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2017 Elections Suggest Incumbency Wont Save Republicans In 2018
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-2017-elections-suggest-incumbency-wont-save-republicans-in-2018/Tuesday was a great night for Democrats. Their candidate for governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, ran away with a 54 percent to 45 percent win. The party gained complete control of two state governments, New Jersey and Washington. But perhaps most significantly, the party picked up at least 15 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, with recounts likely in four districts that will determine control of the chamber.
True, it may seem like possibly, maybe flipping one state legislative chamber doesn’t stack up to those other accomplishments. But more than their implications for governance of Virginia, Tuesday night’s legislative results should cheer Democrats because of what they represent: the best bellwether to date of the 2018 congressional elections.
Ahead of Tuesday, liberals were already rightly bullish about their midterm prospects because of the clear pattern of Democratic overachievement in special elections for congressional and state legislative seats in 2017. Historically, special-election results, in the aggregate, have been a pretty good omen for how a party will do in the following midterms, but it’s best not to rely too heavily on such a small sample of fickle data points (these elections are, by definition, special). And now with Tuesday’s 100 elections for the Virginia House of Delegates and 40 elections for the New Jersey state Senate, we have more than twice as much legislative-election data as we did coming into the week.1
As FiveThirtyEight contributor David Wasserman has pointed out, these regularly scheduled elections are better approximations of 2018’s U.S. House elections. Unlike special elections, in which unpredictable turnout levels can favor one party and skew the results, Virginia’s and New Jersey’s elections occurred concurrently with those states’ gubernatorial elections (36 states will select a governor in 2018), a pairing that typically leads to more predictable turnout. .............
True, it may seem like possibly, maybe flipping one state legislative chamber doesn’t stack up to those other accomplishments. But more than their implications for governance of Virginia, Tuesday night’s legislative results should cheer Democrats because of what they represent: the best bellwether to date of the 2018 congressional elections.
Ahead of Tuesday, liberals were already rightly bullish about their midterm prospects because of the clear pattern of Democratic overachievement in special elections for congressional and state legislative seats in 2017. Historically, special-election results, in the aggregate, have been a pretty good omen for how a party will do in the following midterms, but it’s best not to rely too heavily on such a small sample of fickle data points (these elections are, by definition, special). And now with Tuesday’s 100 elections for the Virginia House of Delegates and 40 elections for the New Jersey state Senate, we have more than twice as much legislative-election data as we did coming into the week.1
As FiveThirtyEight contributor David Wasserman has pointed out, these regularly scheduled elections are better approximations of 2018’s U.S. House elections. Unlike special elections, in which unpredictable turnout levels can favor one party and skew the results, Virginia’s and New Jersey’s elections occurred concurrently with those states’ gubernatorial elections (36 states will select a governor in 2018), a pairing that typically leads to more predictable turnout. .............
