One reason this is hard to predict is because US polls have been so inaccurate in recent years. They chronically underestimate the Republican vote. This is not because of bias. Pollsters’ reputations depend on getting it right.
Rather, conservative voters seem wary of talking to pollsters, or telling them the truth. As the majority of polls are predicting a Republican win or a very tight result, if the poll underestimate of Republicans holds, then they should win convincingly.
But the pollsters have been trying hard to correct their understatement of Republicans. Of course, that’s what they’ve said the past few elections. But there will finally come an election in which the pollsters correct for that bias, or indeed over-correct for it. So polls can show you the direction of movement, and momentum, but they’re not that useful in predicting results, especially in tight elections.
Voting is voluntary in the US and working out likely voters is also tricky. The US Senate has 100 senators. Every two years a third of the senators are elected for six-year terms. This time 34 senators are regularly up for re-election. There are also special elections if a senator dies or retires midterm.
So there are 35 senators in total up for election this time. Republicans are defending 21 seats and Democrats 14. That should be good for Democrats. The Senate is 50/50 at the moment with the Democrats in control because Vice-President Kamala Harris gets a casting vote.
But a whole slew of Senate races are very close. Several Republican candidates won their primaries because of Donald Trump’s backing but are clearly not the best Republicans who could have run. Herschel Walker in Georgia is a classic. Normally Georgia is solidly Republican. Walker, a former professional footballer, is a weird guy with a really strange past. Nonetheless, he might just win the seat.
The same is true in Pennsylvania. John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate, is himself a very weird guy who dresses like a punk. He recently had a stroke and literally cannot put a coherent sentence together. Any conventional Republican ought to beat him easily. Mehmet Oz, a former TV doctor who once served in the Turkish Army and has no political experience, also won his primary with Trump’s backing. That contest looks desperately close.
JD Vance, a more impressive Republican, who also won his primary with Trump’s backing, looks likely to just win in Ohio. Vance wrote the magnificent Hillbilly Elegy and once promised to be among the most thoughtful of conservatives. Before he considered going into politics, Vance denounced Trump as a barbarian. But in order to have a future in the Republican Party, he switched and became, publicly at least, a Trump admirer.
All of this adds another layer of uncertainty. The polling in these states, and a few others such as Arizona and Nevada, has indicated tight races. It’s impossible to predict tight races. Trump won the presidency in 2016 although Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Trump prevailed because he had a series of narrow wins in the most hotly contested states. Joe Biden won the popular vote by seven million, but he too won the presidency with a series of reasonably narrow victories in the closest states.
The United States is polarised, and closely divided on party lines. That makes almost every election hard to predict with unexpected results. The worst outcome would be if some results were very close and the losing candidates contested the legitimacy or accuracy of the vote count.
One thing I do agree with Donald Trump about is that it would be better for the US if it went back to all-paper ballots. These are more reliably counted and if necessary recounted.
By any objective measure, Biden and the Democrats deserve a fantastic shellacking. Trillions of dollars of wasted and misspent stimulus money has seen inflation reach a 40-year high. Inflation is the number one issue for voters.
Biden’s administration has also comprehensively failed to establish a secure border with Mexico. Illegal immigration has been out of control and no one resents this more than legal immigrants, which is one reason Republicans have been trending so well among Hispanic voters.
The other killer issue is crime, the murder rate and homelessness. Democrats at all levels of government embraced something of the ethos and policies of the Defund the Police movement. They blamed all police for isolated crimes of individual police and they gave some comfort to the truly bizarre view that the police are the chief instrument of racist oppression in America.
This led to waves of police resignations. And it led to police being more timid and cautious. As with almost all left-wing ideological obsessions, the chief victims were the poor, especially African-Americans and newly arrived Hispanics living in high-crime neighbourhoods. They want the police.
Finally, Biden’s version of climate activism has produced chaos and soaring prices for energy. Green activists make a tremendous mistake in demonising gas, which is the essential transition power source until renewables become genuinely viable economically.
As for Democrats, they have only two issues motivating their voters: fear and loathing of Trump, and fear that access to abortion may be heavily restricted after Roe v Wade was overturned.
If the Republicans win one or both houses, they will launch waves of investigations into Biden’s son, Hunter, and many other issues. They may well impeach Biden, an abuse of process Democrats also practised. This could lead to a more severely enfeebled and embattled second two years of the Biden presidency.
Trump Republicans display some very worrying instincts on foreign policy. They will be even tougher on China than the Democrats, and that’s OK. They will likely support greater defence spending, and that’s good. But some of them are, bizarrely, against funding the magnificent Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression.
Biden’s climate and energy policies would effectively be reversed by Republican congressional majorities. Trump probably will run for the presidency, which may rule out the much more attractive candidacy of Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis.
It’s all going to be a terrific muddle. The truth is American voters want neither Biden nor Trump. But getting what they want in elections is proving extraordinarily difficult.
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So here’s the $64m question: just what are we going to get from these complex, fascinating and still unpredictable US midterm elections? The latest betting is that the Republicans will take the House of Representatives, while the Senate is close, with Republicans still narrowly favoured to win there as well.