Democrats are hopeful that Republicans’ vote last week to pass the American Health Care Act provides them an argument to use in next year’s election. Only 20 House Republicans voted against the bill, which is not polling well and which Democrats are angling to use as a cudgel against the GOP.
Whatever happens in the first round of voting in the special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District on Tuesday, it seems like a safe bet that the result will get a fair amount of national attention because of what it may tell us about the 2018 midterm. But before getting into what those lessons may be, let’s remember that this is a special election — and thus it features special circumstances.
It’s been nearly a week since the Republican plan to dramatically alter the Affordable Care Act died without a vote in the House of Representatives. It’s 84 weeks until the next national election, the 2018 midterm.
Democrats have a path to winning a House majority next year, but that possibility is highly dependent on variables over which they have effectively no control. That’s the takeaway from our initial ratings of 2018’s House races, a list that is heavy on Republicans who start this cycle only mildly endangered.
At first blush, one might think that the Democrats have a decent chance of taking control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm. After all, midterms frequently break against the president’s party, which has lost an average of four seats in the 26 midterms conducted in the era of popular Senate elections (starting with the 1914 midterm).
It’s become far less common in recent years for voters to vote for one party for president and another for their local U.S. House seat. While the number of “crossover” districts did go up from 2012 — there are 35 of them, as opposed to 26 after the 2012 election — the percentage of crossover seats, just 8% of the 435 districts, is low historically. To put that in perspective, 40 years ago during the 1976 presidential election — a race that, like this one, saw a national popular vote difference between the two candidates of just about two percentage points — 28.5% of the seats (124 of 435) voted differently for president and for House.
When President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office eight days from now, he will be completing a remarkable journey, going from private citizen to the highest elected office in the nation without any elected stop in between. But while Trump is, to put it mildly, a unique figure in presidential politics, his journey is one that is we are increasingly seeing on a smaller scale at the gubernatorial level.
With Republican Sen.-elect John Kennedy’s triumph in the Louisiana runoff last weekend, victories by two other Republicans in Louisiana House races, and Gov. Pat McCrory’s (R) concession last week to Gov.-elect Roy Cooper (D) in North Carolina, the winners of 2016’s House, Senate, and gubernatorial races are now set. This allows us to do a little housekeeping. Kennedy’s win confirms that this is the first cycle in the history of popular Senate elections that every state that held a Senate election in a presidential cycle voted for the same party for both president and for Senate (34 for 34 this year). Also, finalizing these results permits us to give a final assessment of our down-ballot Crystal Ball projections for 2016: We picked 32 of 34 Senate races correctly, along with 10 of 12 gubernatorial races and 428/435 House races.
A potential silver lining for Democrats is that they head into the 2018 midterm as the party that does not hold the White House, and the “out” party typically makes gains down the ballot in midterms. But it will be difficult for Democrats to make Senate gains in 2018: Despite being in the minority, they face a near-historic level of exposure in the group of Senate seats being contested in two years, Senate Class 1.
After the Bay of Pigs debacle, when U.S.-backed forces tried and spectacularly failed to topple Fidel Castro’s nascent communist regime in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy held a press conference and took blame for the failure. Speaking on April 21, 1961 — just a few months into his presidency — JFK memorably declared, “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” meaning that when something goes right, many will want to take credit for it, but when something goes wrong, no one wants to take the blame.
For the first time since Ohio rejected Kennedy in favor of Richard M. Nixon in 1960, it seems quite possible that the Buckeye State will find itself on the losing side of a presidential election this year.
In their influential 1970 book The Real Majority, political demographers Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg identified the individual they saw as the American “Middle Voter.” This person was a metropolitan “middle-aged, middle-income, middle-educated, Protestant, in a family whose working members work more likely with hands than abstractly with head.” They then drilled down a little deeper: “Middle Voter is a forty-seven-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose husband is a machinist.” Scammon and Wattenberg did not actually have a specific person in mind. Their description of Middle Voter was an archetype, but after the book was published, Wattenberg said, “I do not know for sure if the lady exists. But I suspect that if you looked hard enough, you’d find her.”
The horrifying massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando forces us to ponder whether it will somehow change the national electoral calculus. The short answer is that it’s too soon to tell, but the grim reality is that the frequency of mass murder in the United States — committed by ISIS-inspired lone wolves or others — suggests that this, terrifyingly, might not be the last major spasm of violence that takes place between now and the election. How candidates react could have consequences in November, although it’s also easy to overstate the potential impact of jarring events on the choices that voters make. After all, the American electorate is partisan and the vote choices for the vast majority of them don’t waver much throughout the campaign.
While Hillary Clinton still leads Donald Trump in most national polling, her margin is not what it once was: She’s up about five points in the HuffPost Pollster average, down from nine points in mid-April, and she’s up just two points in the RealClearPolitics average, also down from nine points seven weeks ago. Now that she’s the presumptive nominee, Clinton will hope to restore those numbers to their prior luster.
One could not be blamed for looking at the Republican primary results over the past 10 days and questioning how someone could stop Donald Trump from being the Republican nominee.
Let’s get the easy part out of the way first. Bernie Sanders went into the New York Democratic primary with essentially no path to catching Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he leaves it with even less of a path after Clinton’s victory. Despite some national polls showing the race effectively a tie, Clinton has a lead in pledged delegates and superdelegates that Sanders cannot catch. Unless Clinton is somehow forced from the race, she will be the nominee. Sanders assuredly still has some victories to come, but the eventual outcome really is not in doubt.
Pennsylvania’s Seventh Congressional District, which forms a misshapen U linking Greater Philadelphia in the east to the outskirts of Lancaster and Reading to its west and north, provides a vivid example of the challenges Democrats face on the current U.S. House map.
About a month ago, after Donald Trump won the South Carolina primary and all of its delegates, we headlined a piece “The Hour is Growing Late to Stop Trump.” Well, the hour has grown later, and we have to ask the question: Has Trump been stopped?
As we’ve suggested, the past few weeks have been defined by increasingly-loud talk of a contested convention and the possibility that the presidential contest will go beyond the first ballot, something that has not happened in either party since 1952. The highly unusual circumstances on the Republican side, where the polarizing Donald Trump has finished first in the majority of contests so far and has won more than a third of the delegates he needs for a first ballot nomination, make the outcome impossible to predict with precision at this point.
This is the second part of a two-part series analyzing the flood of primaries and in both parties from now through March 15. Last week we looked at the Republicans, and this week we look at the Democrats.
