Can we characterize the 2018 Senate Elections correctly?

[louis c]

Last edited Tue Dec 11, 2018, 03:09 PM - Edit history (1)

I have broken down the results of the Senate Elections in 2018. Trump keeps claiming that "he won the Senate". He did it again today. Let's look at the facts.

There were 35 seats up for election. There were 12 Red state seats (elections in states in which Trump won by greater than 5 points), there were 12 Blue state seats (elections in states that Clinton won by greater than 5 points) and 11 swing state seats (states in which the margin was less than 5 points, either way, plus Ohio and Maine. I placed those in this category because Ohio is a perennial swing state and Trump won one electoral college vote in Maine).

So, the results went this way: Trump and the Republicans won 10 of the 12 Red States, losing 2 and winning Texas by a razor thin margin. Trump and the Republicans lost all 12 Blue States. Most by 20, 30 and 40 points. Trump and the Republicans lost 10 of 11 swing state Senate seats, many by large margins, and won only 1 swing state seat, Florida, in a recount of a quarter point.

That's not too fucking good from Trump's point of view.

[maxsolomon]

1. They kept control. He'll spin it to his advantage.

Every pol would, they'd just do it with some tact, which Individual 1 is incapable of. He fancies himself an insult comic.

[louis c]

2. I understand spin, but the facts are on our side.

We won 24 of 35 seats this cycle. Next cycle it's 22 Reps vs. 11 Dems. If we win 22 and lose 11 seats next cycle, we'll have 58.

[maxsolomon]

5. as the Yiddish say:

fun dayn moyl zu Got's oyem.

[Garrett78]

7. We'll be lucky to get to 51.

[louis c]

9. Don't be too sure...

...I was 22 years old in 1974, the Watergate year. You want to talk about a political slaughter, and the Dems already controlled both branches of Congress.

[Garrett78]

10. I'm not sure of anything, but netting 4 seats is a tall order.

The Senate increasingly favors the Republican Party. There are too many states that lack a strong metropolitan presence.

[louis c]

12. Not if they're marching top Republicans off to prison 4 months before the election.

[Polybius]

13. Many are safe Republicans

58 is a huge stretch, especially because we have to defend Alabama.

[louis c]

14. See reply #12 (upon correction)

[Polybius]

15. I think you mean reply #9, I saw it and disagree

It’s not 1974 anymore. We’re much more divided now. 80%+ of Republicans will never vote for a Democrat. We will likely lose Alabama too. Look what just won in Mississippi. I’d be more than happy with 51 seats in 2020.

[louis c]

16. Actually, I mean #12

[Polybius]

17. Ahh gotcha

It’ll likely get wrapped up in 2019. Doubt it goes 4 months before Election 2020.

If it does, we’ll see.

[louis c]

18. Well, things are certainly shaping up to be something that is a long lasting memory

kinda like Watergate.

[Polybius]

20. Yes

So you’re sticking with 58 in the Senate after 2020? I’ll bookmark it.

[louis c]

22. Well, come on, give me a break

I was making a point. Every cycle at least one third of the Senate seats are up. No matter who hold which seat, or where, winning 24 or of 35 is a successful election. The net is something different. After all, 65 seats were not up.

I'll take 24 out of 35 seats every time, regardless of who holds what seats. After all, the states in play weren't all blue. As I've described in my original post, the states were relatively evenly split.

But if you think 24 to 11 in our favor is a loss, you can't read the electorate. I know we didn't take the Senate, because we were defending the worst map for any party since 1914. but the election, itself, proved to be an electorate that certainly favored Democrat by double digits at the Senate level.

[Garrett78]

21. Yep. Even in a wave election, the vast majority of incumbents win re-election.

And there are more than 20 deep red states. Our tyranny of the minority system greatly disadvantages the Democratic Party.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

33. We weren't favored to win the Senate like we were the House, unfortunately

That we held on to so many of our seats- and flipped two- in a year where we had an ungodly number of seats up is something of a miracle (and probably only made possible because Trump is an awful person/President). Had a less odious Republican than Trump been POTUS, we may have suffered more losses.

[bdjhawk]

3. Interesting analysis- thank you!

[spanone]

4. trump disregards facts.

thanks for the facts

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. I'll give you more statistics

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Senate_elections and similar pages for earlier years.

