Midterms [noun]

The only recent example of the president’s party gaining House seats in a midterm election came in 2002, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It has been longer, 42 years, since a Democratic president escaped his first midterm election without losing control of Congress.

With the 2022 midterms on the horizon, Democrats want to replicate their success in other states — particularly North Carolina, another Southern Sunbelt state with an open Senate seat in the next midterm cycle.

For all that said, the tendency of the opposition party to regain ground at the midterms is very strong.

For instance, the GOP agenda in 2017 and 2018, trying to repeal Obamacare and cut taxes for corporations, was fairly unpopular with Republican voters, but those voters still overwhelmingly backed GOP candidates in the 2018 midterms.

On average, the president’s party suffers about a 5-point penalty at the midterms, according to research we’ve conducted for our congressional model.

The 2018 midterms wiped most of those Republicans off the map, and the president lost ground this year in some of the suburban districts he had carried in 2016.

As we wrote after the 2018 midterms, the correlation between a state or district’s base partisanship and how it voted for Senate or House that year was extremely strong.

Meanwhile, an emboldened Republican minority will look to wreak havoc and magnify internal disputes ahead of the 2022 midterms.

If Democrats had added five to 10 seats this year, they could have survived a 20-seat loss in the midterms.