Voter turnout will be key for Republicans to gain or for Democrats to keep a majority in the U.S. Senate in the upcoming November midterm election, said Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA professor of political science and communication studies, in a lecture Thursday.
“This midterm election will be a competition for partisans and about mobilizing presidential voters (who voted) in the last cycle,” Vavreck said.
She spoke as part of the Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences, a biweekly lecture series hosted by a committee of UCLA professors.
Currently, the Democratic Party has 53 senators and two independents who vote with the party. However, many polls predict that the party will have a high probability of losing its majority in the Senate after the midterm election on Nov. 4.
According to the New York Times’ The Upshot blog, the Republican Party has a 63 percent chance of becoming the majority party in the Senate in November. Democrats will still hold the presidency, which can veto bills passed through the Legislature. However, if Republicans gain the majority in the Senate, they will have the power to prevent non-Supreme Court justices and presidential appointees from advancing to a confirmation vote.
Vavreck writes for The Upshot blog and has analyzed elections for more than 15 years. In the lecture Thursday, she used polling data from the 2010 midterm election to illustrate that many Democratic voters who voted in the 2008 presidential election for President Barack Obama did not vote in 2010. A higher percentage of voters who voted for Republican presidential candidate John McCain turned out to vote in 2010, she said.
In the 2010 midterm election, Democrats lost six seats in the Senate and more than 60 seats in the House of Representatives.
“How can Democrats prevent their losses? One simple thing they can do is get more votes,” she said.
However, given the historical trend, Vavreck said it’s very likely that Democrats will lose at least some seats in the Senate. Of all midterm elections since 1934, the president’s party gained seats in the Senate only five times.
Given the president’s approval rating, which Vavreck said plays a large part in determining the outcome of a midterm election, she expects Democrats to lose around five seats, putting the party at effectively 50 seats in the Senate. In that case, Vice President Joe Biden would break the tie, allowing Democrats to keep the majority.
Vavreck said the loss of five seats is not out of the ordinary for the Democratic Party.
She said it remains difficult to predict exactly which party will hold the Senate, given that in some years, there have been some deviations from the norm.
“It’s a nail-biter,” she said. “Anyone who thinks he or she knows the election is inventing a story.”
Compiled by Jeong Park, Bruin senior staff.