Of the totals for the 2 parties in 2018, the Dems got 59.3% of the vote. Of course, there are 3 cycles of senate elections, and they're not directly comparable to each other, because different states are involved each time. But you can compare them reasonably to the election 6 years earlier. In 2012, Dems got 56.3% of the vote. In 2006, 56.2%. In 2000, 50.0%. So this was the worst performance by Republicans in this cycle for some time.

How about 2016, the other election in Trump's time? Dems 56.0%, compared to 47.1% in 2010, 52.9% in 2004, and 51.4% in 1998. Again, 2016 was the worst Republican performance in a long time.

So, how come the Republicans have held the Senate? Because they had a good 2014 - Dems only got 45.9% of the vote, compared to 53.8% in 2008, 47.9% in 2002, and 49.2% in 1998. And because Republicans benefit from winning more small states. If you add up all the votes in the past 3 elections for Dems and Repubs, and all the senate seats won, you find Dems won 55.2% of the votes, but only 44.8% of the seats in those elections (not exactly equal to 47 because of special elections and so on). And that 55.2% is the highest running total the Dems have achieved using the figures going back to 1998 (in 2008, it was 54.1%).

So we see that Trumpism has depressed the Republican vote. Only a poor Democratic performance in 2014, before Trump infected the Republican party, and the imbalance of state sizes, gives them a majority of seats now.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

8. thanks for the numbers!

[onenote]

11. All true, but in the end, those kinds of arguments

are sort of like the arguments made by a team that lost a football game even though it gained more yardage and controlled the ball longer than the opposition. Nice statistics, but in the end, a win is a win and a loss is a loss. And we lost ground in the Senate.

[louis c]

19. So, hypothetically...

...if 35 seats were up in a Senate cycle, and we held 33 of them, and the results were that the Reps won 4 total seats and we held on to 31, we're losers? Or, do you think, that foreshadows a political disaster for the other side?

I think the later. And, be the way, politics is not a football game. It's a continuous practice in a Democracy..

[onenote]

23. I'm less concerned about foreshadowing and more about immediate impact

The immediate impact in the Senate was that we went from having 49 seats (including 2 independents) to having 47, and the repubs went from having 51 to having 53. That makes the task of stopping nominations more difficult. There is no way to spin the result as good for us.

As for your hypothetical, how big a loss it would be to have the repubs pick up two seats in an election depends on where things stood before the election. For example, if we had a total of 51 seats and the repubs had 49 before the election and 33 of our seats were up for grabs and we lost two, leaving us only 49 seats and majority control had shifted to the repubs, that would be disastrous loss. The loss we suffered in November wasn't that disastrous, but it was clearly a loss.

Maybe in two years we'll get back two seats, or four, or some other number. But that's in two years, and right now we are in a weaker position vis a vis the Senate than we were before the election.

[louis c]

25. You can't win seats that don't exist.

This was the worst map in over 100 years. To just lose 2 seats is a monumental accomplishment.

And, by the way, I never feed into Trump's false narrative that he won the Senate.

24 Dems won vs. 11 Reps. That's the real score. The seats that weren't up don't count.

[onenote]

29. That's a very odd way of looking at it.

Consider the 2016 Senate elections. Going into the election the Repubs had 54 seats and the Democrats/Independents at 46. The repubs were defending 24 seats and the Democrats were defending 10. The repubs lost 2 seats so, the Repubs won 22 and the Democrats won 12. Under your logic, the real score is that the Democrats lost that election.

To take the example a step further, imagine that in 2016 the Democrats had won 15 seats. The "real score" would have been Republicans won 19 and the Democrats won 15 and the Democrats would have taken control of the Senate. But by your logic, the Republicans would have won that election.

[louis c]

31. If I remember 2016 correctly, we did lose

Isn't there a President Trump somewhere?

With only a third of the Senate up in any cycle, you can absolutely lose an election and gain seats. If every seat was up every cycle, we could use your logic. But, with only a third, I like my logic better.

In order to make sense of my logic, you have to look at every 2 year cycle separately. You can advance your cause and still lose seats, because the hill is so steep. That makes one of the future cycles more advantageous.

If a politically wounded Trump heads up the Republican ticket in 2020, no Republican seat is safe at any level.

