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--:-- Shamitha: Hey there, it's Shamitha here. This weekend, we're bringing you an episode from our special series all about the midterm elections. It's hosted by my colleague Gideon Resnick. So enjoy it. And remember, go out and vote.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is our final special episode all about the 2022 midterm elections. So we are just days away from Election Day, and already tens of millions of people have cast their ballots. According to the latest polls, Republicans are heavily favored to gain a majority in the House of Representatives, while the Senate is looking more like a toss-up.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So for final thoughts in this home stretch, I sat down with a roundtable of guests who have all been closely following the ins and outs of the campaign. Amy Walter is the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report. Our politics has become much more existential, both sides believing that every election is literally like a matter of life and death. If the other side wins, America as we know it is going to end.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Erin Haynes is an editor-at-large for The 19th, a journalism organization focused on gender, politics, and policy. Well, I say this every cycle, but I think it's going to be true this cycle, too, that women are the deciders of the election.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And lastly, Mike Madrid, a GOP consultant and one of the hosts of the Latino Vote podcast. There is not a single, not a single competitive Senate race where the Hispanic vote isn't going to be a very large factor in the outcome of the race.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I asked each of them what they're watching in these final days. Amy kicked us off. Well, we've had two major theories over the course of this midterm. One was that it would be like the midterms that we've become used to for at least the past, oh, I don't know, 14, 15, 16 years, which is the party that controls Washington, the party that has the House, the Senate, the White House, are at a tremendous disadvantage in that first midterm election.
--:-- Amy Walter: Their party just isn't invested. Their voters aren't quite as interested in showing up and voting. And we'll see a flip of the House, the Senate, or both. The other theory coming into the campaign is that, well, things have changed, right? Our politics is different, especially in the era of Trump.
--:-- Amy Walter: But as we're getting closer here to Election Day, what seems to be happening is we're going to the former thesis, the one where things look a little bit more sort of traditional, where the focus now, instead of being on issues like abortion or Donald Trump or the things that really motivate and anger the imparkey, get them excited about turning out to vote, are not as front and center as the issues that motivate both partisan Republicans, but also independent Republicans.
--:-- Amy Walter: The economy, frustrations about the way that the Democratic Party has handled the issue of inflation, disappointment with President Biden, his approval ratings now pretty much in line with where previous presidents going into those midterm elections I've talked about in 06 and 10 and 14 and 18.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah. And Erin and Mike, I'm curious, do you see the dynamic in that similar way? And if so, what are going to be some of the most important factors in these final days?
--:-- Erin Haynes: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I agree with so much of what Amy said. At this point, this really does come down to a turnout game. It is a ground game. We are talking about math. The poll that is going to count the most is the poll that happens on election day.
--:-- Mike Madrid: There's an interesting theme that you all are mentioning, which is sort of this notion of a vote in an election feeling sort of like an existential moment and a response to keeping the other party from power, in a sense.
--:-- Amy Walter: Well, this is, it's so funny. We're having these conversations about what we're looking for in these last five days. For me, actually, my favorite day is the days after the election. And I think what we're going to be doing for the couple of weeks afterwards is answering a lot of these questions, right? Some of it will be through the exit polling, right? People will be asked that very question.
--:-- Amy Walter: Are you coming and showing up primarily as a vote for or against Joe Biden or for or against the Republican candidate? So we have some answers to that. We also get a sense too when it comes down to the kinds of issues that independent voters said were really moving them.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah. And Erin and Mike, I'm curious, do you see the dynamic in that similar way? And if so, what are going to be some of the most important factors in these final days?
--:-- Erin Haynes: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I agree with so much of what Amy said. At this point, this really does come down to a turnout game. It is a ground game. We are talking about math. The poll that is going to count the most is the poll that happens on election day.
--:-- Mike Madrid: There's an interesting theme that you all are mentioning, which is sort of this notion of a vote in an election feeling sort of like an existential moment and a response to keeping the other party from power, in a sense.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So, Amy, because you initially brought up that idea, I'm curious, do you think voters are casting their ballots more based on party loyalty or on certain issues at this point?
--:-- Amy Walter: Well, this is, it's so funny. We're having these conversations about what we're looking for in these last five days. For me, actually, my favorite day is the days after the election. And I think what we're going to be doing for the couple of weeks afterwards is answering a lot of these questions, right? Some of it will be through the exit polling, right? People will be asked that very question.
