As every two years, control of the House and Senate will once again be at stake in the November 2022 midterm elections and one of the best tools we have to predict these election results is the generic ballot of the Congress. The generic question on the Congress ballot usually asks respondents which party they intend to vote for in the next congressional elections, without naming specific candidates, which allows the question to be asked at the national level to measure the general political environment. And for a few years now, at FiveThirtyEight we’ve been collecting these polls and calculating a weighted average for them, and today we’re excited to post our generic voting average for the 2022 election cycle.
As of Thursday, Sept. 16, Democrats lead Republicans in our average vote by 2.7 percentage points (43.8% to 41.1%). This average is calculated in the same way as our presidential evaluation average, with a couple of differences. First, the lines we draw for generic voting averages are softened more aggressively; in other words, they respond more slowly to new data. (Because generic polls are less common than presidential approval polls, we’ve found that to filter out noise, the average generic poll must incorporate a larger sample of polls that extends further back. in time than the average presidential approval.) Second, while our average presidential approval prefers versions of polls that analyze the broader universe (i.e., all adults over registered voters and registered voters over likely voters), our generic voting average does the opposite. This is because, while we are interested in knowing what all Americans think about the president, generic polls are essentially election polls, and we are only interested in how real voters will vote in the medium term.
Historically, an average of generic polls calculated in this way has been very good at predicting the national popular vote for the U.S. House. Using our poll database, we can calculate an average of generic retroactive voting for congressional elections dating back to 1980. On average, in these 21 election cycles, our average of generic polls per day of the election missed the popular vote of the House only 3.0 points.
Yes, as you may recall, generic polls deceived in the 2020 election: they gave Democrats an average of 7.3 points on November 3, but the party won the popular vote in the House by just 3.0 points . But it was an unusually significant voting error by recent historical standards. In fact, from 2008 to 2018, the average error in the average of generic retroactive voting on election day was only 1.3 points. Thus, apart from 2020, the final generic voting polls have been remarkably accurate in recent years.
Of course, this is just an argument to pay attention to our generic voting average on November 8, 2022, not necessarily today. But it turns out that the first generic polls can also be predictive, if you know how to interpret them. Specifically, for the midterm elections, you have to consider which party the White House has, as that party has a natural disadvantage in the midterm elections.
The following table compares the retroactive averages of generic votes as of September 16 of the year preceding the midterm elections with the possible popular voting margin of the House in mid-1982-2018. It shows that the president’s party usually loses ground between this point in the cycle and the actual election.
Often, the president’s party continues to lose ground
Change between the average margin of the party of the president in the generic voting on September 16 of the year before the midterm elections * and the popular voting margin of the National Chamber, in all midterm elections of the 1982 to 2018
| Cycle | president | Initial generic voting margin | Popular voting margin of the house | Changes to Pres. Party |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | Republican | R + 0.3 | D + 11.8 | -12.1 |
| 1986 | Republican | D + 8.3 | D + 10.0 | -1.6 |
| 1990 | Republican | D + 10.0 | D + 8.0 | +2.0 |
| 1994 | Democratic | D + 2.0 | R + 6.8 | -8.8 |
| 1998 | Democratic | D + 7.7 | R + 0.9 | -8.5 |
| 2002 | Republican | D + 6.7 | R + 4.6 | +11.3 |
| 2006 | Republican | D + 8.0 | D + 7.9 | +0.1 |
| 2010 | Democratic | D + 2.9 | R + 6.6 | -9.5 |
| 2014 | Democratic | D + 1.9 | R + 5.8 | -7.6 |
| 2018 | Republican | D + 8.3 | D + 8.6 | -0.3 |
Specifically, the previous September’s generic average vote overestimated the President’s party’s voting margin by an average of 3.5 points. This is the manifestation of one of the strictest rules of politics: the party that holds the White House almost always malfunctions in the medium term.
Of course, there have been some exceptions. Most notable is the 2002 cycle, when Republicans under then-President George W. Bush ended the 6.7-point generic vote, but ended up winning the popular House vote by 4.6 points. But that year was, well, exceptional: a rallying effect after the September 11, 2001 attack made Bush very popular, and those good feelings ended his party. The 2006 and 2018 cycles were also exceptions in which the president’s party neither lost nor gained significant ground between polls and actual results; the first generic polls nailed the final margin almost exactly. But in both years, the first polls now he pointed to a bad year for the president’s party, showing Republicans Bush and then-President Donald Trump about 8.0 and 8.3 points, respectively.
In the years when the president’s party leads the average of generic polls in September before the mid-term, the party outperforms polls by an average of 9.3 points. And is that, in a nutshell, that’s why Democrats should be concerned about the 2022 election despite their current leadership in the generic vote. So far, this cycle is very similar to former President Barack Obama’s two semesters (2010 and 2014) for Democrats, as they ran generic polls by a few points in September of the year before the election. But in both years, Republicans finally advanced in our generic voting average and won the election easily.
Therefore, if Republicans pass their first ballots to a degree similar to what they did in 2010 and 2014, they could win the popular vote in the House by 5 to 7 percentage points, which would likely give them control of the House. (and probably also in the Senate), as almost everyone votes a direct ticket to the party nowadays). Of course, though, that’s great Yes; there has been a lot of variability in these historical trends, so a wide range of results is still possible. But even if Republicans only improve their position on little bit, which will probably happen, if history is a guide, it would probably still be enough to go around the House, considering that its control of the redistricting process in a plurality of states can strengthen the structural advantage of the Republican Party in the House races. Past trends do not always remain true, but smart money, at this point, continues to be lost by the president’s party control of Congress next year.
Mary Radcliffe and Aaron Bycoffe contributed to the research.