There are three keys to successfully running for any political office.
First of all, stand for popular positions. Don’t be undecided on major issues, have your stances aligned with your party unless you have a very good reason not to.
Second, more experience is better if you are running for a state-wide office or a seat in Congress.
Third, if your party dominates state government, your party should be doing a good job. Otherwise, the opposite, obviously.
The party index of your state doesn’t matter as much as these factors. These factors ultimately determine the party index of your state.
This is similar to the Cook Partisan Voting Index
We can quantify this for governors and Senators.
- Governor’s Party
- State plurality for the President in the last election
- Incumbent party
- Senators partisan affiliation
- Which candidate has been at a higher level of office.
Add up the scores for both candidates, the candidate with the higher number is likely to win.
When the predictions do not match reality, this is sending you a signal that something is wrong. If it is a local issue and happening once or twice, it is likely a problem with one of the candidates the system does not capture. Maybe they had a scandal. Maybe their issue stances did not align with their constituents. If it is isolated to only a few cases per year then it is a local issue.
However, if there is a large number of upsets across the country all at once it tells us that a fundamental problem is in play. Either the President did something that makes people upset, or the party machinery is in trouble.
It is easy to tell the difference, by looking at presidential approval ratings. If the president’s approval ratings are low, the president is unpopular and there is something wrong with policy.
This tells you whether the party’s strategy is wrong, or whether the president is unpopular.
Historical analysis
My system only misses the Pennsylvania Senate election in the 2024 elections for governor or Senator. It was a very tight race. It predicts Montana and Ohio were tossups, and they were. This shows that the losses this year were basically what we should have expected. So we look at presidential approval, which was low. Biden must have made unpopular decisions in his last two years which cost Democrats the election. The party machinery did not fail.
Biden’s disapproval in the midterms was higher than his approval, so one would expect a small loss in the midterms but not a large one, exactly as we observed. We also observe that my system has only one miss, the Nevada governor’s race where conservative Democrat Steve Sisolak barely lost reelection. Everything else is exactly what my system would predict. Biden needed to look and analyze what he did which was unpopular, but he did not in his hubris. Furthermore, Harris underperformed Democratic candidates nationwide, meaning this was not a problem with the Democratic party, but there were fundamental problems with the Biden Administration that remain unaddressed.
Moving back in time, Donald Trump was unpopular throughout all of his first presidency, leading to the shellacking the Republicans received in 2018. This is pretty clearly voters sending a message that we were angry at Donald Trump. Trump should have analyzed his results and moved back to what Americans want, but he will never do that because he is a demagogue. I expect him to do the same over the next two years, pissing off Americans, and Democrats will likely win in 2026.
Obama’s approval however was never very low, in the midterms of 2014 his disapproval was around 5o-55%, and in 2010 it was 50%. You would expect some loss of seats, but not the massive gains by Republicans as we observed in 2010 and 2014. This implies that voters are not unhappy with the president overall, and there is something wrong with the party machinery.
What is interesting about Obama compared to Biden and Trump is that his approval increased over the second half of his first term. As opposed to what would happen later with Harris he won his reelection and significantly outperformed Democrats running for Congress. He had some coattails, with Democrats picking up 8 seats in the House in 2012, but not enough to get another trifecta. This is a lot of proof that Americans were not unhappy with Obama, but the Democratic Party’s machinery was failing outside of his control.
I have analyzed results back to 2010 focusing on seats that flipped and every senate seat in 2024. You can view my results here: https://1drv.ms/x/c/6c8d84458ba76309/EegBqMb4-bFBn1WX6IK9eIkBzYVmBtG59OrI64-AqrgbtA