Morning Digest: Clinton flipped two Pennsylvania House seats, but Trump gained one by far more

Pennsylvania Rep. Matt Cartwright (D), whose district went from Obama to Trump

Leading Off

● Pres-by-CD: We're pleased to present numbers from Pennsylvania in our ongoing project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts nationwide. You can find our complete data set here, which we're updating continuously as the precinct-level election returns we need for our calculations become available.

Four years after Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney 52-47 in the Keystone State, Donald Trump unexpectedly beat Hillary Clinton by a tiny 49-48 margin. Trump carried 11 of the commonwealth's 18 congressional districts, trading two Romney seats for one Obama district. However, the massive swing in Pennsylvania's 17th Congressional District towards Trump more than offset his losses in the 6th and 7th Districts.

We'll start with a look at the 17th, a Scranton-area seat represented by Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright. Obama won the seat by an easy 55-43 margin, but Trump took it 53-43. We've seen similar shifts in other seats with large white working-class populations, most notably in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Cartwright defeated a perennial candidate 54-46, but he should expect a much tougher re-election campaign in 2018.

To the south, Clinton narrowly won two suburban Philadelphia seats that Obama narrowly lost. Clinton took the 6th District, which is represented by Republican Rep. Ryan Costello, 48-46, while Obama lost it 51-48. Clinton also won the 7th, represented by GOP Rep. Pat Meehan, 49-47, an improvement on Obama's 50.4-48.5 loss there four years ago. However, Democrats fielded weak candidates against both Republicans, and each incumbent won with ease. Meehan is flirting with a Senate bid in 2018 and while he could give Democratic Sen. Bob Casey trouble, Team Blue would have a better shot at flipping his seat with him gone.

Both parties spent heavily to try and win the open 8th District, a suburban Philadelphia seat being vacated by Republican Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick. But despite the swing in the neighboring 6th and 7th Districts, the 8th barely moved from 2012 to 2016: Trump won 48.2-48.0, just the slightest uptick from Romney's 49.4-49.3 margin. Republican Brian Fitzpatrick, who was the retiring congressman's brother, decisively held the seat for Team Red 54.5-45.5. This district is close enough that it should be a Democratic target in the future, but Team Blue needs to find a way to win over the many voters who back Democrats at the top of the ticket but still support Republicans like the Fitzpatricks downballot.

The open 16th District, located around Lancaster County, became a long-shot Democratic target late in the cycle. However, Trump's 51-44 win here was a little better than Romney's 52-46 victory, and Republican Lloyd Smucker won by a larger 54-43 margin. Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Charlie Dent hasn't been a Democratic target in years, even though his Lehigh Valley 15th District backed Romney just 51-48. But the 15th also drifted towards Trump, supporting him 52-44. The remaining eight GOP-held seats and four Democratic seats remain safe for the party that holds them. While Trump dominated in most of Appalachia, the Pittsburgh-area 14th barely moved from 68-31 Obama to 67-31 Clinton.

There's also one small bit of housekeeping we want to address. Daily Kos Elections always relies on official, certified precinct-level election results for our calculations. However, even though we're well into January, Carbon and Somerset Counties have not made their official results public yet, and it may be some time before we get them. We elected to use the unofficial precinct results for those two counties rather than hold up the rest of the state, but we'll update our numbers once we have official results. While we doubt there will be anything but very minor changes, we'll announce the new numbers when they're final.

Senate

● MO-Sen: This is a surprise: Last fall, GOP Rep. Ann Wagner stepped down as the NRCC's fundraising chief, a move that made it look as though she was gearing up for a run against Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill next year. But on Thursday, NRCC chair Steve Stivers announced his deputies for the 2017-18 cycle, and right there at the top was Wagner, in the same role as before. This is most definitely not the sort of job you can do while seeking higher office, so this would seem to take a Senate bid off the table. If so, that'll disappoint the NRSC, since Wagner would likely have been their strongest option, but as true creature of the establishment, she might have faced a hard time in the primary. Just in case, though, we should wait to see what Wagner herself says about her plans.

