Confidence, anxiety and a scramble for votes two days before the midterms

The turbulent midterm campaign rolled through its final weekend on Sunday as voters — buffeted record inflation, worries about their personal safety and fears about the fundamental stability of American democracy — showed clear signs of preparing to reject Democratic control of Washington and embrace divided government.
As candidates sprinted across the country to make their closing arguments to voters, Republicans entered the final stretch of the race confident they would win control of the House and possibly the Senate. Democrats steeled themselves for potential losses even in traditionally blue corners of the country.
On Sunday, President Biden campaigned for Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York in a Yonkers precinct where he won 80 percent of the vote in 2020, signaling the deep challenges facing his party two years after he claimed a mandate to enact a sweeping domestic agenda. Former President Donald J. Trump addressed supporters in Miami, another sign of Republican optimism that the party could flip Florida’s most populous urban county for the first time in two decades.
In the rally at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Mr. Biden characterized Election Day and the coming 2024 campaign as “inflection points” for the next 20 years. Voters, he said, had a clear choice between two “fundamentally different visions of America.”
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, took the stage for about 90 minutes to blast Democrats as being soft on crime, re-litigate grievances about his presidency and the 2020 election, and boast that he has motivated Hispanic voters, especially in Florida, to shift toward the Republican Party.
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman with supporters at a rally in Pittsburgh on Saturday. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
“We need a landslide so big that the radical left cannot rig or steal it,” he said, minutes before a rainstorm soaked the crowd. “We are going to take back America.”
Two supporters of Senator Raphael Warnock greeted each other at one of his events in Monroe. (Nicole Craine for The New York Times)
The appearances represented an unusual capstone to an extraordinary campaign — the first post-pandemic, post-Roe, post-Jan. 6 national election in a fiercely divided country shaken growing political violence and lies about the last major election.
While a majority of voters name the economy as their top concern, nearly three-quarters of Americans believe democracy is in peril, with most identifying the opposing party as the major threat. Should Republicans sweep the House contests, their control could empower the party’s right wing, giving an even bigger bullhorn to lawmakers who traffic in conspiracy theories and falsehoods like Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida.
A central question for Democrats is whether such a dinctive moment overrides fierce horical headwinds. Since 1934, nearly every president has lost seats in his first midterm election. And typically, voters punish the party in power for poor economic conditions — dynamics that point toward Republican gains.
After days of campaigning across rural Nevada, Adam Laxalt, the Republican challenging Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, rallied supporters in and around Las Vegas this weekend, predicting a “red wave” that is “deep and wide.” Mr. Laxalt noted that Mr. Biden did not campaign in Nevada this year and blamed him for the state’s 15 percent inflation.
“He’s going to call you anti-democratic for using the democratic system to give us a change,” he told supporters on Saturday in Clark County, the state’s largest county. “But that change is coming.”
The midterm’s final landscape hinted that voters were prioritizing fiscal worries over more exential fears about democracy or preserving abortion rights. From liberal northeastern suburbs to Western states, Republican strategs, lawmakers and officials now say they could flip major parts of the country and expand their margins in Southern and Rust Belt states that have been fertile ground for their party for much of the last decade.
There were also some early signs that key parts of the coalition that boosted Democrats to victory in 2018 and 2020 — moderate suburban white women and Latino voters — were swinging toward Republican candidates. Top Democratic officials made 11th-hour efforts to shore up their base. Vice President Kamala Harris made stops in Chicago to help Illinois Democrats. The first lady, Jill Biden, traveled to Houston on Sunday, trying to lift party turnout in Harris County, a stronghold for Democrats in Texas.
In the House, where Republicans need to flip five seats to control the chamber, the party vied for dricts in Democratic bastions, including in Rhode Island, exurban New York, Oregon and California. Republican strategs touted their surprisingly close standing in governor’s races in longer-shot blue states like New York, New Mexico and Oregon.
At the same time, the Senate remains a tossup, with candidates locked in near dead-even races in three states — Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania — and tight races in at least another four. Republicans need just one additional seat to win control.
Supporters of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida gathered at a campaign event in Coconut Creek. (Scott McIntyre for The New York Times)
“Everyone on the Republican side should be optimic,” said Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican and the head of the Republican Senate campaign arm. Mr. Scott predicted his party would flip the chamber, going beyond the 51 seats needed for control. “If you look at the polls now, we have every reason to think we’ll be over 52.”
For months, Democratic candidates in key races have outpaced Mr. Biden’s low approval ratings, aided flawed Republican opponents who had been boosted to primary victories Mr. Trump. Continuing to outrun the leader of their party grew more difficult as perceptions of the economy worsened and as Republican groups unleashed a fall ad blitz accusing their opponents of being weak on crime.
“It’s a close race — it’s a jump ball for sure,” Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democrat running for Senate in Pennsylvania against Mehmet Oz, the television personality, told a group of supporters in suburban Philadelphia.
