either party in more than three decades and won their largest House majority in more than 85 years during the 2014 midterms. In the 2018 midterms, President Donald Trump suffered a "blue wave" that saw Democrats regain the House, usher in the so-called progressive Squad and post a net gain of seven seats in gubernatorial elections.

The forecast for President Joe Biden was no different. With the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, inflation fears and the state of the economy, Republicans were primed to sweep the midterms as polls predicting favorable outcomes in a number of key battleground states. But as the votes were tabulated and races called, it became clear that the GOP wouldn't have the wide margins it prepared for.

Political scientist Steven Schier said that while wave elections used to be common in midterms, the waves no longer occur because "voters are pretty much in their trenches and firing from established and comfortable positions at each other."

"We have a closely divided country, we had a closely divided presidential election [in 2020]. Now, we had a closely divided midterm," Schier said. "This may be the new normal."

As of Wednesday afternoon, the next Congress remains in the balance, with both chambers yet to be claimed. With Georgia's Senate race headed off to a runoff, both parties are anxiously awaiting results in Nevada and Arizona. Although they have the lead, Republicans are still just over a dozen seats short of regaining the House.

While Republicans "should have cruised to an easy victory," this year's results have left them "scratching their heads and pointing fingers," the University of Houston's Brandon Rottinghaus said.

Rottinghaus and Audrey Haynes, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, told Newsweek that what ended up hurting the GOP was a set of lower-quality candidates who were unable to win over voters.

Across the country, Trump-endorsed candidates appeared on the general ballot after winning their primaries. The former president spent much of the campaign cycle touting the primary wins of his endorsees, setting himself up to take credit for a red sweep in November.

But results showed that the concerns raised by establishment Republicans, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, about statewide candidates seemed to materialize as candidates like Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano lost in Pennsylvania.

At the same time, Democrats saw a boost thanks to the Dobbs decision and fear of extreme MAGA policy, Haynes said. Even with an unpopular president in the White House, voters appeared to be highly motivated by the threats to abortion rights and democracy that Democrats campaigned on, bucking the Republican assumption that inflation and fears of a recession were enough to get voters to split their tickets.

Looking at voter turnout in places like Philadelphia, Suzanne Schwarz, an assistant professor at Swarthmore College, said with turnout reaching 2018 levels, it appears that "a lot of Democrats were more mobilized than one would expect during a 'normal' midterm election—probably because many saw this election as a referendum on democracy itself."

Schier said the problem for Republicans was that they felt the only thing they needed to emphasize was a bad economy.

"What they didn't provide was a hopeful alternative to that bad economy—a way forward that a lot of voters could identify and seize upon and vote for," he said. "They felt bad news was enough, and it wasn't."

Schwarz agreed, telling Newsweek that while exit polls showed inflation as the key voting issue, "It is not clear to me that Republican candidates offered voters tangible solutions to these issues."

Schier also said that the fundraising strategies of Republicans were "too grandiose" and "misfired" in districts that didn't need money as badly as others, telling Newsweek that the GOP "did not understand how precarious their situation actually was, and therefore misallocated money in a big way."

More importantly, Schier pointed out that Biden is not as unpopular as Republicans believed him to be. The National Election Pool exit poll found that although one-third of voters said their choice for Congress was to oppose Biden, 47 percent said the president wasn't a factor.

Schier said that part of the reason Biden didn't play as big of a factor in the midterms was because Trump made it more of a choice election than a referendum on his Democratic rival.

"Biden is still not popular but he's less unpopular than many Republicans at the local and national level," Rottinghaus said. "Voters decided to choose the devil they knew instead of the one they didn't."

Update 11/9/22, 4:02 p.m. ET: This story was updated with comment from Suzanne Schwarz.