● PA-Sen: Last year, prior to the election, GOP Rep. Mike Kelly said he was a "pretty strong maybe" to run for governor in 2018. Now, though, a spokesman says he's "currently exploring all options," and the National Journal's Kimberly Railey goes so far as to call him a "possible challenger" to Democratic Sen. Bob Casey. No Republicans have yet announced a bid for Senate.

● WV-Sen: For the first time, sophomore Rep. Evan Jenkins, who'd been mentioned as a possible Republican candidate against Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, says he's considering a run, though he didn't offer a timetable for making a decision. No Republicans have yet entered the contest, but another, state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, is still not ruling out a bid of his own, and according to unnamed people "people familiar with his thinking" canvassed by The Hill's Timothy Cama, Morrisey is "likely" to go for it. Before narrowly winning his current job in 2012, Morrisey's one prior run for office came in 2000, when he finished a distant fourth in a House primary … in New Jersey.

Gubernatorial

● CT-Gov: Democrat Dan Malloy has yet to announce whether he'll seek a third term as governor next year, but given his truly disastrous approval numbers (Quinnipiac gave him a scary 24-68 job approval rating last June) coupled with Democratic losses in the legislature last fall that have left the party clinging to an 18-18 tie in the state Senate, plenty of Nutmeg State Democrats would be happy to see him call it a day. And one, in fact, is already giving Malloy a zetz: On Thursday, Middletown Mayor Dan Drew opened an exploratory committee for a 2018 gubernatorial bid.

The Connecticut Mirror says that Drew has been "on good terms" with the governor, and Drew himself offered a pretty reasonable explanation for moving forward even without a decision from Malloy, noting he expects it would take a long time to raise enough money to become eligible for matching funds from the state (candidates need to raise at least $250,000 in contributions of $100 or less to qualify).

But in a statement announcing his move, Drew also took a jab at Malloy, saying, "For too long, the focus of our government has been to assist people at the very top." That's a somewhat startling tack to take, since Malloy is a strong contender for the most progressive governor in America, but Drew might just be hoping to take advantage of discontent with the incumbent in whatever form it comes in.

Malloy responded by saying that he still has not made a decision, nor did he say when he'd make one. Given that it took Malloy 14 months to qualify for public funding in 2014, he's not going to want to wait much longer—nor will his would-be rivals.

● FL-Gov: On Thursday, Miami Beach Mayor Phil Levine announced he would not run for re-election this year, a possible prelude to a gubernatorial bid next year. Levine, a Democrat, had previously expressed interest in running for governor, and while Miami Beach is a small town (population: 91,000), he's personally wealthy and also well-connected. In his first run for mayor in 2013, he spent $2 million of his own money—and earned an endorsement from Bill Clinton, who calls Levine a friend (and vice-versa).

It's not clear how much Levine is worth (he made his fortune selling a company that publishes magazines that cruise lines place in their staterooms to luxury giant LVMH), and it would take a truly enormous sum to make a difference in a state as giant as Florida. It is clear, though, what kind of campaign he'd run, based on how he's run in the past. He cites former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as his top role model and presents himself as an outsider businessman who fought the establishment, took on "fakakta" media outlets, and charged into office criticizing a plan to renovate the city's convention center, saying he'd "cancel that deal, bring in the right architects and design a state of the art convention center" (which he did).

We'll have to see if this approach is popular with a much broader electorate, especially since Levine would likely face some heavyweight foes in the Democratic primary. While no one else has yet entered the race, several big-city mayors and a couple of former members of the House are considering bids. (A consultant for Levine says he'll decide "in the first half of the year"—not to helpful.) A number of major Republicans are also looking at the contest, so we might see hard-fought primaries on both sides.

