Leading Off:
● Pres-by-CD: It's that time again! Daily Kos Elections is once again calculating presidential election results by congressional district in all 50 states, and we're out with our first set of data from New Hampshire. We'll be pushing out new data on a rolling basis as the results are officially certified and the precinct-level election results we need for our calculations become available. (Ballotpedia has a list of state certification deadlines.) We have a chart of all 435 congressional districts here, which also includes results from 2012. That's the page you'll want to bookmark, since we'll be updating it continuously.
Now, to the numbers! The Granite State backed Hillary Clinton by a narrow 48-47 margin, 4 points tighter Obama's 52-47 win here four years ago. The 1st District, which includes Manchester, was very close in both presidential years and didn't move that much: Donald Trump took it 48-47, while Obama narrowly carried the seat 50-49. The 2nd, which includes Nashua and Concord, was a bit more volatile: The seat supported Clinton 49-46, a considerable drop from Obama's 54-45 performance.
Despite this split, both seats will be represented by Democrats. In the 1st, ex-Rep. Carol Shea-Porter unseated scandal-tarred GOP Rep. Frank Guinta 44-43. Both parties stopped spending here late in the race, which seemed like a strong sign that they agreed Shea-Porter was in a dominant position. However, Trump's tight win helps explain why this contest was so close in the end, and Shea-Porter may also have been hurt by wealthy Democrat-turned-independent Shawn O'Connor, who took 9 percent.
While the 1st District was always going to be a battleground, national organizations ignored the 2nd District entirely. However, Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster beat underfunded ex-state Rep. Jim Lawrence only 50-46, tracking very closely with Clinton. It's a good reminder that, despite Obama's decisive win here in 2012 and Kuster's 55-45 victory during the 2014 GOP wave, it's tough to become entrenched in a state as volatile as New Hampshire.
P.S. After we've released the presidential results for all 435 seats, Daily Kos Elections will circle back and continue our president-by-legislative district project (Pres-by-LD). We'll be crunching not only the presidential races by state legislative district, but we'll also calculate partisan statewide contests like Senate, governor, and attorney general by congressional and legislative district. We'll also fill in a few remaining blanks from some 2014 and 2015 statewide elections as well.
Senate:
● ME-Sen: Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who was offering the same kind of belligerent nativism that powered Donald Trump's campaign long before Trump came on the scene, is mercifully term-limited in 2018. But it may be a small mercy indeed: LePage now says there's a "high likelihood" he'll run again left-leaning independent Sen. Angus King in 2018 if King seeks another term.
LePage, without any substantiation, also claims that King is eyeing a return to the governor's mansion, which he occupied from 1995 to 2003 (term limits in Maine only apply to consecutive terms). But spokesperson for King, who caucuses with the Democrats, unequivocally shot that down, saying simply, "Sen. King will run for re-election to the Senate in 2018."
And there's good reason not to believe LePage at all—not just about the intentions of others, but about his own. For starters, LePage has made similar claims about challenging King before. On top of that, when he was half-heartedly gearing up for his own re-election bid back in 2013, LePage declared out of nowhere that he was considering a run for the House seat being vacated by Democratic Rep. Mike Michaud, who was running against him for the governorship that cycle.
Of course, LePage wound up doing no such thing, and at the time of his surprise announcement, he even said, "Who knows? I don't take myself as seriously as all you do." Hopefully we won't have to take him any more seriously this time, either.
Gubernatorial:
● MA-Gov: Ever since he took office in 2015, polls have shown Republican Gov. Charlie Baker with stratospheric approval ratings, and Bay State Democrats haven't shown much interest in seriously challenging him in 2018. However, Baker was dealt one major defeat on Tuesday that his detractors hope will weaken him politically. Baker was an energetic supporter of Question 2, which would have expanded charter schools in Massachusetts, but his personal popularity couldn't save it from a resounding 62-38 defeat. Rejecting Question 2 is far from the same thing as rejecting Baker, but it could convince commonwealth Democrats and groups like the Massachusetts Teachers Association that he's beatable.
Setti Warren, the mayor of the affluent Boston suburb of Newton, has been mentioned as a possible challenger. On Thursday, he announced that he wouldn't seek re-election to his current post in 2017. While Warren didn't say anything about his future plans, he said that, "[i]n the next phase, I'll be thinking about what I want to do next," and both the Boston Globe and Boston Herald speculate that he's testing the waters for a gubernatorial bid.
