It worries me that media narratives (and the people who read them) are buying so hard into this idea of a strong, anti-Trump blue wave in 2018. It's not going to play that way in the Senate just...
It worries me that media narratives (and the people who read them) are buying so hard into this idea of a strong, anti-Trump blue wave in 2018. It's not going to play that way in the Senate just because the map is already so tilted in Republicans favor (Democrats are defending ten seats where Trump won the popular vote). It especially worries me when articles don't even mention the actual margin for the vote result when delivering their news.
The House of Representatives is also tilted hard against Democrats, with several experts I've read suggesting that they'd need an advantage of around 5 points to take the majority of the seats there (an advantage that while currently is exceeded by about one percent in averages of generic ballot polls, is not guaranteed to last five and a half more months and already fell by one percent from a month ago).
State legislatures are one of the few areas where Democrats can make a lot of honest gains, only because their starting position was so weak in the first place. We could see that as more of a reversion to the mean with people deciding two strong parties is in their best interests, rather than any particularly strong reaction to who is president outside of the R next to his name.
The predictively telling question for November is not whether Democrats flipped a seat, but how much the margin moved. The article here already noted that the partisan lean of this district was probably about +5.5 R (weighting 2012's presidential margin at 25% and 2016's at 75%). In a national environment where Democrats are generally preferred by about 6 points overall, a 51%-49% result nearly exactly matches the sort of result we'd expect (and far under-performs compared to the average of special election results so far since Trump's election).
The last bit that I'd complain about here is that we're obsessing so much about Republican seats that Democrats are able to flip in special elections, but because of last night there is also a seat that was democratic to the same Pennsylvania chamber that a Republican flipped. This will potentially muddy the narrative a lot more than people like, so I'm sure there's a reason it went unnoticed by the Daily Beast.
It worries me that media narratives (and the people who read them) are buying so hard into this idea of a strong, anti-Trump blue wave in 2018. It's not going to play that way in the Senate just because the map is already so tilted in Republicans favor (Democrats are defending ten seats where Trump won the popular vote). It especially worries me when articles don't even mention the actual margin for the vote result when delivering their news.
The House of Representatives is also tilted hard against Democrats, with several experts I've read suggesting that they'd need an advantage of around 5 points to take the majority of the seats there (an advantage that while currently is exceeded by about one percent in averages of generic ballot polls, is not guaranteed to last five and a half more months and already fell by one percent from a month ago).
State legislatures are one of the few areas where Democrats can make a lot of honest gains, only because their starting position was so weak in the first place. We could see that as more of a reversion to the mean with people deciding two strong parties is in their best interests, rather than any particularly strong reaction to who is president outside of the R next to his name.
The predictively telling question for November is not whether Democrats flipped a seat, but how much the margin moved. The article here already noted that the partisan lean of this district was probably about +5.5 R (weighting 2012's presidential margin at 25% and 2016's at 75%). In a national environment where Democrats are generally preferred by about 6 points overall, a 51%-49% result nearly exactly matches the sort of result we'd expect (and far under-performs compared to the average of special election results so far since Trump's election).
The last bit that I'd complain about here is that we're obsessing so much about Republican seats that Democrats are able to flip in special elections, but because of last night there is also a seat that was democratic to the same Pennsylvania chamber that a Republican flipped. This will potentially muddy the narrative a lot more than people like, so I'm sure there's a reason it went unnoticed by the Daily Beast.