Ron Brownstein has a thorough look at the 2022 electorate and I think this is the most salient aspect as we await the “Big Announcement” tonight:
How did Democrats overperform recent historical trends with voters dissatisfied with the economy or the president? Attitudes about the former president, and the party he has reshaped in his image, may largely explain the difference. In the exit poll, nearly three-fifths of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Trump, and more than three-fourths of them voted Democratic this year. Many of the Republican Senate and gubernatorial candidates he helped propel to their nominations also faced negative assessments from voters. And despite predictions from both Republicans and media analysts that abortion had faded as a galvanizing issue, a clear three-fifths majority of all voters in the national exit poll said they believed that the procedure should remain legal in all or most circumstances—and about three-fourths of them voted Democratic. Democrats also won about three-fourths of the voters who said abortion should remain mostly legal in the key Senate states of Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and two-thirds of them in New Hampshire. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer won a stunning four-fifths of the voters who said abortion should remain legal.
These concerns about Trump and abortion rights didn’t completely erase voter discontent over the economy and inflation. Inflation still ranked highest when the exit polls asked voters what issues most concerned them (with abortion a very close second). And Republicans still won most of the voters who expressed the purest “double negative” views—those with unfavorable opinions of both Biden and Trump. But it’s hardly a surprise that the party out of the White House might win most voters who express an unfavorable view of the sitting president, no matter what other attitudes they hold. The notable part was that the exit poll found Democrats holding 40 percent of those double-negative voters—a number that helped them apparently avoid a titanic red wave.
In the past, when midterms have turned decisively against the sitting president’s party, one reason is a backlash among independent voters, who are the most likely to shift allegiance based on current conditions in the country. Each time the president’s party suffered especially large losses in a midterm since the mid-1980s (a list of electoral calamities that includes 1986, 2006, and 2018 for Republicans and 1994, 2010, and 2014 for Democrats), independents have voted by a double-digit margin for House candidates from the other party, according to exit polls. But yesterday’s exit polls showed the two parties splitting independent voters about evenly on a national basis and Democrats winning among them in the Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania Senate races.
Yeah, that’s working out well.