Warren, an Iraq War veteran who also served as an aide to then-Sen. John Kerry, launched a brief Senate bid against GOP incumbent Scott Brown in 2011. However, Warren didn't gain much traction, and he left the race soon after Elizabeth Warren (no relation) got in. Warren's decision to run for the Senate less than two years after being elected mayor angered some locals, but he easily won re-election in 2013, and he has connections to state and national Democrats.
If Baker looks vulnerable later in the cycle, there are more than enough other Democrats in Massachusetts who could step up and challenge him. The Boston Herald puts on their Great Mentioner cap and name-drops Reps. Seth Moulton and Katherine Clark, and wealthy retiring state Sen. Dan Wolf. A September YouGov poll also found Rep. Joe Kennedy III, a grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, tied with Baker 33-33 in a hypothetical race even as Baker clearly led his other would-be foes. But Massachusetts has proven time and again that it's more than willing to send Republicans to the governor's office, and if Baker's approval ratings remain high, prominent Democrats will likely decide to just sit this one out.
● PA-Gov: Businessman Tom Wolf offered Democrats a rare bright spot in 2014 when he defeated GOP Gov. Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania. Now, after spending two years fighting with the state's Republican legislature, one of its members says he's preparing to run against him. State Sen. Scott Wagner, who made a fortune running a waste management company, told a local TV station shortly after Election Day that "I intend to run for governor" but cautioned that he wasn't making a "formal announcement," which he says will "most likely" come "after the first of the year."
Wagner also promised he'd write himself a "significant seven-figure check" if he does run, which could give him a leg up in a hypothetical GOP primary—just as Wolf's personal wealth allowed him to spend millions to win the Democratic nomination two years ago. And like Wolf, he'd be something of an outsider, except that rather terrifyingly, he's of the Trump mold.
Wagner only won office in 2014, the same year Wolf did, but he'd spent some time before that funding candidates who suited his conservative tastes. And after local Republican leaders passed him over for a special election two years ago, he stunningly won a write-in campaign with 48 percent of the vote. Then, just months after his arrival in the state capital, Wagner helped foment a coup that led to the ouster of Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, whom Democrats say was too moderate for the strident Wagner.
Now, says one local Republican operative, Wagner is "the logical heir to the Trump constituency," particularly as a rich guy who has it in for the establishment. And that may serve Wagner well in the next Republican primary, seeing as Trump dominated the last one with 57 percent. However, Wagner's not the only one looking to ape The Donald: Rep. Mike Kelly, who represents a conservative district in the northwest corner of the state, said earlier this year that he's a "pretty strong maybe" to run and, before the election, also added that he's "absolutely over the top" for Trump.
But while Trump did narrowly carry Pennsylvania this month, who knows if he'll wear out his welcome in two years—or worse.
● PR-Gov: On Tuesday, Ricardo Rosselló Nevares of Puerto Rico's pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP) won perhaps the worst elected office in America. Rosselló, the son of a former governor, defeated ex-Secretary of State David Bernier of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), a party that wants to preserve Puerto Rico's commonwealth status, by a 42-39 margin to succeed retiring PPD Gov. Alejandro García Padilla. (Interestingly, both Rosselló and Bernier are also members of the Democratic Party, but mainland partisan affiliations mean little in local Puerto Rican elections.)
Puerto Rico is in the midst of a horrific debt crisis, and Rosselló certainly has his work cut out for him. Rosselló also recently said that he would push for statehood by drafting a state constitution and holding elections for two U.S. senators and five congressmen who would then go to D.C. to demand that Puerto Rico become the 51st state. That's almost certainly not going to result in statehood anytime soon, especially since a Republican Congress would need to approve it. Puerto Ricans tend to be solidly Democratic voters in elections in the 50 states, and the GOP has little incentive to gift Team Blue extra seats in Congress and more electoral votes.
Legislative:
● State Legislatures: Stephen Wolf takes a state-by-state look at the key legislative chamber election outcomes in 2016 and maps out which ones flipped between the two parties. Overall, 86 of 99 legislative chambers had seats up for grabs. Democrats captured four of them, Republicans won back control over three others. Team Blue gained power in the Alaska state House, the Nevada state Senate and Assembly, and the New Mexico state House, while Republicans won majorities in the Iowa state Senate, the Kentucky state House, and the Minnesota state House. The two parties also fought over supermajority status or nearly won power in several other important chambers too.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Stephen Wolf, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, and James Lambert.