Democrats and media pundits are extrapolating a lot from some horrible Republican candidates who managed close (or losing) races in places the GOP should win, even with Donald Trump in the White House. Statistically, the less densely populated, the older, and the less diverse a region, the more it should break for Republicans. Other indicators are well known, too: married couples earning $30-75K annually trend Republican, for example. The highest income and lowest income households break for Democrats, as do denser urban areas with greater diversity.
Even in the Trump vs. Hillary Clinton election of 2016, it was possible to model voters on these factors, normalize for variation, and predict how a county would probably vote with a high degree of certainty. Believe it or not, 2016 wasn’t actually that far from the 2012 voting trends.
Midterm elections tend to break against the incumbent president’s party, but history has been a bit strange this century. Models still suggest GOP losses in the House, but not the Senate and not in most statewide offices. Why is this? Why isn’t the Trump Effect crushing the GOP more? Because Trump wasn’t the main reason for the GOP Senate loss or other weak performances. Trump was a drag on Republicans, yes. But, would any Republican president have saved the Roy Moore Senate race? Let us hope not.
The model for Republicans in 2018 might be Massachusetts’ governor, the moderate and reserved Charlie Baker. A Republican is the most popular governor in America. Plus, he is leading a solidly Democratic state. As Politico reports:
How Charlie Baker ditched Trump to become the most popular governor in America – POLITICO:
By LAUREN DEZENSKI – 01/13/2018
BOSTON — Donald Trump got crushed by Hillary Clinton in Massachusetts. And after his first year in office, polls show the president is now even less popular here.
Trump’s rock-bottom ratings should be dragging Republican Gov. Charlie Baker to defeat in 2018. Instead, the opposite is occurring. Baker is not only more popular than any other politician in solidly Democratic Massachusetts, he’s the most popular governor in the nation.
His defiance of the laws of political gravity is proving maddening to opponents who once viewed him as a certain one-termer. And it offers a ray of hope to the handful of other Republican governors facing blue-state electorates in November with the prospect of an unpopular president in the background.
Baker is not loudly and actively anti-Trump. Instead, Baker largely ignores Pres. Trump, preferring to concentrate on his role as governor of a liberal, mildly progressive state. Baker does not rally against Trump. He doesn’t lead press conferences condemning the president. Baker does not alienate Republican voters, and he doesn’t anger Democrats. He issues written statements and press released opposing specific Trump policies, without much fanfare.
When Democrats and some Republican pundits suggest that GOP candidates need to vociferously oppose Trump, Baker proves it is more politically effective to ignore Trump rather than actively oppose the president. However much I would like a strong anti-Trump movement within the GOP and among libertarians, classical liberals, and social conservatives, the resistance strategy has limitations.
The Resistance movement might make dedicated progressives happy, but it seems to alienate unaffiliated voters and disgusted GOP voters. Baker offers a different approach that does not rally progressives; he solidifies the middle ground, centrist voters. In surveys, the moderate middle remains a majority.
That centrist middle will determine the 2018 midterm elections, if they vote. For the GOP to minimize losses in 2018, the party base must avoid nominating hard-line social conservatives, nativists, and other likely losers. The GOP could maintain control of the House and Senate in 2018 if the party’s activists don’t continue their recent rejection of establishment moderates.
The Senate map and House districts should help the GOP minimize Democratic gains. But, anything could happen.
Wave versus The Map: Democratic Control of Senate – Washington Post
By Paul Kane January 13 at 10:59 AM
The possibility that Democrats could win the Senate in 2018 seemed preposterous a year ago given President Trump’s stunning victory and the basic math facing a party defending three times as many seats as Republicans in November’s midterm elections.
Not anymore. The debate has grown over Democrats’ chances of capturing control of the agenda and holding power over Trump’s nominations, including potential vacancies on the Supreme Court.
The dispute pits the practitioners of big data against those who also scout candidates and measure broader political atmosphere to make their bets.
Both sides agree Democrats face a narrow path to gain two seats needed to reclaim the majority — but there is a debate over just how narrow.
Even after Sen. Doug Jones (D) won his improbable Alabama special election last month, Democrats still face an imposing task: They are defending 26 seats of their own to just eight Republican seats up for grabs.
