“The huge voter turnout over the past three elections could scramble the usual dynamics of midterm voting – potentially providing Democrats their best chance to avoid losses next year that could cost them control of the House, the Senate or both. The president’s party has almost always lost ground in the first midterm after his election, a trend that stretches back well into the 19th century and threatens Democrats clinging to a slim majority in the House and a 50-50 split in the Senate after Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. One reason for those consistent losses, political scientists and campaign operatives agree, has been that voters who support the new president typically have not felt as much urgency to turn out in the midterm elections as the voters opposed to him. That risk still looms over Dems, but the party has a unique, rarely discussed, asset in trying to avoid that fate in 2022: the unusually large pool of voters who have backed its candidates in recent elections.”

“Everything else is working against Democrats, but this is the first midterm… that a president’s party has had this reservoir of votes hanging over. That’s the way Democrats can avoid the usual losses in the midterm: They have the names and addresses. Voters surged to the polls in large numbers in 2016, and in record-breaking proportions in the 2018 and 2020 elections; Democrats won the popular vote in both of those presidential races by substantial margins, while also capturing significantly more House votes nationwide than the GOP in 2018. As a result, there are nearly 91 million individual Americans who have voted Democratic in at least one of those three elections, according to previously unreported calculations by Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, from data collected by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm. Even with Donald Trump’s formidable success at energizing his supporters, that’s significantly more than the slightly more than 82 million voters who backed Republicans in at least one of the past three elections, according to Podhorzer’s calculations. This disparity helps explain the torrent of new laws that red state Republicans are passing, on an almost entirely party-line basis, making it more difficult to vote” – Ron Brownstein, CNN