Why the President's Party Loses Seats in the Off-Year Election, and why the pattern doesn't always hold. Political Analysis plus some comments. (How could I not?)
This is a well-known pattern in electoral studies: That the President's party loses seats in the House in the off-year election. This podcast discusses recent patterns and the logic behind the patterns, as well as a few reasons why the rules may not hold.
This podcast is posted exactly two weeks before the 2022 mid-term elections. it is risky to post such a discussion at a time when the results will soon be in and you, the listener, will know what actually happened. But I delivered a talk on this subject at a faculty forum on campus on Monday night and the students were interested enough that I thought you might be interested as well.
I think I know what will happen, but let's save that for another season.
thanks for listening.
ps. A point I meant to make. At this point (14 days out) no one is changing their mind. The whole effort is on mobilization. I doubt that reading the polls will be as useful as in other races. They may be accurate, as they mostly are, but if unexpectedly large numbers of people vote that will shift the balance of the outcome.