For Joe Biden, it is a ballot with very high political risks: on the occasion of the mid-term elections, which are held on Tuesday November 8, the American president could face a Republican wave in Congress and thus see his powers reduced until the fall of 2024. In any case, this is what the most recent opinion polls in the United States suggest.
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For the House of Representatives, the Republican opposition has a good chance of winning at least 10 to 25 seats, which is more than enough to be in the majority there. Today, the Democrats have 222 of the 435 seats in the lower house, against 213 for the Republicans. According to the specialized site FiveThirtyEight, the Republicans have an 84% chance of becoming the majority in turn.
FiveThirtyEight’s Deluxe forecast for the US House estimates that Republicans have an 84-in-100 chance of taking control of the chamber.
That’s roughly the same chance Republicans had when we launched our midterm forecast on June 30. https://t.co/gPDHwhRtx2 pic.twitter.com/3yhZfCg86C
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) November 8, 2022
Pollsters are more mixed about the fate of the Senate, but the Republicans seem to have the advantage there too. Currently, the upper house is divided between a group of 50 Republicans and a group of 50 Democrats and independents. In the event of a perfect tie in the upper house, it is the vice-president who decides, in this case Joe Biden’s number 2, Democrat Kamala Harris.
The fate of the Senate looks to be on a knife’s edge. Republicans have a 59-in-100 chance of taking control of the chamber, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Deluxe forecast.
That isn’t much better than the probability of calling a coin-flip correctly. https://t.co/oEvUvaJVsB pic.twitter.com/mHHUmW5eBT
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) November 8, 2022
During this election, there are 35 seats to be renewed: 21 are Republicans and 14 are Democrats. According to FiveThirtyEight’s predictions, Republicans have a 59% chance of regaining a majority, an advantage on paper that has widened over the last days of the campaign: on October 18, three weeks before the election, the Democrats still had 63% chance of retaining the majority, according to this same prediction model.