Democrats Are Likely To Win Full Control Of Congress

With the 2020 General Election just a few days away, Democrats command convincing 9 point leads in both the generic ballot and Presidential opinion polling. Although Republicans have structural advantages in the House, Senate, and Electoral College, the size of the Democratic lead results in a grim outlook for the GOP this cycle.

Our probabilistic forecasts for the House, Senate, and Presidential races are complete and have been tracking the changing national environment over time. Since the first Presidential debate and Trump’s subsequent coronavirus diagnosis, the President lost the small gains he achieved following the Republican National Convention. This article explores our current forecasts for the House and the Senate. Although these might not be the most high profile contests this year, they are absolutely pivotal in determining whether the winner of the Presidential race will be able to govern effectively, or will simply be a placeholder keeping the next President’s seat warm for four years.

The House of Representatives

Following their blue wave in 2018, Democrats go into this year’s House elections with 232 representatives, a comfortable majority. To regain control, Republicans need to make extensive gains in an environment even more favourable to Democrats than the 8.5 point lead they enjoyed in 2018. Additionally, Democrats now have the advantage of incumbency in almost every swing seat, having won them off Republican incumbents 2 years ago. As a result, our model gives Democrats a 98% chance of maintaining control of the House, and actually expects them to expand their majority, winning 240 seats on average.

The Senate

In a chamber where California gets the same number of representatives as Wyoming, Democrats are always going to struggle. The Republican structural advantage in the Senate is immense, such that even in 2018 Republicans were able to expand their majority, and now occupy 53 out of the 100 seats. However, in 2018 Democrats had very high exposure in the Senate, with the vast majority of the seats up for election that year occupied by Democrats. This gave the GOP plenty of chances to pick off some of the less secure Democrats in red states they’d won courtesy of excellent years for Democrats in 2006 and 2012. In 2020, the tables are turned as the GOP seeks to hold onto the gains it made in 2014. Now Republicans have high exposure, and could suffer significant losses in this very blue national environment.

12 Democratic and 23 Republican seats are up for election this year, including many Republican held seats in moderately red states. To win control Democrats need to make a net gain of 3 or 4, depending on whether Kamala Harris or Mike Pence is elected to the Vice Presidency, which breaks ties in the Senate. The GOP stands to make a fairly easy gain unseating Doug Jones in Alabama. Following his victory in one of the reddest states in the country as a result of facing an exceptionally unpopular opponent in Roy Moore, Jones has been voting consistently with the Democratic mainstream. It appears he decided that even if he voted as a conservative Democrat in a similar manner to Joe Manchin in deep red West Virginia, Jones would still lose his re-election campaign, so has simply been voting with his party. The only other Republican target is Michigan, where Democrat Gary Peters is facing a small threat to his re-election campaign, but will probably pull through given that Peters and Biden are both consistently leading polls in the state.

Given Biden’s lead in national polling, it’s reasonable to assume that Democrats therefore need to make approximately 4 gains to win control of the Senate. Colorado is an obvious target, Biden is leading there by 14 points and incumbent Cory Gardener has made little effort to appeal to moderates in the state, and trails in polls by a significant margin. If Democrats can’t win this one, they can’t win.

Arizona presents a second strong target for Democrats. This swing state is currently leaning towards Biden, and the Republican incumbent Martha McSally is only an appointed incumbent, not an elected one, and is therefore not expected to command a significant incumbent advantage. Interestingly, in 2018 McSally lost Republican Jeff Flake’s old Senate seat to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, so if McSally loses again this year she will have been responsible for the GOP losing both Arizona Senate seats in the space of 2 years!

Beyond these 2 targets, Democrats have to work harder to make gains. Maine is a slightly blue state, but incumbent Republican Susan Collins has a moderate reputation, putting her in a much stronger political position than Gardener or McSally. However, since voting in favour of confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, voters in Maine are increasingly questioning her moderate reputation. She trails slightly in polling, but this is a race that could easily go either way.

Iowa and North Carolina are each somewhat red states with Republican incumbents, so the fact that Democratic challengers have small leads in each of these states is a reflection on the national political situation being very favourable toward Democrats. Additionally, Democrats are only slightly behind in Montana, Kansas, Arkansas, South Carolina, and both races in Georgia. All of these are red states with Republican incumbents, the fact that Democrats are even in contention here must be alarming for the GOP.

