I’m something of an amateur number-cruncher, and I’ve thought even before the outcome of the 2016 election that the urban-rural divide was becoming a real problem for the Democratic Party, so I’ve decided to sit down and dig through some of the data on the post-2010 landscape. Specifically, I’ll be looking at what the recent results tell us about Democratic strengths and weaknesses and what a path back to power — in terms of the Presidency, the House and Senate, and the state legislative chambers that control redistricting — might look like.
The 2012 Obama coalition seems like a good place to start, in that it delivered a solid but not overwhelming Democratic victory in the popular vote, the electoral college, and the Senate, so I’ve been working with the numbers archived on Daily Kos here, which tracked the presidential vote in 2012 by congressional and legislative district:
2012 Presidential Results by Congressional and Legislative Districts
I’ve looked at the actual results from the last three election cycles and compared them with three hypothetical scenarios:
Scenario 1: Percentages match the Obama/Romney numbers exactly. This is what would happen if everyone voted the same way for their representative in Congress as they did for their representative in the House. This would result, for example, in Democrats capturing Minnesota District 3 (Erik Paulsen’s seat), because that district voted 49.6% Obama vs. 48.8% Romney. (This works both ways, however, so seats like Collin Peterson’s go to the Republicans in this scenario.)
Scenario 2: Percentages match the Obama/Romney numbers plus a 3-point swing to the Democrats. Here we start with the 2012 Obama coalition and then assume the Democrats improve on it across the board. I calculated these numbers by adding 1.5% to the Obama numbers and subtracting 1.5% for the Romney numbers. An example of a seat that would flip in this scenario (but not in Scenario 1) would be PA-7, held by Pat Meehan: Romney carried this seat 50.4-48.5, so the 3-point shift would produce a result of 50.0 D-48.9 R.
Scenario 3: Democrats carry all seats that they have won at any point in the last three cycles. This puts seats like Collin Peterson’s, as well as districts like NE-02 (which Brad Ashford won in 2014 but lost in 2016), into the Democratic column, but leaves districts like MN-03 (which they haven’t won in the last three tries despite Obama narrowly carrying it) in the Republican column.
Here’s what we get:
TOTALS |
2012 |
2014 |
2016 |
Scenario 1 |
Scenario 2 |
Scenario 3 |
Democrats |
201 |
188 |
194 |
211 |
226 |
207 |
Republicans |
234 |
247 |
241 |
224 |
209 |
228 |
Scenario 1 would bring the Democrats close to a House majority, but still short, while Scenario 2 would give them a majority of just 9 seats. Scenario 3 illustrates that this would be something of an uphill climb either way, because in the current configuration of House districts, only 207 of the 435 existing districts have been held by a Democrat at any point in the last three cycles, and at least two of those — GA-12 and WV-3 — probably aren’t going back to the Democrats any time soon. This challenge is further illustrated when you look at a complete list of seats that would change hands from the 2016 result in at least one of the three scenarios. (In seats not listed below, all three scenarios result in the same outcome as in 2016.)
The difficulty of achieving Scenario 2 — the one that gives Democrats a majority — comes into sharp relief here, because quite a few of these Republican incumbents. Even if you assume that Collin Peterson and Josh Gottheimer hold their red-tinged seats (a plausible assumption), Democrats would have to win 13 seats where they have been defeated in the last three elections just to get to 218 (much less the 228 that you’d get from Scenario 2 plus Peterson and Gottheimer). Take GA-12, UT-04, and WV-03 off the map (also a plausible assumption), and that number rises to 16. Assume that well-entrenched incumbents like Peter King, Dave Reichert, and Matt LoBiondo survive, and the path grows even narrower. Is this doable? Perhaps, especially if Trump does turn out to be a total disaster and a Democratic wave arises in 2018 or 2020, which might well enable Democrats to capture some districts where Romney won by *more* than 3 points.
But I’m less sure that it’s sustainable. As impressive a politician as Barack Obama is, his coalition only resulted in large congressional majorities once, in 2008 — when he had the anti-Bush backlash and Democratic gains in 2006 (also spurred by opposition to the Bush administration) helping him. Ever since 2010, he’s mostly been either defending the accomplishments of his first two years or trying to do things through executive orders like DACA, the Clean Power Initiative, and the Paris Agreement (all of which are now more vulnerable to being undone because they haven’t been legislated into the books).
Democrats may well recapture both the White House and the Congress by 2020 — in fact, if you asked me right now, I’d say they’re slight favorites to do both — but I don’t think occasional 2-year stints of firm control followed by longer periods of playing defense is a solid recipe, in terms of the policy or the politics. Somehow, Democrats need to find ways to capture and hold power for longer periods of time to make lasting and efficient progress on the policy front.
“Ah-ha,” you might say. “But those are the old gerrymandered districts from the 2010 Republican wave. If Democrats do better in 2020, they can prevent that sort of gerrymandering.” That may be true — up to a point. But there’s another hurdle to consider: in 2020, Democrats will still be faced with the challenge of trying to recapture state legislative majorities based on the current state district maps. I’ll be taking a closer look at the state legislative maps in future diaries, but in my next one I”ll be running the numbers on the Senate.