Why Democrats’ Gain Was More Impressive Than It Appears


They are poised to win more seats this year than they did in 2006, despite far fewer opportunities.

NATE COHN, NY TIMES

The Democrats are poised to gain around 30 seats after Tuesday’s elections. Republicans seem likely to gain a few seats in the Senate, and they triumphed in some high-profile governor’s races.

But Democrats faced formidable structural disadvantages, unlike any in recent memory. Take those into account, and 2018 looks like a wave election, like the ones that last flipped the House in 2010 and 2006.

In the House, where the Democrats had their strongest showing, it’s impressive they managed to fare as well as they did.

Democrats had so few opportunities because of partisan gerrymandering and the tendency for the party to win by lopsided (and thus inefficient) margins in urban areas. It gave Republicans a chance to survive a hostile national political climate that would have doomed prior parties.

As a whole, the House Democratic candidates overcame all of these disadvantages. They are on track to win more seats than Democrats did in 2006, with far fewer opportunities. They even managed to win more seats in heavily Republican districts than the Republicans managed to win in heavily Democratic districts in 2010.

Democrats pulled it off with an exceptionally deep and well-funded class of recruits that let the party put a very long list of districts into play. In prior years, the party in power wouldn’t have even needed to vigorously contest many of these races.

Democratic House candidates were helped by the declining value of incumbency, which made it harder for Republicans to outrun disapproval of the president.

The same forces, however, made it harder for Democratic senators to run as far ahead of the national party as they had in the past, and often their states had shifted far to the right since their last election.

Democrats benefited from a huge number of Republican retirements, and they have flipped eight of those seats so far. Many retirements were inevitable, but the number — the highest since 1992, a redistricting year — was not. Democrats also benefited from a string of court decisions that eroded or outright eliminated Republican gerrymanders in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and, most recently, Pennsylvania.

It is hard to measure the accumulated effect of these decisions. But it could have easily represented the Democratic margin of victory in Virginia’s Seventh District and in Pennsylvania’s Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and 17th. That’s atop Democratic gains already realized in 2016 in Florida and Virginia.

The Democratic disadvantage in the Senate isn’t going anywhere. State lines aren’t about to be redrawn, after all, and Hillary Clinton won just 19 states in 2016 while winning the national popular vote.

Perhaps Democrats still would have won the House without redistricting efforts and with a more typical number of Republican retirements. We still don’t know the full picture because the countinghas not been completed. But Democrats are likely to win the national popular vote in this election by seven to eight points once late votes — which typically lean Democratic — are counted.

That would be a slightly larger margin than Republicans achieved in 2010 or 1994. It would be about the same as the Democratic advantage in 2006. It would be, in a word, a wave. 

Nate Cohn is a domestic correspondent for The Upshot. He covers elections, polling and demographics. Before joining The Times in 2013, he worked as a staff writer for The New Republic.
@Nate_Cohn