What the conventional wisdom misses about 2018 and 2020.
T he conventional wisdom about the 2018 House elections was that Democrats won in the suburbs—that is, that college-educated white suburbanites shifted further toward the Democrats, and Republicans (despite also getting a strong turnout) didn’t get enough votes to keep up. That narrative is mostly right, but it’s shaped by a certain type of (important) topline level result —the House popular vote totals, the win/loss record across different districts, etc.
So I tried to expand the scope a little bit by looking at vote totals in different types of districts, comparing the 2016 House results to 2018 and generally trying to take a broad look beyond the normal indicators. And I found some interesting stuff that has real implications for 2018 and 2020.
We’ll start by looking at the vote totals in each district.
This GIF compares the number of votes for Trump (horizontal axis) to the number of votes for GOP House members (vertical axis) in contested House districts (each point is a district) across districts with different levels of urbanization. Each frame of the.gif compares Trump’s vote total to that of House Republicans in a certain type of district (e.g. pure rural, dense suburban, urban-suburban mix—these categories were taken from David Montgomery over at CityLab and you can read more about them here).
The basic pattern here seems clear—the House Republicans didn’t quite get to Trump’s overall vote total. The House GOP’s vote total (and Trump’s) tends to go down as the GIF progresses. That makes sense: Generally speaking Trump did better in rural areas than he did in denser locations, and the 2018 House GOP followed that pattern.
But the graphic takes a different, surprising turn when we substitute Hillary Clinton and the 2018 House Democrats for Trump and the 2018 House Republicans.
