This article, by Dave Wasserman at FiveThirtyEight blog, has attracted a lot of attention among people interested in American electoral politics. Here is (for us Democrats) the dispiriting bottom line:
Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats.
In amplification, let's consider the House side of the equation first. In the last presidential election Trump, though he lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million, carried 230 congressional districts, to 205 for Clinton. Meanwhile, in the races for US House, Republican candidates won a narrow majority of all votes cast, and 241 seats to 194 for the Democrats. It's not my main point, but I don't want to pass up a chance to note that Trump's claim to have carried the Republicans to victory doesn't square with the data: in the country, he actually ran somewhat behind Republican House candidates.
My main point is just that Democratic congressional districts tend to be overwhelmingly Democratic--that is why Democrats can simultaneously win a lot more votes in the country and a lot fewer seats in the House of Representatives. This hasn't happened by accident. It's the gerrymandered districts, stupid. Also, Democratic voters abet the efforts of Republicans to pack us all into a few districts by hording together in the country's urban centers. Manhattanites, disperse! Won't your boss let you work remotely from the town in Indiana from whence you came?
The situation is probably more dire in the Senate. Every two years, a third of the seats are filled, and it happens that the 2018 lineup heavily favors Republicans. The Democrats only very plausible chance of a pick-up is in Nevada, a state that is trending blue. To gain a majority, however, Democrats need a net gain of three, and they have to defend seats in places like Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Montana, and North Dakota. Trump won all those states, and his narrowest margin was 19 points, 57-38 (both Indiana and Missouri). Thus the dim outlook in the Senate for 2018.
But that is in part the luck of the draw. Of course the last presidential election occurred in all fifty states, and, as with the House, it seems reasonable to gauge the true lay of the land by superimposing the presidential result on the Senate. Clinton, with a plurality of nearly 3 million popular ballots, won the electoral votes of twenty states, compared to thirty for Trump. If we give the Trump states two Republican senators, and the Clinton states two Democratic senators, the result is a veto-proof majority . . . for the party that received 3 million fewer votes!
I don't know what the solution is. It's not enough for Manhattanites to disperse. I suppose we could start by splitting California in two by an east-west line drawn anywhere between Dodger Stadium and San Francisco Bay. That would net two more Democratic senators. Then we could do something similar with New York: just make Long Island, including Brooklyn and Queens, its own state, perhaps. You'd have to be careful where you drew the lines--as careful as Republicans have been when drawing congressional districts. I assume that Lincoln, if he could have seen forward 150 years, would simply have allowed the South to secede.
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