Trading Places
Republicans and Democrats could swap control of the House and Senate
Happy Labor Day! Democrats are likely to retake the House, because the economy is improving and Republicans will be weighed down by Donald Trump and the unpopular Republican agenda. But Republicans are likely to retake the Senate, because there are many more vulnerable Democratic seats than vulnerable Republican seats in the Senate in 2024.
In the 2022 midterm elections—as I predicted—Republicans barely won control of the House but failed to win the Senate. In my last post, I wrote that President Biden is likely to win in 2024 because Republicans are committed to defending Donald Trump and pushing a broadly unpopular political agenda. Control of Congress is likely to be more closely contested, however. Democrats are moderate favorites to win back the House for the same reasons Biden is likely to win the presidency, but because the Senate map in 2024 strongly favors Republicans they’re the favorites to finally retake the Senate. It’s early yet, but the most likely outcome is that Republicans and Democrats trade control of the two chambers of Congress.
Right now—there still isn’t much polling—Republicans and Democrats are roughly even in the generic congressional ballot. Some trackers favor Republicans by a small margin, while others favor Democrats by a small margin. In other words, about as many people say they’re likely to vote for a Republican for Congress in 2024 as say they’re likely to vote for a Democrat. The redrawn congressional maps—which are still not definitively finalized—don’t look like they’ll greatly favor either party. The Cook Political Report currently estimates that 207 House races lean Republican and 205 races lean Democratic. As things stand, control of the House will come down to which party wins most of the 23 tossup races. In 2022, control of the House was decided by just 6,670 votes. Early indications are that 2024 will be another close election.
But as I wrote in my last post, Democrats have outperformed their expected margins by an average of 10 points in 38 special elections this year. It’s not clear why voters’ intention to vote for Democrats hasn’t been showing up in generic ballot polls. One explanation is probably just that the turnout in special and off year elections can vary widely from regular election patterns. But special elections may also favor Democrats because voters’ feelings about the parties—and their identification with one or another—doesn’t completely reflect their feelings about the actual issues and candidates at stake in specific elections. We shouldn’t expect Democrats to dominate special elections indefinitely, but their recent performance in those elections suggests voters feel more favorably toward Democrats than the generic ballot suggests.
At this point in the election cycle—with the 2024 election just beginning to get underway—the generic ballot may primarily be a referendum on the Democratic party, which has largely controlled the federal government for three years. It reflects reasonable concern about inflation, which has meant many voters have less purchasing power than they did in 2020, as well as the disappointment voters inevitably feel in the reality of any administration. But as inflation moderates, voters’ purchasing power is rising again—so far without any corresponding increase in unemployment—and as the 2024 election gets underway, voters will begin to face the reality of the current Republican Party.
That reality is that Republican officials support abortion bans most voters strongly oppose. It’s that they have pushed to cut spending on Social Security and Medicare for years. It’s that their latest proposal to address voters’ concerns about the economy—which are mostly about rising prices—is to impose a 10% tariff on all goods entering the US. It’s that instead of addressing issues that are important to voters like health care and climate change—which they know are losing issues for them—Republicans focused on whether critical race theory is being taught in schools and what bathrooms transgender people can use. It’s that most Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, and believe that he committed a crime and that the charges against him are serious. It’s that ultimately Republicans are a minority party that seeks to remain in power by gerrymandering, suppressing votes, and limiting direct democracy rather than by appealing to a majority of voters.
That’s why I think that what looks like a close race is likely to break Democrats’ way in 2024. Republicans can’t readily win the support of Republican primary voters and appeal to the general electorate at same time. Instead, they have largely been counting on voters remaining unhappy enough with the economy to vote Democrats out. That could happen, but it’s not a serious strategy for winning the election. As it is, the President’s party has gained seats in the House the last 6 times a president has run for reelection, including in the years when the President didn’t actually win reelection, as it has rebounded from losing seats in the previous midterm election. If Biden does win—as I predict he will—Democrats will probably also win control of the House by a small margin.
But Republicans do have one major advantage heading into 2024: the Senate map is terrible for Democrats. One-third of the Senate—rounded up or down, depending on the year—is elected every two years. Of the 34 seats at stake in 2024, 23 are held by Democrats and just 11 by Republicans. That means Democrats have more than twice as many chances to lose a seat they control next year than Republicans do. Any regression to the mean among incumbents—if they perform at all less well than they did well than in 2018 when they won those seats—is likely to hurt Democrats because they have the most seats to lose. The outcome in most of those races isn’t actually in doubt; a Democrat will win in Hawaii and a Republican will win in Wyoming. Democrats or Independents who vote with Democrats hold 10 of the 12 seats that are likely to be in play in 2024. No Republican is up for reelection in a state President Biden won in 2020, while three Democrats—Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joe Manchin in West Virginia, and Jon Tester in Montana—are up for reelection in states Trump won in 2020. In order to hold on to the Senate, Democrats can afford to lose at most one of those three seats, unless they can somehow also pick up Florida or Texas.
Democrats have so much more to lose than they have to gain in Senate elections that it would be a major victory for them to keep control of the Senate in 2024. Democrats do have an outside chance to run the tables for the same reasons I think Democrats are likely to retake the House. Republicans running for Senate will be asked uncomfortable questions about whether they will pass laws banning abortions and what they think about Trump’s trials. In 2022, they probably lost three Senate races they could have won—in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—because they nominated some truly terrible candidates. Republicans will almost certainly choose some bad candidates again because their primary voters are so out of sync with mainstream voters. In fact, they may end up nominating one of the same terrible candidates—the exceptionally uncharismatic Blake Masters—again in Arizona. That will keep the Senate close, but I don’t think poor Republican candidate selection will be enough for Democrats to hold on to the Senate in 2024.
In other words, I think—as strange as it might seem—the most likely outcome is that Republicans and Democrats will trade control of the House and the Senate. Metaculus currently gives Republicans a 50% chance of holding on to the House and a 61% chance of retaking the Senate in 2024. If Republicans do hold on to the House, they’ll probably win the Senate too. Likewise, if Democrats do hold on to the Senate, they’ll probably win the House too. It’s possible neither chamber changes hands, but that’s a less likely outcome.
My Forecasts
I’m going to try publishing my forecasts on a new website for tracking forecasts called Fatebook. You can see my forecasts and make your own forecasts on them here.
Democrats have a 70% chance of winning the House in 2024
Democrats have a 25% chance of winning control of Senate in 2024
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