--:-- Amy Walter: Are you coming and showing up primarily as a vote for or against Joe Biden or for or against the Republican candidate? So we have some answers to that. We also get a sense too when it comes down to the kinds of issues that independent voters said were really moving them.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah. And Erin and Mike, I'm curious, do you see the dynamic in that similar way? And if so, what are going to be some of the most important factors in these final days?
--:-- Erin Haynes: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I agree with so much of what Amy said. At this point, this really does come down to a turnout game. It is a ground game. We are talking about math. The poll that is going to count the most is the poll that happens on election day.
--:-- Mike Madrid: There's an interesting theme that you all are mentioning, which is sort of this notion of a vote in an election feeling sort of like an existential moment and a response to keeping the other party from power, in a sense.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Mike, how about you? The fundamentals of this race, you know, I think historically would suggest that this is going to be a moderately good year for the Republican Party, largely because the party is out of power.
--:-- Mike Madrid: There's enough data at this point, noise as we call it, to show evidence in both directions. Literally this same week, you have headlines in half the major papers in the country saying Republicans are surging, they're coming back. The other half saying, no, there's a Democratic wave swelling.
--:-- Mike Madrid: It really depends on how you read the leaves, the tea leaves. As somebody, again, who has to make decisions in the middle of this environment that are going to affect campaign outcomes, we try to focus on those fundamentals.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So we are in an era, I think, of sustained high turnout as people are very deeply concerned about the stability and the direction of the country. But even in an environment like that, most of the fundamentals that guide campaign dynamics are still very much in play.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There's an interesting theme that you all are mentioning, which is sort of this notion of a vote in an election feeling sort of like an existential moment and a response to keeping the other party from power, in a sense. So, Amy, because you initially brought up that idea, I'm curious, do you think voters are casting their ballots more based on party loyalty or on certain issues at this point?
--:-- Amy Walter: Well, this is, it's so funny. We're having these conversations about what we're looking for in these last five days. For me, actually, my favorite day is the days after the election. And I think what we're going to be doing for the couple of weeks afterwards is answering a lot of these questions, right? Some of it will be through the exit polling, right? People will be asked that very question.
--:-- Amy Walter: Are you coming and showing up primarily as a vote for or against Joe Biden or for or against the Republican candidate? So we have some answers to that. We also get a sense too when it comes down to the kinds of issues that independent voters said were really moving them.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah. And Erin and Mike, I'm curious, do you see the dynamic in that similar way? And if so, what are going to be some of the most important factors in these final days?
--:-- Erin Haynes: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I agree with so much of what Amy said. At this point, this really does come down to a turnout game. It is a ground game. We are talking about math. The poll that is going to count the most is the poll that happens on election day.
--:-- Mike Madrid: There's an interesting theme that you all are mentioning, which is sort of this notion of a vote in an election feeling sort of like an existential moment and a response to keeping the other party from power, in a sense.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Mike, how about you? The fundamentals of this race, you know, I think historically would suggest that this is going to be a moderately good year for the Republican Party, largely because the party is out of power.
--:-- Mike Madrid: There's enough data at this point, noise as we call it, to show evidence in both directions. Literally this same week, you have headlines in half the major papers in the country saying Republicans are surging, they're coming back. The other half saying, no, there's a Democratic wave swelling.
--:-- Mike Madrid: It really depends on how you read the leaves, the tea leaves. As somebody, again, who has to make decisions in the middle of this environment that are going to affect campaign outcomes, we try to focus on those fundamentals.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So we are in an era, I think, of sustained high turnout as people are very deeply concerned about the stability and the direction of the country. But even in an environment like that, most of the fundamentals that guide campaign dynamics are still very much in play.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Amy, what are some of the ones that you are really paying attention to?
--:-- Amy Walter: Well, that's a good question. It is a big question. And look, part of the challenge we have is when we look at the Senate races, they get the most attention for good reason. Right. These are statewide contests. We're now seeing more money being spent on these Senate races than we've ever seen in history.
--:-- Amy Walter: Hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into these contests. We've had control of the Senate, the House, and the White House come down to 20,000, 30,000 votes spread across a handful of states in those last few years.
--:-- Amy Walter: It is quite possible that, once again, Georgia is going to be the decider of Senate control. I do think we're going to spend a lot of time, because Georgia and Arizona are states that are not only having competitive Senate races, governor's races, secretary of state races, but also we know they're going to be critical in 2024, that those are the places I think we're going to be spending in an inordinate amount of time analyzing, thinking about, looking at, trying to find trend lines that tell us something about how these states are going to perform in the upcoming years.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Mike, how about you? The race I'm most interested in is actually the Senate race in Nevada, largely because I think one is, it's obviously going to be one of the closer contests that may also, like Georgia, as Amy mentioned, you know, determine the balance of power on the Senate side.
