Because redistricting gives significant advantages to incumbents, some legislatures want to make sure voters have a say in who is in office when those changes are made. Even if half of all voters support the president, fewer positive voters will show up at the polls compared to the other 50 percent who hate him. The phenomenon even has a name – the midterm penalty. To wrap things up, let’s take a look at some of the most remarkable midterm results in U.S. The results of the 2022 midterms are expected to follow the same general trends, which has Democrats worried. In 1997, Bolden was assigned as the Deputy Commanding General of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the Pacific. Big Blue represents ActivePure® exclusively for Australasia & the South Pacific regions. This represents 84 percent of the state legislative seats in the U.S. Not only are state senators divided into three classes and elected in different years, but in many states the length of the term isn’t fixed. In so-called 2-4-4 states, state senators are elected for either two or four years depending on the year of the election. State senators serve either two- or four-year terms, and most state representatives serve two-year terms (only five states have four-year terms for representatives).

In 34 of those states, governors serve four-year terms. For example, 36 states elect their governors during midterm elections. Ever since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971, voter turnout at midterm elections has averaged 17 percentage points lower than presidential elections. A second theory for the midterm penalty is called negative voting. In the 2022 midterm elections, there are 6,166 state legislative seats up for grabs. With 50 states and 99 individual legislative bodies, that means thousands of state government seats are up for grabs during the midterms. But actual missions on the ground are often carried out by the Green Berets.S. Ehman’s thankless job was to scan the mind-numbing numbers for anomalies, anything that stood out from the constant low hum of background noise. The coattail effect is particularly strong when a president is swept into office in a landslide victory, like Barack Obama in 2008. Given Obama’s popularity and wide appeal with Democrats, more people turned out at the polls in 2008 and 2012 to vote Democrat.

The conventional explanation for the midterm penalty is that midterms function as a referendum on the president’s popularity. But if voter sentiment has turned sharply against the president and his party, the midterm losses can be crippling. The Republican turnout advantage has been greatest during midterms when a Democratic president is in the White House. Since 1978, Republican voters have been more likely to show up for midterms by an average of 3 percentage points. The result is that the president’s party, regardless of the president’s performance or popularity, takes a hit during the midterms, because many of the voters who were excited to vote in the general election lack motivation to participate in the midterms. But low voter turnout is compounded during midterm elections that lack the wall-to-wall media coverage of a presidential campaign. Keep in mind that before this midterm election, there might have been primary elections held earlier in the year if two or more candidates from the same party were running for the same seat. In the next section, we’ll explore the so-called “midterm penalty” and other theories for midterm power transfers.

In states with two-year terms for state representatives, all seats are up for election in both presidential and midterm elections. In the 2018 midterms, there were more than 160 proposals on state ballots either created by state legislatures or citizen petitions. Since most voters cast ballots along party lines, Democratic candidates down the ticket got a boost, from senators to House representatives to mayors. Only 36.4 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. For example, in the 2008 presidential election, 26 percent of all voters identified as nonwhite, but in the 2010 midterms, that share was only 23 percent. At the time of the 2010 midterms, for example, President Barack Obama’s approval rating slipped to 45 percent and his party suffered heavy losses – 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. Between 1946 and 2006, when a president registered a job approval rating over 50 percent at the time of the midterm, his party has only lost an average of 14 seats in the House of Representatives. Worse, there might also have been a runoff election a few months after the primary, depending on the state rules, if the top candidate didn’t get more than 50 percent of the vote.S.