Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
This is what I mean by reframing defeat. 'Better than expected' isn't the same as 'good', and it's not a metric of success. You can do better than expected but still fail. You can do better than expected, but your expectations were horribly based in the first place. It's neither proof of good performance, or good evaluation.
I agree that better than expected isn't sufficient to qualify as good. For instance, if the races happened to be extremely close but the senate went +1 Republican, that would still beat the fundamentals for Dems, so I should probably expand my point.
To regard D senate and R house as a D loss seems to be judging victory based on the ground gained. But I think there's plenty of examples, in ongoing conflicts, where merely gaining some ground isn't sufficient to claim victory. If your goals are to gain a certain amount of ground and you get some but not all, that can also be fairly framed as a defeat.
Both sides appeared to me to view gaining the Senate one victory condition, and gaining/preventing a sizable R advantage in the house as the other. Taking those as the victory conditions, the Democrats won both. The results are:
Republicans fail to prevent Democrats confirming more judges.
Rs fail to stop a potential Supreme Court confirmation.
Rs have a much harder time dealing with their house than if they had a larger majority, and have less of a mandate of using the house to pressure Ds
The R dream of a senate supermajority next cycle is extinguished.
The R leadership is in disarray after their kingmaker failed to produce satisfying results.
If the economy happens to turn around, Ds get to take a lot of credit (though also more blame if it doesn't).
D's are happy with that, R's are very much not, and historical precedence appeared to give R's the advantage. That helps clarify why winning the senate was considered a condition to claim an R victory, not just gaining some ground in the house.
What do you mean? Senate control is gonna depend on Georgia runoff, which looks very hard to call -- and while the size of the R majority in the house is not yet clear, the Ds aren't takin' it AFAICT.
If team R can pull it together in Georgia, team D has just lost control of both houses -- how in the world is that a victory?
I didn't have the most precise phrasing but this is the hypothetical we were debating from OP
If Ds lose the Senate I'd agree that it doesn't look like much of a victory. That said I'd bet on a D senate.
I wonder if anyone is prepping an enormous bribe for Joe Manchin.
He seems like someone who wouldn't stay bought.
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