--:-- Mike Madrid: But I think most importantly, the Latino vote in Clark County has been a really big focus of national pundits to saying, is this vote going to show up in the numbers that it needs to for Cortez Masto, the incumbent, the first Latino U.S. senator, or is Laxalt going to make an incursion, the Republican candidate?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And the answer to that is really going to, I think, define a huge variation in the Latino vote amongst Mexican-Americans, which is significant, that will determine whether or not Latinos in Nevada will start to vote more like California, Mexican-Americans or more like Texas Mexican-Americans?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And that distinction, it sounds a little bit abstract, but it's really that the answer to that question is going to really determine, I think, the balance of power, not just on the Senate side, but more importantly, in the House of Representatives over the course of the next four or five election cycles during through this census cycle.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And that's why I'm watching the Nevada Senate race so closely. Aaron, how about you? What do you think?
--:-- Aaron: Yeah, I think I'd say probably the state that I'm from, Georgia, the Senate race there, gubernatorial contest there, and also the state where I live now, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where certainly the governor's race and the U.S. Senate race are in the spotlight.
--:-- Aaron: I'm also looking at Florida and North Carolina, the U.S. Senate races, because as we know, there's, as we sit here today, no black women serving in the Senate since Kamala Harris was elevated to the vice presidency.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So as the panelists have pointed out, Republicans were expecting significant wins this election cycle based on historical precedent, President Biden's unpopularity and historic inflation. The party's forecasted wins are expected to be pretty big, but maybe not as big as the party was hoping.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Democrats, meanwhile, made up a lot of ground this summer, but haven't quite been able to cement those inroads with voters. So I asked all of our guests if they were to look back on the course of the campaign thus far, where they would say each party had gone wrong.
--:-- Erin Haynes: Where Democrats maybe went wrong was in not trying to balance enough, kind of empathizing with voters about the state of the economy while also talking about the other issues that they may be concerned about, really focusing on economy as the top issue, but not realizing that that wasn't the only issue for voters.
--:-- Erin Haynes: I think we've seen that more kind of in the homestretch, but in the beginning, That wasn't necessarily the conversation.
--:-- Mike Madrid: Look, I'll answer it this way. I'm not exactly sure. Either of them have made significant mistakes. They're just dealing with dynamics that have largely been out of their control.
--:-- Mike Madrid: For the Democrats, for example, the issues matrix facing the Democrats heading into the summer were really quite bad. We were actually not talking about whether or not there would be a red wave, but how big that red wave would be.
--:-- Mike Madrid: That changed a little bit with two, I would argue, two and a half things. The first was the Uvalde shooting really put Republicans on their heels, and they were reacting to the gun control pressures that they were facing, especially in places like Texas.
--:-- Mike Madrid: The second, of course, was the Dobbs decision, overturning Roe versus Wade. Both of these were external forces that the campaigns never could have put in play or put into motion, but they really revived the Democrats' chances of keeping this midterms competitive.
--:-- Amy Walter: I would agree with Mike's premise here that, you know what, a lot of times in politics, you have to deal with the hand that you're dealt, right? Or you just got to do, you're going to get a whole bunch of stuff that you can't control for.
--:-- Amy Walter: How do you respond to it? And I think if you had talked to Democrats early in the year, let's say early in 2021, what they really believed was that the extra stimulus that they pumped into the economy, that that was going to be a defining issue in the upcoming election, that COVID was going to be a defining issue.
--:-- Amy Walter: Think about where we started 2021, right? That we started 2021 with the promise from the new president that he was going to do two things, get us to move beyond COVID and, you know, have that in the rearview mirror and get the economy back on track and get us back to normal.
--:-- Amy Walter: And so on two of those three things, I mean, we could say, well, we're no longer talking about COVID, which is true. But the cost of that, which was spending a lot of money, which Republicans did not support, did also set in motion some of the stuff we're talking about today, especially on higher levels of inflation.
--:-- Amy Walter: And we don't hear Democrats talking about, hey, remember us? We're the people that gave you the child tax credit. We're the people that gave you the stimulus money. We're the people that allowed your business to stay open.
--:-- Amy Walter: So month to month, you know, moment to moment, the issues in which we thought were going to dominate or benefiting one party or the other changed.
