Last week's Democratic rout is starting to settle in among some Republicans. Even with the structural disadvantages of GOP gerrymandering, Democrats are now poised to pick up anywhere between 35 and 40 seats. And Democrat Kyrsten Sinema's win in Arizona means Republicans will at least be limited to a two-seat pickup in the Senate while perhaps just gaining a meager one seat, depending on the Florida recount.
Overall, the GOP's future stands to get consistently bleaker over time. Republicans lost women, young people, independents, and Latinos by a lot while Democrats made big gains with suburban voters and even seniors, to some extent. If you wanted to boil it down even further, CNBC’s John Harwood notes:
- Republicans carried white evangelical Christians by 53 percentage points
- Democrats carried everyone else by 34 points
- White evangelical Christians are only one-fourth of the electorate
Republican pollster and congressional adviser David Winton hopes Republicans don't use their retention of the Senate as a reason to ignore their midterm drubbing. “We didn’t lose the Senate, but losing by the margins that we did with a lot of these groups is unsustainable,” Winston told the New York Times.
While Trump did manage to drive up turnout among his older white rural voters, in many competitive races that wasn’t enough to offset Democratic gains in more densely populated suburbs and exurbs. Not only will Democrats end up flipping around 20 of the 23 GOP-held districts won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, they also picked up at least 17 seats in districts where Trump prevailed.
In other words, Democrats' overall haul will be fueled almost equally by Clinton districts and Trump districts alike, suggesting Trump may underperform considerably in 2020. In fact, Democrats cleaned house up and down the ticket in the three blue-leaning Midwestern states that went for Trump last cycle—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
That said, Ohio remains a trouble spot for Democrats in 2020. Trump's white rural base proved enough to push almost every contested race in the Buckeye State in the direction of Republicans with the exception of Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown's seat.
Democrats will now face a strategic choice to some extent of working to engage and deepen their support in more diverse states like Florida, Georgia, and Texas, or aiming to win back rural white voters in Ohio. As the Times writes: "Democrats will have a narrower path to the presidency nationwide as long as Ohio leans red. But the peril may be greater for Mr. Trump, who could have difficulty in 2020 replicating the regional sweep that made him president in the first place."