When Political Trends Collide

It is 2018, which means A) we survived the first year of Trump, though if he keeps tweeting like this I have my doubts we all see 2019 and B) it's a midterm year, where we will have our first serious referendum on the president.  Yes, technically there were referendums in 2017 on Trump, namely the governor's race in Virginia and the Senate race in Alabama (both of which saw his party go down in flaming defeat), but 2018 is when the chips will truly be out on the table.  Can the Democratic Party, still a bit chaotic and showing some of the fractures of the Hillary/Bernie battles even a year after, come together and rally around their party, or is antipathy to Trump not nearly as low amongst actual voters as we all thought (or at the very least is Trump a separate enough brand that the GOP can distinguish themselves and minimize their losses?).  These are just some of the questions before the American populace, but the one I want to focus on today is on trends, specifically two trends that will be battling ferociously in 2018, and only one can emerge victorious: the increased propensity for straight-ticket voting and the "wave party doesn't lose held seats during a midterm" trend that has been nearly unbroken since we stopped worrying about Y2K.

For those unfamiliar with these trends, I'll give you a primer here, and why they won't be able to coexist in 2018.  For starters, there's straight-ticket voting.  Would it surprise you to know that, 16 years ago, parties regularly won their presidential electoral votes but lost them when it came to their Senate seats?  For example, sixteen years ago we had Democratic senators in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Nebraska, while the Republicans would dominate these states on a presidential level.  There used to be a place for a more moderate breed of incumbent in both parties, and they would be able to deliver thin (usually 6-10 points) victories while they lost the presidential elections.  It's part of why the Democrats did so well in keeping their Senate majorities for decades, because local politics trumped national politics, even in Senate races.

This has almost completely gone the way of the dodo.  In 2016, for the first time since the passage of the 17th amendment, there was no ticket-splitting (at least in terms of results) between the presidential results and the Senate results-every state that went for Donald Trump also elected a Republican senator, and vice versa.  Sure there were states where certain candidates out-performed (most notably Jason Kander ran ahead of Hillary Clinton by 15-points in Missouri, an election that almost certainly would have been his had this same scenario played out in 2000, or even 2008), but at the end of the day if you voted D for president, you voted D for the Senate.  Currently, in fact, there are only 15 senators who represent parties that their state voted against in the 2016 Senate election...and eleven of them are up for reelection in 2018 (ten Democrats and one Republican).

The second trend, however, is that the party seems to uniformly embrace waves, particularly when it comes to the party-in-power.  Since Bush v. Gore (I still think that the psychological toll on Democrats having lost the White House in such a fashion that many assumed they should have won it, including this author, followed by a deeply controversial presidency, was the principle cause of the hyper-partisanship that has become routine and detrimental in modern-day America), we have had four midterms, three dominated by Republicans (2002, 2010, & 2014) and one dominated by Democrats (2006).  Looking at those races, the party on the losing end of the midterm did win a couple of races-it wasn't a blanket sweep of the closest races: in 2006 Republicans managed to win Tennessee by less than 3-points, while Democrats held close seats in 2002 (Louisiana), 2006 (Colorado, Washington), and 2014 (New Hampshire, Virginia).  Only one time during those years, however, did both parties end up picking up a Senate seat, and that was all the way back in 2002, when the Republicans nabbed GA/MN/MO but thanks to a pretty salacious divorce involving the incumbent and a star candidate, Democrat Mark Pryor bested Sen. Tim Huchinson.  In 2006, 2010, and 2014, not only did no incumbents of the victorious party lose, no open seats exchanged hands.

In 2018, these two trends cannot possibly continue to coexist.  Democrats have nine states that went for Donald Trump in 2016, and even if we decide to dismiss the four Democrats in states that Trump won by less than 2 points (Bill Nelson, Debbie Stabenow, Bob Casey & Tammy Baldwin), assuming that a 2-point swing is natural with a president this unpopular, that still leaves Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp, Sherrod Brown, and Jon Tester, six Democrats that should not be able to survive a polarized environment where people don't change their minds and vote straight-party.  One of these candidates could theoretically luck into a Roy Moore, but not all of them.  But if 2018 goes as expected and the Democrats have a strong year, then the trend of the wave party not losing would mean all of them would be safe, albeit by narrow margins.

These sorts of juxtapositions happen all the time in politics-something is true until it isn't.  For years Republicans couldn't win a Senate seat in Louisiana until conventional wisdom was challenged, same with Pennsylvania Democrats winning reelection to the Senate.  But this is a big deal because with Doug Jones' recent win in Alabama, the Senate is up-for-grabs.  The Democratic Party can win Arizona and Nevada and take 51 seats, but only if they also land some incumbents that, historically, should fall to Republicans.  Whichever trend wins out could have a huge impact on our country.  A Democratic Senate could essentially stop Trump's free reign on the judiciary, as well as stop more controversial appointments like Jeff Sessions or Betsy DeVos from getting to the Senate floor.  Conversely, if Trump is able to pick up more seats in the Senate, it could mean an easier time filling these openings and (depending on the House) a freer reign on legislation in the back half of his first-term.  It's early in the year, and things will change (no one thought this time last year that we'd be wondering if Al Franken's seat is vulnerable to a Republican takeover), but whichever trend wins will have a big impact on the future of the country.