Charlie Cook: “It is hard to overstate the unusual boom-and-bust nature of our elections these days. Depending on whether the year is divisible by four, we have two very different Americas. One of them exists when the presidency is at stake, and the electorate is big, broad, and demographically diverse—looking pretty much like the country. But midterm-election America, with an electorate only about 60 percent the size of presidential years, is older, whiter, more conservative, and more Republican. This, in effect, puts a thumb on the scale that simply isn’t there in presidential years, when the turnout is substantially larger.”
“The result: Democrats have fared well in Senate races when the presidency was up for grabs. In 2008 and 2012, they picked up eight and two seats, respectively. Their gain in 2012 wasn’t larger because they’d already picked up four seats in 2000 and six more in 2006—the two previous times this class of senators had faced voters—leaving fewer additional seats within their reach.”
Save to Favorites