● HI-Gov: Perhaps the most shocking election result of 2014 came in Hawaii's Democratic primary for governor, when little-known state Sen. David Ige demolished Gov. Neil Abercrombie by a stunning 66-31 margin. That's the kind of result you usually only see when an incumbent is mired in scandal, but there were none to speak of here. All the more remarkably, Ige was badly underfunded, and even the most astute local observers we spoke to had a hard time identifying just why Abercrombie had grown so unpopular—but indeed he had, and it led to an extraordinary upset.

Could something like that happen again? Ige went on to a comfortable 49-37 win that fall, and polls (like this one and this one) have since shown him slightly above water with voters—not the kind of numbers that suggest a real vulnerability. But Democratic state Sen. Josh Green seems to think there might be an opening, saying on Wednesday that he might run against Ige (pronounced "EE-gay").

In speaking publicly about his plans, Green identified housing costs, homelessness, and the governor's failure to meet his promise to install air conditioners in 1,000 public schools by the end of last year as his top concerns. But, said Green, "I really do want the administration to succeed because I love what I'm doing," so this might be a way of goading Ige to focus on Green's key issues. It could also be a way to raise his profile, since Green also says he might run for lieutenant governor next year, or for governor in 2022, when Ige would be term-limited.

Green, a physician, has been in the legislature for 14 years, so he doesn't have the classic profile of a junior up-and-comer. But he does have a lot of money in the bank: As of the middle of last year, Green had $507,000 in his campaign account, far more than Ige ($318,000) or the current lieutenant governor, Shan Tsutsui ($239,000). (Tsutsui's unhappy in his current role, and he might run for mayor of Maui in 2018.) In fact, Green's got more on hand more than any other state or local candidate in all of Hawaii, and it sounds like he wants to use it one of these days.

● MN-Gov, MN-08: Hrm. Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan, who miraculously survived the first wave of the Trumpocalypse in November, now rather unexpectedly says he's considering a bid for governor next year. However, Nolan says he doesn't know when he'll decide, and adds that he "lean[s] more towards continuing to represent the 8th District." If Nolan abandoned his rural House seat, though, Democrats would almost certainly have an even harder time keeping it: The 8th swung wildly to Trump, who won it 54-39, just four years after Obama carried it 52-46.

In fact, the St. Paul Pioneer Press specifically pressed Nolan on this question; in response, he said he wasn't concerned about his seat flipping "if Democrats were having a good midterm election year generally." That, of course, is a very big "if"—and even if a Trump backlash were to yield a great year for Democrats, the 8th could still easily change hands if it came open (Nolan won last year by 6 tenths of a percent), so you can expect the DCCC to pressure Nolan to stay put. The congressman is also 73 years old, which is not an age at which most candidates typically make their first runs for statewide office.

There's also no shortage of Democratic candidates, actual or potential, for this open seat. So far, three have joined the race: St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, state Rep. Erin Murphy, and state Auditor Rebecca Otto. A ton of Republicans are also in the mix, but none have jumped in yet.

● NJ-Gov: On Thursday, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno filed paperwork to run for governor this year, though bizarrely, she refused to comment on her ostensible campaign launch. Guadagno's boss is, of course, Gov. Chris Christie, who is term-limited but wouldn't get elected rat-catcher in a one-man race at this sorry point in his career. But even though he's not running, Christie's extraordinary unpopularity—Quinnipiac found him with a squirm-inducing 19-77 approval rating last month—will still act as a very heavy anvil around whomever the GOP nominates to succeed him.

However, if there's a small blessing for Guadagno, Christie for some reason has grown to loathe her, a sad fact she might just have to play up if she's to have any shot. Then again, she's served as Christie's second-in-command since he first won office in 2009, so good luck trying to sever that connection in voters' minds now.

Despite her troublesome resume, Guadagno is likely the favorite to emerge with the Republican nomination, since the only entrants so far have been pretty minor players. But who knows? Jersey Republicans obviously hate Christie, too, so maybe they'll want to take it out on Guadagno. Meanwhile, Democrats have by and large rallied around former Goldman Sachs exec Phil Murphy, though he, too, faces a contested primary. However, Team Blue definitely starts with the early edge in the general election.

