On November 8, all 435 members of the US House of Representatives are up for reelection, as are one-third of the members of the US Senate. In addition, 36 states will elect governors.
To get a peek into the crystal ball, we reached out to Logan Phillips, editor in chief of RacetotheWH.com, an interactive election forecast website that provides polling and predictions for every major race in 2022. Phillips contends that his prognostications are even more accurate than Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, considered by many political wonks to be the industry’s gold standard. He claims to have successfully predicted Joe Biden’s narrow victories in Arizona and Georgia as early as June 2020.
RacetotheWH developed as part of a “personal project” Logan worked on during the Covid lockdown in his final semester at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He finished with a master’s degree in international affairs, and studied presidential campaign management under Professor Karine Jean-Pierre, now Biden’s White House press secretary.
Before entering Columbia, Logan cut his teeth in American politics. He was an intern in the Obama White House, assisting the president’s scheduling team. Prior to that, he worked as an organizer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign in South Carolina, and on the reelection campaign for Connecticut governor Dan Malloy.
The conventional wisdom is that Republicans are favored to retake the House while Democrats will hold the Senate. Would you agree?
Overall the situation has improved for the Republican Party in the last few weeks, although they’re still on track to perform below expectations for a national midterm, in large part due to the blowback from the Roe v. Wade decision. So it’s not particularly surprising to me. The American people really like to punish the party in power, while the other side usually isn’t as motivated to vote.
That being said, while it’s very competitive, I still think Democrats are more likely than not to hold on to the Senate because Republicans have struggled to recruit strong challengers.
They have a lot of seats of their own that are open. Democrats don’t need to over-perform too much to be able to flip one of them, and are on track to narrowly do so in Pennsylvania. And their incumbents are in a pretty good position in the states outside of Nevada, where I think Republicans are more likely to win and flip that state than not. So I think we’re in a situation where the most likely scenario might even be a tie again, 50-50, with Democrats flipping Pennsylvania, Republicans flipping Nevada.
In Pennsylvania, Democrat John Fetterman looked like a formidable candidate at the beginning of the race, but due to his stroke, we’re seeing his numbers decline and Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz becoming a solid challenge. Do you think that Oz has a shot at winning?
Fetterman still has around a lead in the polls of three or four percentage points. If Oz is going to win, he will need to keep building momentum. Up to this point, he’s won a lot of undecided Republicans who were expected to break his way. He’s starting to carve into independents, but he’s going to need to do more if he wants to beat Fetterman. I think his chances overall have gone up.