[onenote]

32. So you think it would have been defeat for the Democrats in 2016 even if they had won control

of the Senate.


To go back to a sports analogy: Senate elections are like one period in a hockey match. A team might build a 5-0 lead in the first two periods and then in the third period "lose" 3-0. But they still won the match, which is really what matters.

[louis c]

34. But you get to play all 3 periods in one night, not every 2 years.

[Awsi Dooger]

24. Treating every race the same while ignoring incumbency, favoritism, cycle tilt, and net shift

That may work with suckers but it's not going to fool anyone with big picture grasp.

Nate Silver's senate model was overly kind to Democratic chances in 2018 because historically the side with the severe national advantage in the generic vote simply does not lose incumbents. Virtually unheard of yet we lost many of them. I don't see how that can be set aside. We were favored in Indiana and Florida. McCaskill was basically pick-em most of the way until the final month. Likewise with Heitkamp.

This type of rationalization is comforting when we are defending the vast majority of seats. But it is comically fragile and misleading because as soon as the other side is defending more seats...whoops. Now they can claim they won almost everything. Are we supposed to change focus at that point, and say it doesn't matter that we lost most of the races, because our net was positive? Then what about 2018, when our net was negative? Oh, a difficult argument applied there. I understand.

I predicted we would lose 1 or 2 senate seats. Once we had such a huge 2012 it was always going to be difficult to maintain numbers in 2018. But Donald Trump gave us a massive opportunity to do that, via such low sustained approval rating for 2 years. The only maddening race was Florida, which was the most balanced state we lost and a race I followed day to day while living in Miami. Bill Nelson essentially gave that seat away. I've detailed the variables countless times in prior threads. It was unbelievable that Nelson didn't understand the dangers of a midterm race, with a guaranteed older electorate, and while essentially facing a fellow incumbent in Rick Scott.

[louis c]

35. How about the House?

Incumbency didn't mean shit.

What I'm trying to say here is that the overall election results, including the Senate and the governorships bode well for Democrats. The 65 seats NOT up in 2018 have no bearing on analyzing the results. To fall for that obvious nonsense is to give credibility to Trump's bullshit. Here's what I'm looking at:

Every Blue State was an overwhelming victory for Dems. now, I'll admit the Reps won governorships in Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont. But those Republicans are very anti-Trump. The Senate races were landslides for Democrats who are as anti-Trump as a person can be.

Ohio was a split, with Brown winning a Senate seat. Still, if the election was held today, I'd give Trump the edge. But Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan are Democratic landslides in everything.

Florida was Republican, but razor thin. Arizona is a toss up state and Nevada is safely in our camp. Add Maine, where we lost 1 electoral vote, and you can see we picked up steam.

Here's what I expect the future to look like, politically: I agree with most economic experts that the economy will stall in 2019 and 2020, maybe even move into a recession. Trump will face corruption and illegal activity reaching him and his family.

Having said that, what do you think the election is 2020 will look like?

[dsc]

37. actually it kind of still did

there are 435 seats in the House, of which about 44 flipped (42 to us, 2 away from us) but of those 44, a bunch weren't incumbents but open seats. I bet that the reelection rate of incumbents was still over 90 percent even in this election.

[Garrett78]

38. The vast majority of incumbents won re-election, as always.

See charts: https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/reelect.php.

As I said before, netting 4 seats in 2020 will be tougher than you might think.

[underpants]

26. Excellent point.

[unblock]

27. yes, we won about 2/3rds of the seats. it's only disappointing because 6 years ago we won 3/4ths.

[fierywoman]

28. And could we mention the corruption in vote-counting in a lot of red states?

[David__77]

30. Democrats have to win "Trump states" to get close to a majority.

If Democrats only won states that Clinton won, they’d have 40 seats. While I think the Democrats did fairly well in senate races last month, Democrats must win races in “Trump states” to win the senate.

[Garrett78]

39. In most instances, that's virtually impossible without Roy Moore as an opponent.

There are a lot of states that lack a sufficient metro presence. Gaining and maintaining control is a serious challenge for our party, and it will only get more challenging.

[scheming daemons]

36. Simpler version: Democrats won 24 of the 35 Senate seats up for election

That's 70%.