--:-- Amy Walter: What hasn't changed is this idea that voters, especially those who identify as partisans, that they just even when things are going well, won't give the other party credit. And when things are going badly, won't admit that their party's to blame.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I would agree with Mike's premise here that, you know what, a lot of times in politics, you have to deal with the hand that you're dealt, right? Or you just got to do, you're going to get a whole bunch of stuff that you can't control for.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: How do you respond to it? And I think if you had talked to Democrats early in the year, let's say early in 2021, what they really believed was that the extra stimulus that they pumped into the economy, that that was going to be a defining issue in the upcoming election, that COVID was going to be a defining issue.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Think about where we started 2021, right? That we started 2021 with the promise from the new president that he was going to do two things, get us to move beyond COVID and, you know, have that in the rearview mirror and get the economy back on track and get us back to normal.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And so on two of those three things, I mean, we could say, well, we're no longer talking about COVID, which is true. But the cost of that, which was spending a lot of money, which Republicans did not support, did also set in motion some of the stuff we're talking about today, especially on higher levels of inflation.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And we don't hear Democrats talking about, hey, remember us? We're the people that gave you the child tax credit. We're the people that gave you the stimulus money. We're the people that allowed your business to stay open.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So month to month, you know, moment to moment, the issues in which we thought were going to dominate or benefiting one party or the other changed.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: What hasn't changed is this idea that voters, especially those who identify as partisans, that they just even when things are going well, won't give the other party credit. And when things are going badly, won't admit that their party's to blame.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I do want to ask each of you, what would you be most surprised by on election night or election week or, you know, the course of counting?
--:-- Amy Walter: I guess that I am not going to be surprised if we don't have the answer on election night. So I think we need to be preparing Americans once again for that.
--:-- Amy Walter: I think the most surprising thing would be to see that, you know, we get some of these races called early, like if Pennsylvania gets called early for the Democrat. To me, that would suggest, wow, this is going to be a much better night for Democrats than we had been expecting.
--:-- Amy Walter: The other thing that would surprise me is if in New Hampshire, a place where right now it looks as if the Democrat, at least in polling, is ahead by enough to it's not that she's safe, but safer than many of the other Democratic incumbents. I would say that if she either loses or it's really, really close, like it takes a long time to call that race, that's a sign early on that this is going to be a much worse night, even in the Senate, for Democrats.
--:-- Erin Haynes: First of all, damn Amy, you took mine because it was definitely... Sorry, sorry, that's why I went first. Right, exactly, exactly. But like, seriously, conditioning the American people to understand that we are in election season, right? So there is no such thing anymore as election day.
--:-- Erin Haynes: And there also really is no such thing as election night in terms of us having actual results necessarily in some of these races. So I think, yes, I would be surprised if we actually had a lot of results on election night, because that just really does not tend to be the case.
--:-- Erin Haynes: And we want to certainly make sure that we are continuing to conduct the fairest and freest and safest Democratic elections in the world. So I echo Amy with that.
--:-- Erin Haynes: But I think, yeah, I mean, the other thing, I am really going to be curious to see if one or both of the contests in Georgia, the gubernatorial or the U.S. Senate races, ends up going to a runoff.
--:-- Erin Haynes: I have to say, I mean, the polling has been pretty consistent, especially around the gubernatorial race with now incumbent Governor Kent being outside of the margin of error in terms of his lead over Stacey Abrams.
--:-- Erin Haynes: If she manages to force a runoff, that would be really interesting. And I think, you know, Senator Warnock, certainly this would not be his first time in a runoff situation. And maybe that will be the case again as Herschel Walker just kind of continues to be within striking distance in that race as well.
--:-- Mike Madrid: Well, as a Californian, we have this peculiar characteristic where we allow people to vote basically any way you want to over the largest window of time than most states.
--:-- Mike Madrid: Well, I think that's personally a great thing. The problem that comes is it takes an exceptionally long time to vote. So in a state where there's probably four or five of these really contested House races that will be determined by Californians, it may take three weeks to know what the outcomes of those races, especially in Los Angeles and Orange County, are going to be.
--:-- Mike Madrid: Finally, what I would say, too, is, yeah, I mean, look, I am surprised at the resilience of the Democratic base to this point.
--:-- Mike Madrid: I mean, I really can't underscore enough against major headwinds, against the historical trend line against very bad economic indicators, at least from the mood of the electorate, the Democrats are holding in there.
--:-- Mike Madrid: And they largely have been, on both the Senate and the House side anyway, for the better part of this year at a time when you really would not expect that.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Erin. Thanks, Amy. Thanks for having us.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You can find voting resources in the apple news app there are state-by-state guides for casting your vote plus much more and we'll have full coverage of the results as they come in if you haven't yet make a plan to vote and shamita will be back with the news on monday
