MIDTERMS? YES, WE’RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT MIDTERMS!— There will be a moment, maybe tonight, when we’ll know who won the Virginia governor’s race. That’s when the 2022 midterms will have begun.
Reporters and political junkies will be watching congressional races from across the country, trying to divine the will of the voters on which party should control the House and Senate. If the polling from right now holds into next November, Democrats would likely be swept out of power in both chambers.
There will be plenty of unforeseen events before now and then. But quite a bit of it is foreseeable. Nightly talked to campaigns reporter Ally Mutnick over Slack to see what the messaging, money and maps tell us about who’s got the early advantage in 2022.
No matter who wins in Virginia, what if anything did this campaign tell us about the national mood heading into the midterms?
The campaign in Virginia has been all about the suburbs and to what extent those voters are still up for grabs this cycle. Democratic gains in the Virginia state Legislature in 2017 — and their capture of it in 2019 — were powered by well-educated, affluent voters disgusted by Donald Trump.
Now Republicans are trying to stage a comeback: Trump is out of office, Biden’s approval ratings are sagging, and the GOP has a plethora of timely issues with which to persuade suburban voters: how to teach racial issues and American history to students, school closings, inflation and taxes.
If that strategy works for Youngkin or GOP statehouse candidates, that’s a really concerning sign for Democrats across the country. As Dan Sena, who led the DCCC in 2018, told my colleague Elena Schneider last month: “If Democrats are bleeding in the suburbs now, no way you’re not bleeding the suburbs next year.”
Trump seems to want to be a factor in the 2022 elections. How do you expect Democrats and Republicans to deal with him?
I think both parties see some sort of role for him in the midterms. But they both want the good without the bad. Republicans want him to boost base turnout, especially in rural and heavily Latino areas, and bring out low-propensity voters — but not turn off those well-educated affluent swing voters. Democrats, meanwhile, want to brand the GOP as the party of Trump and baseless conspiracy theories like QAnon but not at the expense of crafting an actual message on the tangible impact their policies could have on the lives of average Americans.
Does there seem to be a money advantage or trend as we gear up for ’22?
Trump’s election in 2016 spurred an absolutely massive fundraising windfall for Democrats, powered by small-dollar donors via the ActBlue platform. Before this era, top-tier House candidates were raising a few hundred thousand dollars a quarter but by 2018 House Democrats were raising well over $1 million. Republicans were flabbergasted and couldn’t catch up.
Fast forward to today: This fundraising revolution never went away for Democrats. Their candidates are still doing well. But over the last two quarters, Republicans have closed that gap, thanks to their newly created fundraising platform WinRed and a greater investment in digital fundraising.
Here’s a telling stat: In the third quarter of 2019, 49 House Democratic candidates raised over $500,000, compared to 23 House GOP candidates. By the third quarter of 2021, 45 House Democratic candidates still raised over $500,000, but there are now 48 Republicans.
States are going through the process of redrawing their congressional districts based on the census now. What are we seeing as the first crop of states finishes their maps, and how will redistricting affect the midterms?
This is a hard question to answer because of a delay in the census data that’s meant redistricting is happening much later than usual and in a compressed timeline. But a few early trends have emerged. Democrats have ceded control of the redistricting process to independent commissions in a few key blue states and those commissions have been mired in dysfunction. In Colorado, the commission approved a map that could result in an even split of the state’s eight congressional seats between Democrats and Republicans — a result Democrats say is not representative of a state that's turning rapidly blue. In Virginia, the commission couldn’t even agree on a redistricting starting point and punted its work to the state Supreme Court (which leans Republican).
Another trend worth watching: In states where redistricting is controlled by one party, we’ve seen each side creating more deep blue or deep red seats. That means we’re going to have a much smaller battlefield. Take Texas as an example — There were about a dozen seriously contested races in the state in 2020. This cycle there’s just one seat that’s likely to be truly competitive.
Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. For all your elections tracking, POLITICO has you covered: Our spiffy results pages for Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, and congressional elections in Florida and Ohio, and our live chat with top elections reporters and editors. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight’s author at [email protected] or on Twitter at @tweyant.
What'd I Miss?