P.S. Evesham Mayor Randy Brown, who is also a kicking consultant for the Baltimore Ravens, just said that he won't seek the GOP nod, though he says he's talked to Guadagno about joining her ticket as her running mate for lieutenant governor.

● OH-Gov: Back in October, U.S. Economic Development Administration head Jay Williams, a Democrat who previously served as mayor of Youngstown, expressed interest in running for this open seat in 2018. Williams will be out of a job in a week, and he's reaffirmed that he's thinking about running, saying he'll decide sometime in the next few months. 

Last year, Williams said he'd wait to see what Rep. Tim Ryan and ex-state Attorney General Richard Cordray do before deciding, though it's unclear if he's sticking to that plan. Williams did acknowledge that he, Ryan, and state Senate Minority Leader Joe Schiavoni are all from the Mahoning Valley, and said that while it wasn’t impossible all three run, it’s unlikely. 

● TN-Gov: Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris is one of the many Republicans who've been mentioned as possible candidates for this open seat, and this week, he acknowledged he was interested. Morris said he was "preparing to" run but stopped short of declaring, saying that he's focusing on his current post and being "very methodical" about deciding on a gubernatorial bid.

House

● MT-AL: Rich guy Greg Gianforte, a Republican who narrowly lost last year's gubernatorial race to Democratic incumbent Steve Bullock, acknowledged last month that he was considering running in the likely special election to succeed GOP Rep. Ryan Zinke. Assuming Zinke is confirmed as Donald Trump's secretary of the interior, party leaders will pick their nominees rather than hold primaries, and Gianforte is getting a boost as he reaches out to this small group of deciders.

Politico reports that Sen. Steve Daines is helping Gianforte as he makes calls about the special. Daines went into business with Gianforte back in 1999 and the two became close friends, so it's not surprising to see the senator going to bat for his old buddy now.

● SD-AL: Just before Thanksgiving, Republican Dusty Johnson announced that he was "planning" to run for this open House seat. Johnson, a former public utilities commissioner, hasn't conclusively said he's in yet, but he's announced that he raised $104,000 during the final part of 2016. Johnson also used to serve as Gov. Dennis Daugaard's chief of staff, and Daugaard now says he'll back Johnson if he runs. While South Dakota has plenty of Republicans who could run for this seat, Secretary of State Shantel Krebs is the only other politician who has publicly expressed interest in jumping in.

Mayoral

● Boston, MA Mayor: On Thursday, City Councilor Tito Jackson announced that he would challenge Mayor Marty Walsh, a fellow Democrat, in this November's non-partisan race. If Jackson wins, he'd become Boston's first black mayor, but the odds are very much against him. To begin with, no mayor has lost re-election since James Curley narrowly fell in 1949, and at the beginning of the month, Walsh also had a massive $3.6 million to $65,000 cash-on-hand edge over Jackson.

However, while Walsh is the clear favorite, he has had some stumbles since he narrowly won his first term in 2013. Most seriously, two high-ranking members of his administration were indicted last year for allegedly participating in an extortion scheme, and the investigation is not over. Jackson is also arguing that Walsh hasn't done enough to help less-well off residents. 

However, as David Bernstein recently wrote in Boston Magazine, most of Boston's power players, including people who opposed Walsh in 2013, are on his side this time, and there's no sign that any other notable politicians are thinking about running. What's more, an October Walsh internal poll gave him a 77-14 favorable rating, so if anyone is seeing different numbers, they aren't releasing them.

And while Walsh's predecessor, the late Thomas Menino, served for 20 years, political insiders don't expect Walsh to stay anywhere near that long. Instead, Walsh's would-be opponents seem content to just wait him out rather than risk ruining their political careers on a very tough bid. In Boston, all the candidates will compete on one ballot in the primary (also known locally as the "preliminary election"), and the two candidates with the most votes advance to the November ballot.

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.