One week out, Democrats have little reason for optimism about Congress

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Essentially from the moment Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, his party faced a difficult cycle in the 2022 midterms. Recent history is pretty consistent here. New presidents trigger a backlash two years later.

For a while this summer, though, it seemed like Biden’s party might buck the trend to some extent. Democratic activists rallied around the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, though the party’s electoral fortunes may have been more directly linked to the overlapping plunge in gas prices. Regardless, by August, a brutal election had become a blurry one.

Then the flow of the election reversed. Polling in close races and nationally shifted back to the GOP. By late October, Republican candidates had gained in nearly all of the contested Senate and governor’s races. Races were still close — but the trend was against the president’s party.

A review of the past six election cycles shows little reason for Democratic optimism. Generic ballot polling, estimates of which seats are at risk and Biden’s own approval suggest that the GOP is poised to retake both houses of Congress.

In FiveThirtyEight’s average of generic ballot polls (that is, polls that ask people to pick between support for a generic Democrat or Republican in a House race), Republicans have a modest advantage — smaller than might be expected given Biden’s low approval rating. But it is still an advantage, and since 2010 the party leading in the generic ballot average a week before the election has won more votes on Election Day four out of six times.

In three of those six elections, there was also a big swing to the Republicans between the average a week before the election and the final national margin.

You’ll notice one key exception: 2012, when polling showed a slight GOP advantage in a year where Democrats won more votes. That was a presidential year in which polls underestimated support for President Barack Obama. We could see a similar shift this year, but the terrain is obviously much different.

We can also look at Cook Political Report’s race ratings for the House and Senate. Cook Political identifies (and constantly adjusts) its estimates of how likely races are to flip, rating closer contests as “toss-ups” or “leaning” toward one party or the other. If we add up a party’s leaning and toss-up races and compare it to the other party, we get a pretty decent predictor of what will happen. (The most recent archived data for 2012 was from August of that year, so it is excluded.)

In 2010, for example, there were 77 House seats that were toss-ups or leaning for the Democrats and 23 for the GOP. That’s a difference of 54 seats in a year where the GOP gained 63.

You can see that this metric is not perfect — but that Cook Political’s ratings do generally correlate to seat flips. Which suggests that Republicans, with an 18-seat advantage, are well positioned.

In the Senate things move around more, since there are fewer races. What’s noteworthy here is that the shifts (which are common) tend to advantage the Republicans. This comports with a recent pattern in Senate polling showing that GOP chances tend to be underestimated.

Then we come to the metric discussed at the outset: presidential approval. You can see how the dots on the graph below go from lower left to upper right: as presidential approval climbs (goes up), the president’s party fares better in the national House vote (moves to the right).

This uses Gallup polling; Gallup’s most recent figure for Biden is 40 percent. In 2018, President Donald Trump’s similarly low approval preceded a Democratic blowout.

None of this is foreordained anymore than it was on Nov. 7, 2020, the day the presidential race was called. But Democratic progress in polling stalled and reversed, with strong indicators that enthusiasm on the left is more than matched by…