Dr. Oz and Mr. Fetterman both spent time in the Philadelphia area on Sunday, battling, in particular, in the crucial swing suburbs. A day after joining Mr. Trump at a rally in the Pittsburgh exurbs, Dr. Oz campaigned with Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, two more moderate Republicans.
In Georgia, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley told supporters not to feed into national headlines about Republicans’ strength, as she campaigned with Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee, in the conservative northwest Atlanta exurbs.
“Don’t len to this red wave stuff they’re talking to you about. The win that will happen in Georgia will simply be based on turnout,” she said. “Do more of us show up than they do?”
And in the Las Vegas suburbs, former President Bill Clinton appeared with Ms. Cortez Masto to urge a crowd of labor union members to warn their family and friends not to cast a protest vote for Republicans, who he said would be “terrible” for working-class people.
“They’re gambling that they have this magic moment where we’ll all be so mad, we’ll stop thinking,” he said. “Between now and Tuesday, people here could change the outcome of this election.”
New Yorkers cast their ballots during early voting at a polling station at John Jay High School in Brooklyn on Saturday. More than 30 million ballots have been cast already. (Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times)
In the House, the question is how large next year’s Republican majority will be. Some strategs have increased their estimates of how many seats the G.O.P. will gain from a handful to more than 25, which is well over the threshold for control of the chamber. Some of the Democratic challenges are structural: Republicans could pick up three seats just from redricting according to some estimates, and a wave of Democratic retirements means more than a dozen seats in competitive dricts lack incumbents to defend them.
Paired with the number of seats leaning Republican or considered tossups, those obstacles are the makings of a landslide if undecided voters break decisively for the party out of power.
“It’s not a surprise that this is a tough cycle,” said Sean Patrick Maloney, the head of the Democratic House campaign arm, who is in danger of losing his seat in New York’s Hudson Valley, which Mr. Biden won 10 percentage points. “We’re very much aware of what we’re up against.”
In governor’s races, Republican candidates modeled after Mr. Trump face decidedly mixed prospects, reflecting their party’s struggles with his continued influence. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida seemed poised for re-election, while Kari Lake, the Republican nominee in Arizona, faces a tough battle. Doug Mastriano, the far-right nominee in Pennsylvania, was expected to lose, but Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, both of whom clashed with Mr. Trump, appear to have solidified their hold.
In some ways, the congressional elections are less consequential than some of the state elections, given that Mr. Biden will still be in the White House to block Republican legislation. In Wisconsin and North Carolina, the party is on the verge of breakthroughs in state legislatures that would give it almost total control of their governments.
If Republicans gain just a handful of House and Senate seats in North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, faces the prospect of a Republican supermajority, rendering his veto pen obsolete to stop policies like a state abortion ban. If Republicans flip only one of the two State Supreme Court seats up for re-election Tuesday, a Republican-controlled high court could ratify even more gerrymandered state legislative maps that would lock in Republican control for the foreseeable future.
Kari Lake addressed reporters at a campaign event on Friday, alongside other Republican candidates at the U.S.-Mexico border in Sierra Va, Ariz. (Rebecca Noble for The New York Times)
“Yes, we’re concerned about it because the Republicans got to draw their own dricts,” Mr. Cooper said. “We know this is a very purple, 50-50 state, yet we have a situation with unfair maps of maybe a supermajority.”
But the chaotic events of the post-Trump era along with questions about the very mechanics of elections have injected a heavy dose of uncertainty into the outcome of the 2022 midterms.
Democratic strategs have been enthusiastic about early voting, saying that it matched or was higher than the turnout two years ago when the party swept the House. More than 30 million ballots have been cast already, exceeding the 2018 total, and the Democratic advantage is 11 percentage points nationwide, even better than in 2018, according to Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a firm that analyzes political data.
The audience watched former President Barack Obama at a Democratic rally in Las Vegas on Tuesday. (Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)
But Republican candidates have followed Mr. Trump’s lead in denouncing mail voting and encouraging their voters to cast their ballots on Election Day. So those early Democratic numbers could be swamped Republican votes on Tuesday.
Republicans, meanwhile, point to polling averages that crept toward the G.O.P. in the final week. But a number of the polls were conducted Republican-leaning firms, which could influence the outcome of those surveys. And after several cycles of polling underestimating Trump voters, it’s unclear whether pollsters have correctly captured the electorate.
“I’ve never been one who has put my bets on any poll, because I think particularly at this time people are not sharing where they are,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington, who is facing a tough re-election battle in her blue state.
Hispanic voters are likely to play a crucial role in Tuesday’s election, though both sides remain uncertain how much the landscape has shifted. In two of the states that are likely to determine control of the Senate — Nevada and Arizona — they make up roughly 20 percent of the electorate. Latinos also account for more than 20 percent of regered voters in more than a dozen hotly contested House races, including in California, Colorado, Florida and New Mexico.
“The data itself right now is a picture of uncertainty,” said Carlos Odio, who runs Equis, a Democratic-leaning research firm that focuses on Latino voters. “We’re not seeing further decline for Democratic support, but the party has relied on very high margins in the past.”