If You Don’t Like Polls, Follow the Money

Debate is roiling among political operatives and observers over whether the midterm elections will result in a Blue Wave or a Blue Trickle. This is not a mere “horse race” question whose answer can wait until the votes are counted. Candidates need to understand how deep voter anger runs and where it is directed to judge whether any last-minute recalibrations are necessary, and parties’ campaign arms need to know where to send their resources. For the rest of us, understanding the shape of voter sentiment before Election Day will help make sense of the results afterward, and of what voters want from the next Congress.  

When I explored this question two weeks ago, I compared today’s political environment with 2018, the last Democratic wave. That year, Democrats won the national House popular vote by 8.6 percentage points and picked up seats well into Republican-leaning territory. That matters because Democrats need to do something similar, though not necessarily on the same scale, if they are going to gain substantially more than the three seats required to take the House. Winning the obvious swing districts won’t be enough for a wave. They would also have to make Republican-leaning seats genuinely competitive. The polling suggests that possibility remains alive. The Real Clear Politics generic congressional ballot average currently has Democrats ahead by 8.5 percentage points, roughly the national margin Democrats ultimately achieved in 2018. But some wave skeptics point to individual Senate polls which show closer than expected races in Democratic-held seats in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota, as well as a newly materialized Republican spending advantage. 

Fortunately, polls are not the only way to measure the political environment. There is also the money. 

Campaigns and party committees can trumpet favorable polls, dismiss unfavorable ones, and release internal surveys designed in part to generate favorable coverage and donations. But as Election Day approaches, they eventually have to decide where to spend finite resources. Those decisions amount to a running assessment of which incumbents actually need help, which long-shot challengers might be worth a bet, and which supposedly competitive races the professionals do not yet consider serious. And right now, the geography of campaign spending tells a fairly straightforward story: Democrats are forcing Republicans to defend considerably more territory than Republicans are forcing Democrats to defend. 

Rob Pyers, research director for California Target Book, routinely compiles campaign spending data and shares his “big board” of party committee spending in U.S. House and Senate races on X. Over the weekend, he sent me a supplemental table that included independent expenditure committee spending in addition to the main party-affiliated campaign committees.  

For Senate races, the “big board” shows both parties spending in seven states where Republicans hold seats—Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa, Maine, Alaska, and most surprisingly, Nebraska, where independent Dan Osborn is challenging incumbent Pete Ricketts and no Democrat is on the ballot. Three Democratic-held seats have also attracted spending: Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire.  

When we take into account states where other independent expenditure operations are spending at least $1 million on an underdog, the map expands to include Kansas and—maybe the biggest surprise—Mississippi. In fact, the Democrats in those races, Adam Hamilton and Scott Colom, respectively, have received slightly more in independent expenditures than their incumbent Republican opponents—the only such instances on the map.  

What we don’t see is any outside spending in Minnesota’s Senate race, suggesting Republicans don’t yet believe the Democratic nominee, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, is actually vulnerable, despite a few tighter-than-expected polls. We also don’t see Democrats putting real money down yet on South Carolina longshot Annie Andrews, though $22,000 may be an initial toe in the water.  

The House money map also shows Democrats playing the most offense, but not all. 

The “big board” covers 59 House races, 35 Republican-held and 24 Democratic-held seats, with spending from at least one party’s network of committees. Forty of the 59 districts have red-leaning PVI scores, up to as high as R+9. Party spending is happening in all seven races deemed “Lean Republican” by Cook, and 17 out of 21 currently considered “Likely Republican.” In several of the “Likely Republican” races, the Democratic committees are not spending heavily, if at all. But the Republican spending on such red turf betrays a degree of anxiety and could attract more Democratic money later.    

The 14 races with spending on the Lean and Likely Democratic side of the ledger mostly do not feature heavy GOP committee investment, indicating that Republicans recognize their opportunities to go on offense are few. We do have five exceptions. Republicans have ponied up in Michigan’s 8th (held by first-term incumbent Democrat Kristen McDonald Rivet), New Mexico’s 2nd (held by second-term incumbent Gabriel Vasquez who has only seen close races), Nebraska’s 2nd (the Kamala Harris-won district being vacated by Republican Don Bacon), Texas’s 28th (the Trump-won district long held by Democrat Henry Cuellar, whom Trump pardoned after a bribery indictment), and New York’s 3rd (repped by Democrat Tom Suozzi who succeeded the scandal-marred Republican George Santos). We can’t know if Republicans are truly optimistic about these contests or just want to avoid the optics of solely playing defense. 

We also have a handful of additional House races without party committee spending but with other independent spending of at least $100,000. Only two of these feature independent expenditures on behalf of both part candidates: Ohio’s 7th (the “Tossup” race featuring Republican incumbent Max Miller who is facing horrific domestic abuse allegations by his ex-wife) and Virginia’s 5th (a “Solid Republican” district per Cook but former Democratic congressman Tom Perriello is running a well-financed challenge). Three Democratic candidates in North Carolina running in “Solid Republican” districts have attracted independent expenditure cash, while Republican longshots in “Solid Democratic” Michigan’s 3rd and Oregon’s 4th have done the same.  

In the past two months, a flurry of internal polls have been released sampling 40 House races, mostly from pollsters affiliated with Democratic campaigns. Seventeen of these are in seats now considered “Solid Republican”—attempts by the campaigns to convince party operatives and donors that their races should not be considered lost causes. Last week FiftyPlusOne’s Noah Wyhof-Rudnick published an in-depth examination of the history of internal polls. Most promising for Democrats is his finding that “there is a strong relationship between the share of all internals that are released by one party, and the advantage that party has in the national House popular vote,” presumably because the party in the lead has better data to show. Moreover, “the current composition of partisan surveys, at 80.7 percent Democratic, is more D-leaning than every cycle since 2002 — larger even than 2018.”  

But he cautions that “the frequency of Democratic internals that show a close race has risen significantly” (emphasis original), which he suspects is tied to a recognition among operatives that campaigns often goose their fundraising upon publishing close internal polls. While Wyhof-Rudnick did not pass judgment on their accuracy, if party committees and independent expenditure outfits thought they were accurate, they would be spending on their races. But we’re not seeing much of that, at least not yet. Of those “Solid Republican” races with publicly released Democratic internal polls, only North Carolina’s 3rd, North Carolina’s 9th, and Virginia’s 5th have attracted significant Democratic independent expenditure money, while Republican independent expenditure groups have sought to shore up incumbents French Hill in Arkansas’s 2nd and David Flippo in Nevada’s 2nd after Democratic internals showed them slightly behind. 

Following the money confirms that the Blue Wave scenario is well within the realm of possibility. In one of most optimistic scenarios for the Democrats, in which they win all the races where they are competing with party committee spending, without coughing up any of their own incumbents save for those in redistricted states and now classified as “Solid Republican,” Democrats would net gain 34 seats for a total of 249—31 more than needed for a majority. If we add on the few “Solid Republican” races where Democrats are competing, and where Republicans seem a little worried, the upper bound is a 39-seat gain for a total of 254. Whereas for Republicans to keep the House—and not let Democrats net gain three seats—Democrats would have to whiff on nearly all the competitive races and Republicans would probably need to pull off a few upsets in the “Lean Democratic” and “Likely Democratic” columns.  

In other words, the money is telling us that both parties know a Blue Wave is percolating. Republicans may be able to blunt the size of the wave with their fundraising edge, buoyed by the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing mega-donors to give unlimited amounts to campaigns via joint fundraising committees. But they are mainly using that money to play defense.

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