ANALYSIS | How Joe Biden and the Democratic Party defied the midterm story

President Joe Biden campaigns in support of Pennsylvania Democrats John Fetterman, center, and Josh Shapiro in Philadelphia on November 5, 2022. (Credit: Hannah Beier/Reuters)

(CNN) --

President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have clinched a midway election for the record books.

Democrats retained the Senate — doing nothing worse than holding their own on 50 seats and possibly winning one — and are likely to keep net losses in the House in the single digits.

• Democrats will retain control of the Senate, CNN projects

The midterms are supposed to be the time for the opposition party to shine.

That should be especially the case when there is once-in-a-generation inflation and when the vast majority of Americans think the country is on the wrong track.

Instead, Biden and the Democrats are in a position to have one of the four best midterm elections for the party that controls the White House in the last century.

So what happened?

It's pretty clear that general election voters punished Republican candidates they saw as too extreme, on issues like abortion and/or too closely tied to former President Donald Trump.

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Still, the election results were extremely unusual.

I checked the log books.

Since 1922, there have been three previous instances in which the president's party won (or did not lose) Senate seats and lost fewer than 10 House seats in the first half of the president's term.

All of them — 1934, 1962 and 2002 — are believed to be monumental achievements for the president's party and major exceptions to the rule, suggesting that the party that controls the White House typically loses seats in a middle one.

The Democrats' performance this year has also been channeled to the state level.

We already know, based on projected races, that this will be the first time since 1934 that the president's party has netted gubernatorial gains in the first half of a president's term.

(1986 is the only other post-1934 half-term term, regardless of when he fell into a presidency, when the president's party made a net gain of governorships, though Ronald Reagan's GOP had massive losses in the Senate that year.) .

The shocking thing about this year (assuming current trends continue) is that Biden is pretty unpopular.

Her approval rating was 44% in exit polls.

Her favorable rating was 41%.

We don't have any polls for 1934, though considering that Franklin Roosevelt won two landslide victories at both ends of that partial period, he was probably quite popular.

Polls from 1962 and 2002 show the presidents at the time (John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush respectively) with approval ratings above 60%.

The Republican Party's "Candidate Problem"

Democrats' ability to defy expectations this year starts simply with who Republicans nominated for statewide elections.

Analysts, myself included, noted that Republicans seemed to have a sympathy problem for the candidates.

Pre-election polls showed that Republicans in all key races had negative net favorability ratings.

Democrats in nearly every key race were more beloved than their opponents.

• OPINION |

  There is a culprit of the beating that the Republicans took at the polls

Many of those Republicans were endorsed by Trump and said (at least at some point) that they believed he had won the 2020 election. (This is, of course, false, as Biden won the election.)

Exit polls confirm the Republicans' "candidate problem" in the 2022 midterms. In all Senate races (save Georgia) that Inside Elections had called a shot at random or just leaning toward a party before the election, more voters said the views of the Republican candidate were too extreme than they said the same of the Democratic candidate.

We see this also in the gubernatorial elections.

Republicans nominated supporters of voter fraud in the 2020 gubernatorial election in several blue or swing states.

None of them have been projected as winners, and only Republican Kari Lake of Arizona has any chance of winning.

Perhaps the lack of success for these GOP candidates should come as no surprise given that about 60% of voters in both pre-election and exit polls believe Biden was legitimately elected.

Still, the Democrats appear to have scored an incredible feat in the 2022 midterms, especially given how unpopular the polls were showing Biden to be.

The last two Democratic presidents with approval ratings matching Biden's in their first half terms (Bill Clinton in 1994 and Barack Obama in 2010) saw their party suffer a net loss of more than 50 seats in the House of Representatives, at least five seats in the Senate and at least five governorships.

Two presidents on the road

Of course, poor Senate or gubernatorial candidates weren't the only reason Republicans had disappointing midterms.

Nationally, there are two presidents in the spotlight: the current one (Biden) and the previous one (Trump).

Both men sported negative net favorable ratings, according to exit polls.

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The fact that you have a current president and a former president who are both unpopular is not unusual.

Both Obama and George W. Bush were unpopular before the 2010 midterm elections.

What is unusual is that of the 18% who viewed neither Biden nor Trump favorably in the exit polls, 40% of them voted Democratic.

The backlash against one president this year may have been overridden by the backlash against the other.

In 2010, a September CNN poll showed Democrats winning just 21% of those who viewed neither Bush nor Obama favorably.

The reason for the difference between 2010 and 2022 is quite obvious.

He had pointed out before the election that Trump was getting more search traffic from Google than Biden (meaning the former president was on voters' minds).

However, Bush wasn't getting anywhere near the search traffic that Obama was in 2010.

“Abortion First” Voters

Arguably, what really made this midterm unique was abortion.

Despite high inflation, only 31% of voters in the exit poll said it was the most important issue for their vote.

An almost identical percentage (27%) said abortion, and these voters overwhelmingly chose Democratic candidates for Congress.

This matches the dynamic we saw in the House special election following the overturn of Roe v.

Wade in June.

Democrats fared considerably better than before the Supreme Court ruling.

And while Republicans recovered their position in the national House polls somewhat in the final weeks of the campaign, they never got back to where they were during the spring.

• Abortion rights were on the ballot in three states.

  This is what the voters decided

The fact that abortion-first voters overwhelmingly chose Democrats makes sense given that 60% of exit poll respondents said the procedure should be legal in all or most cases.

When you put it all together, Biden and the Democrats appear to have done something that others tried, and failed, in previous midterms: They turned the election into a bipartisan election instead of the usual referendum on the president's party.

midterm elections