— U.S. rejoins coalition pushing for 1.5 degrees Celsius goal at COP26: The return of the world’s second-largest emitter and richest nation boosts the group, called the High Ambition Coalition, which is an informal alliance of small vulnerable countries and big Western states, including the EU. They are demanding that countries in Glasgow raise their climate targets to align with the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
— ‘A massive step forward’: Democrats clinch drug pricing deal: Senate Democrats today announced an agreement on drug pricing reform, coming out in favor of allowing Medicare Part D to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies for the first time since its creation, a move the drug industry has fought hard against for nearly two decades. While the latest proposal is far weaker than the version passed twice by the House, even staunch progressives in both chambers are preparing to accept that it’s likely the best they’re able to get in the narrowly divided Congress.
— CDC vaccine panel endorses vaccine for kids 5-11: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent vaccine advisers unanimously endorsed the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 to 11, clearing the last major regulatory hurdle to immunizing young children against the virus. The panel voted 14-0 today in favor of the shots, which the Food and Drug Administration authorized for children last week. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is expected to quickly endorse the administration of shots, allowing doctors and others to start administering them.
— Congress hits ‘standstill’ as December shutdown, debt cliff near: Government funding expires in one month, and bickering top lawmakers are already forecasting another autopilot spending bill to prevent a December shutdown. Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on how to begin negotiations. The next shutdown threat hits at midnight on Dec. 3, when federal cash stops flowing from the temporary spending patch Congress enacted to keep the government funded after the new fiscal year started on Oct. 1. Another debt cliff is also expected as soon as next month, because the Treasury Department already exhausted the $480 billion in extra borrowing power Congress granted three weeks ago.
— Biden to nominate Grady to be military’s No. 2 officer: The White House has informed Congress that it will nominate Adm. Christopher Grady, the commander of the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command, to serve as the military’s No. 2 officer, just weeks before the current Joint Chiefs vice chair is set to retire. Grady’s nomination has been expected for weeks, as Joint Chiefs Vice Chair Gen. John Hyten is due to retire Nov. 20. The late date of the nomination all but guarantees that there will be a gap between retirement and confirmation of a new vice chair.
— Biden says Fed nominees coming ‘fairly quickly’: Biden said today he intends to announce his nominees to the Federal Reserve board “fairly quickly” but declined to say whether he would replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Biden told reporters in Glasgow that he’d given a lot of thought to the decision, and dismissed suggestions that his administration has been slow to pick officials to run the central bank.
AROUND THE WORLD
BORIS TAKES THE PITCH POST-COP26 — Boris Johnson described himself as “cautiously optimistic” about the chances of COP26 success as he left the summit today to return to London, saying “we’ve pulled back a goal,” Esther Webber writes.
En route to the G-20 talks in Rome at the weekend, the British prime minister had said the world was “five-nil down” in the fight against climate change, but he struck a more positive note on day two of the U.N. talks in Glasgow.
Johnson’s message to world leaders was to “guard against false hope and not think in any way the job is done — because it’s not,” but he told journalists: “I am cautiously optimistic.” He added that “we’ve pulled back a goal or perhaps even two,” and, continuing the football analogy, he said the match would go into extra-time.
Nightly Number
Parting Words
FEDS TRANSFER 400 OUT OF D.C. PRISON — A slew of complaints about the treatment of jailed defendants in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol appears to have triggered a review that led to about 400 federal prisoners being transferred out of the D.C. Central Detention Facility. But those accused of participating in the Capitol riot are not among them, Josh Gerstein writes.
The U.S. Marshals Service announced today that it had conducted an “unannounced inspection” of District of Columbia Department of Corrections facilities two weeks ago and determined that one of the complexes — the main jail — did not meet federal standards.
“The USMS inspection was prompted by recent and historical concerns raised regarding conditions at the DC DOC facilities, including those recently raised by various members of the judiciary,” the Marshals Service said in a statement. “The U.S. Marshal’s inspection of [the Central Detention Facility] revealed that conditions there do not meet the minimum standards of confinement as prescribed by the Federal Performance-Based Detention Standards.”
The approximately 400 prisoners — all pretrial detainees — are being moved to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa., the Marshals Service said.
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