What the conventional wisdom misses about 2018 and 2020.<\/b>
\nT he conventional wisdom about the 2018 House elections was that Democrats won in the suburbs\u2014that is, that college-educated white suburbanites shifted further toward the Democrats, and Republicans (despite also getting a strong turnout) didn\u2019t get enough votes to keep up. That narrative is mostly right, but it\u2019s shaped by a certain type of (important) topline level result \u2014the 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\u2019ll 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\u2019s vote total to that of House Republicans in a certain type of district (e.g. pure rural, dense suburban, urban-suburban mix\u2014these categories were taken from David Montgomery over at CityLab and you can read more about them here).
The basic pattern here seems clear\u2014the House Republicans didn\u2019t quite get to Trump\u2019s overall vote total. The House GOP\u2019s vote total (and Trump\u2019s) 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.
As the GIF progresses and we move into more dense districts, House Democrats start to outperform Clinton\u2019s total by larger and larger amounts. In the most urbanized districts, House Democrats often got more votes than Clinton despite the fact that 2018 was a midterm year.
To me there are a couple of takeaways here.
First, the urban\/rural divide is sort of like the gender gap\u2014that is, people assume that a large gap will automatically favor one party, but that\u2019s not really the case. The gender gap was large in 2012,2014,2016, and 2018. Republicans won two of those elections and Democrats won two. Similarly, the urban\/rural divide (which isn\u2019t hasn\u2019t been as cleanly defined as the gender gap yet) was huge in 2016 and 2018. Republicans won one of those elections, and Democrats won the other one.
Second, the 2018 elections weren\u2019t just a suburban event. Republicans turned out strongly in basically every category, and Democrats seemed to outpace Clinton more and more as the districts got became denser. This has implications for 2020. If the GOP continues to hemorrhage votes in denser areas, states like Arizona and Georgia could enter the playing field. Similarly, Democrats could bleed votes in states like Minnesota and Maine if the GOP pushes harder on the rural side of that divide.
Third, the broader GOP\u2019s clearest path to a victory in 2020 seems to be a combination of winning back voters that it lost in 2018 and 2012. I\u2019ve written at length about the votes that Trump lost (and gained) in the 2016 election\u2014he traded blue-collar white voters (most importantly in the upper Midwest) and lost white-collar suburbanites (most notably in the Southwest), and you can see some attrition between 2018 and 2016 in the graphic above. But it comes through even more clearly when you compare the House 2016 and 2018 numbers to presidential results.
This graphic is similar to one you might have seen over at Echelon Insights. The basic idea here is to show that voters were more willing to distinguish between Trump and the GOP in 2016 than 2018. In 2016, a number of House GOP candidates beat Trump\u2019s margin by a significant amount\u2014suggesting that there\u2019s a real slice of Americans who voted for a House Republican but didn\u2019t vote for Trump. In 2018 (as Echelon pointed out) the House results were more correlated with the presidential results than they were in 2016. This suggests that, after two years of Trump in the White House, voters were more likely to identify their Republican representatives with Trump. And with Trump is as unpopular as he is, that translates into real Republican losses.
It seems like the simplest move for Republicans in 2020 would be to try to regain voters who have cast a ballot for them in the past. There are other options for GOP expansion \u2014a number of right-of-center writers have proposed a sort of multi-ethnic populist front\u2014but Trump (and the current iteration of the GOP) has yet to show that he\u2019s capable of that. But for the short-term, it seems like the first step for the GOP is to figure out how to regain voters they\u2019ve lost in the last four to six years.
And the most intuitive first step for Democrats is to try to keep that from happening. If Democrats manage to replicate their 2018 margins (or even fall short by a moderate amount) in an only-somewhat-higher-turnout environment, they would win in 2020. I\u2019ll write more about Democratic strategy as time goes on, but I don\u2019t think analysts need to overthink either side of this equation. Both parties have a path to a 2020 majority, and it\u2019s not hard to use numbers from the last couple of elections to construct that.<\/p>\n