“Just how bad is this map for Democrats? It’s bad enough that it may be the worst Senate map that any party has faced ever,” Nate Silver, the founder of Five Thirty Eight, the data analytics blog covering sports and politics, wrote Wednesday.
“A key question for November is which will be dominant: the environment or geography. Put another way, in both the House and Senate, it’s the wave versus the map,” Charlie Cook, the founder of the Cook Political Report, retorted a day later.
A reminder that despite recent attention to the issue, gerrymandering only influences House races, not the Senate. The states are what they are, and increasingly they are polarized between the states with the largest urban centers and the states with more rural voters. In states with either decreasing density or increasing urban populations, no amount of gerrymandering can offset migration and birthrates. Sorry, but Montana is what is, and California is what it is. There are fewer “purple” counties, even within purple states.
The House is going to be a lot closer, regardless of which party wins the most seats. The 2018 House might be within five seats — or closer. This actually should give moderates of both parties more influence because compromise will be required. At least that is what history has suggested in the past: closely divided legislatures require moderation for legislation. Yet, as I wrote earlier, this century has been strange.
The House is a 50-50 bet, with the economy, world events, Pres. Trump, and individual candidates influencing the outcomes of House races. Anything could happen during the coming months. The slightest change in the weeks before November could determine which party controls the House. One thing seems unlikely: Trump rising in popularity. This makes the economy and the strengths of candidates more important than normal. Regardless of which party wins a majority in the House, the party will likely over-play its hand to appease an activist base.
On a broad level, the 2016 presidential math looked relatively stable — Trump won 230 House districts, almost exactly the same as Mitt Romney in 2012 — but there was a dramatic shift at the ground level. Several dozen suburban districts swung into Democrat Hillary Clinton’s column or went from strong Romney districts to narrow wins for Trump. Rural districts, meanwhile, broke far out of reach for Democrats.
Both Silver and Cook believe the Democratic case for picking up the 24 House seats they need for the majority has only gotten stronger amid Trump’s historic unpopularity for a first-year president. Silver actually believes some analysts have been “slow to recognize just how bad things had gotten for Republicans,” given election data from 2017 congressional special elections and Virginia’s gubernatorial race.
“Just about any fair-minded assessment of the House would show that Democrats have probably more than a 50-50 chance of taking control of the House,” [Cook] wrote.
Barack Obama was popular and that wasn’t enough to help Democrats. Trump is unpopular… and it might not be enough to help Democrats gain control of Congress. The Senate is the wall over which Democrats need to climb. (Democrats should consider promoting the division of California into three states — if for no other reason than two or three more Senate seats.) The low-population states provide a Republican advantage, structurally, that is magnified by this election cycle’s unique map.
The Senate has always been a steeper climb for Democrats. Those 26 seats Democrats are defending include five in states that Trump won by more than 18 percentage points — plus five more in states he won by smaller margins. Sen. Dean Heller (Nev.) is the only Republican running in a state that Clinton won.
Look at North Dakota. In 2012, Republican Romney won comfortably over then-President Obama by more than 63,000 votes, 58 percent to 39 percent. But Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) ran a strong enough campaign to eke out a 3,000-vote win. She won 36,000 more votes than Obama — meaning there were lots of Romney-Heitkamp voters.
By 2016, Democratic support had collapsed in Heitkamp’s state. Clinton won just 27 percent of the vote, losing by more than 120,000 votes to Trump.
If North Dakota has turned this Republican, it seemed, any generic Republican would topple Heitkamp this year.
That’s also the situation Sen. Joe Manchin III (D) faces in West Virginia, where Clinton won just 26 percent of the vote. Democrats are also defending three more states — Indiana, Missouri, Montana — where she received less than 40 percent of the vote.
Democrats spent a lot of money recently in special elections. They must focus their efforts for the midterms. The Republicans need to persuade their base voters to support moderates in most states. This is the same problem facing rural Democrats: balancing the national activist base against winning locally.
Right now, I’m anticipating the House within five seats for Democrats and a Senate margin of two seats for the GOP. But, that estimation can and will change and after primary elections give us actual nominees with better polling data.
A nation divided today is going to remain divided after 2018.
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