Now that Donald Trump occupies the White House, Democrats face the choice of whether to try to compromise with his reactionary agenda, or whether to emulate Republicans under Barack Obama and oppose the new administration in lockstep. To the dismay of many progressives, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sometimes sounds more inclined toward working with Trump on certain policies. However, there’s one crucial reason why House Democrats in particular have very little to lose by opposing Trump: He lost the overwhelming majority of their districts by a decisive margin.
This statistic is critical in our highly polarized era, when ticket-splitting rates are at historic lows. Democrats who hold seats where most voters vigorously opposed Trump have little to fear in future general elections if they are seen opposing him, especially when his national approval rating often polls in the low 40s. In fact, Democrats from these dark-blue districts who do cross the aisle to work with Trump could even be at risk of losing a primary challenge because of it.
Daily Kos Elections has calculated the 2016 presidential election outcome in all 435 congressional districts, which we’ve illustrated in the map at the top of this post that renders each district the same size. It reveals which party won each seat at both the presidential and congressional level (see here for a larger image or a traditional map). Thanks in large part to gerrymandering, House Democrats won just 194 seats in 2016, but 182 of those members hold seats that Hillary Clinton carried.
The graph below, called a histogram, groups every Democratic-won House seat by its 2016 presidential election margin. Clinton prevailed in half of the Democratic seats by a landslide 31-point margin or greater—all of those dark blue districts to the left of the “Median District” line. She carried 167 of those seats by at least 10 points, equivalent to a full 86 percent of all Democratic seats. With polls finding Trump deeply unpopular nationally, there is a strong likelihood that voters disapprove of him by even more in the vast majority of Democratic districts.
These numbers are so important for a general election context because the presidential and congressional outcomes were extremely correlated with each other in 2016 and recent elections. As the scatterplot below demonstrates, relatively few races (those farthest away from the diagonal line) saw a meaningful divergence between the presidential results and the House results.
Trump of course won’t be running for office in 2018, but as the most pivotal figure in American politics for the next four years, he’ll be a singular influence for nearly every voter. Presidential approval has long proven a key factor in determining how the incumbent president’s party fares in downballot elections. That’s particularly true in the last few decades, where partisan polarization has reached highs not seen for many generations. Democrats who hold districts that Trump won might be wary of crossing the voters who elected him, but there are only 12 of those Democrats to begin with.
Polarization doesn’t only mean that Democrats in dark blue districts can be free to follow their hearts and stand fast against everything Trump does. It also means that they could pay a significant penalty if they don’t steadfastly oppose his agenda, which we can be sure is wildly unpopular with Democratic primary voters. However, these primary voters have, in the past, often been far more supportive of compromise and opposed to ideological purity tests than Republicans. That could well change in the era of Trump, though, and it’ll be up to the progressive base to ensure that Democratic incumbents hold the line.
One of the most urgent concerns going through any congressmember’s mind is how political actions will affect their chances of winning re-election. Of course, individual House Democrats also care about gaining an overall majority for their party and are wary of opposing harmful policies that are nonetheless popular. These conflicting concerns can sometimes mean taking actions that put incumbents at risk of losing in a primary or general election.
Unlike Republicans, who nearly all have more to fear from a primary challenge than a general election defeat because Trump won most of their districts by a substantial margin, House Democrats aren’t in the majority. Being in the minority means the few dozen Democrats who hold more marginal seats face a much stronger individual incentive to defect on bad legislation if such measures would pass regardless and are popular with swing voters in their districts.
However, when a commanding majority of House Democrats come from safe districts and Trump is unpopular nationally, those members simply have little to fear from hostile general election voters if they vigorously try to thwart Trump’s agenda. If Democrats can make the GOP own whatever unpopular legislation it ultimately passes without a false veneer of bipartisanship, Team Blue might even reap considerable electoral rewards in 2018, just like Republicans did in 2010.