Six months ago, as gas prices and inflation seemed to be spiraling out of control, the predicted midterm “red wave” appeared to be a foregone conclusion. Democrats would lose control of the House and Senate, pollsters predicted.
But with the election now just a little more than two months away, pollsters are having to recalculate their prediction models and are suggesting that Democrats may actually emerge victorious, which would be an enormous boost for President Joe Biden.
According to Harvard Polling expert John Della Volpe, the 2022 election looks a great deal like what we saw in 2018, as he explained to Mehdi Hassan of MSNBC:
“The reason that Democrats have control of the House, the Senate, and the White House is because of younger Americans. Donald Trump, in the big five battleground states, of 2020, won the vote of everyone over the age of 45. It is young people, under the age of 30, who won Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, by an average of 20 points. That’s the reason we have President Biden in the White House today, not President Trump.”
He continued:
“And now what we’re seeing…to me, it looks a lot like 2018. People did not expect to see a Democratic wave. They didn’t expect to see young people turn out. Days before the election, eyes were rolling among pundits. And we’re seeing the same thing I think today. Young people say they are angry, young people are registering, young people are showing up in real numbers in these primaries, in Kansas and other places. I think it’s very very likely that we see a significant change in the face of the electorate over the next several weeks.”