All in all, Democrats have 2 easy opportunities to make gains, and 9 highly competitive races which could go either way. If Democrats win even just a couple of those, they win the Senate. That’s why our model gives Democrats an 81% chance of taking control of the upper chamber. An important note is that the margin could also be extremely important here. If Democrats have only 50 Senators, they would be reliant on conservative Democrat Joe Manchin, whose vote could not be counted on for any liberal policies. If Democrats have 52 seats things are very different, and if Biden were President he could probably pass mainstream Democratic reform through Congress easily. With 55 seats or more, Democrats could run rampant passing whatever progressive policies they so choose, so truly every single competitive race could have an immense impact on politics going forward.

Whilst this piece has focused on the more likely scenario of Democratic victory, it’s worth emphasising the fact that the 2% and 19% chances of Republicans winning the House and Senate respectively are real and should not be ignored. But to hold on even in just the upper chamber, the GOP has a lot of ground to make up. Aside from Susan Collins, Republicans in key races show very limited interest in using moderate rhetoric and policy positions to persuade Independent voters, leading Independents to overwhelmingly back Democrats. While passionate conservative messaging does encourage Republican turnout, it also fires up Democratic turnout, such that Republicans find themselves having to play defence deep within their own territory. If the GOP does indeed suffer a severe defeat this year, they may have to re-examine this strategy.

Confusion As Iowa Results Delayed

Do you find the Iowa caucus system confusing? Don’t worry, so does the Iowa Democratic Party. It’s the morning after and there are still zero official results. Instead, we have chaos. The Party has failed to provide a thorough or consistent explanation for the absence of results. Reports from Iowa suggest that pretty much everything that could have gone wrong, has.

The key issue seems to be technical problems with an app precincts use to report their results. The technical helpline provided for this app is overloaded, with hold times of more than an hour and some callers being hung up on as soon as they get through to a technician. The backup system for reporting results, based on phone calls, also appears to have collapsed. Additionally there are reports of widespread confusion at caucus sites regarding the process itself, including among some organisers as a result of changes in the system since 2016.

Nevertheless, both the Buttigieg and Sanders campaigns have effectively declared victory, citing anecdotal reports from their own representatives at limited numbers of precincts, and unofficial preliminary results from <2% of precincts from the AP. Meanwhile the Biden campaign is casting aspersions on the legitimacy of the process, perhaps pre-emptively making excuses for what could have been a disappointing night for Biden. The President is also jumping in, insinuating that there exists a conspiracy in Iowa to manipulate the election results. This is one of many misinformation campaigns, with another example being the widespread retweeting of a report of Biden dropping out of the 2008 race, attempting to pass it off as being about 2020.

This is a disaster for Iowa, calling into question the caucus system and Iowa’s traditional position as first in the primary calendar. If Iowa were to switch from a caucus to a primary system, it would fall victim to a New Hampshire state law requiring the state to always have the earliest primary. This year, we can expect Iowa’s influence to be significantly decreased due to the confusion and mixed messages. This is probably good news for Biden, who was comparatively weak in Iowa, and disastrous for candidates such as Buttigieg and Klobuchar who built their entire campaigns on winning Iowa. We could now see New Hampshire become the most important state in the primary, and the power of Nevada and South Carolina magnified dramatically. Sanders particularly could stand to benefit due to his strength in New Hampshire, but this is uncharted territory, so the exact impact of tonight’s debacle is unpredictable.

For now, we recommend that you don’t take any of the currently available data seriously. Entrance polls, photos of caucuses, campaigns releasing their own biased estimates, and preliminary results from a tiny proportion of precincts are all very weak data points. We are going to have to wait for the final, official results. Thankfully, there is a paper trail for the caucuses. Therefore, if the worst comes to the worst, the Party can painstakingly recount every vote and eventually arrive at accurate, reliable results. Campaigns have been told that results should be released later today, but at this stage there’s really no telling whether or not that will happen.

The Iowa Caucuses

Today is the single most important day in the Democratic Primary. Although just 41 pledged delegates are up for grabs tonight, the results and their interpretation will have knock on effects on the rest of the country.

Iowa Predictions

Current Iowa polling shows Sanders and Biden effectively tied with 23% and 22% of the vote respectively. Buttigieg and Warren have each fallen to approximately 15%, while Klobuchar has surged to 11%. However, a naive assessment of these first choice preferences is insufficient in understanding who might win, Iowa is much more complex than that. For each local caucus, candidates who receive 15% or more of first choice preferences immediately bank those votes. However, people who initially supported candidates with less than 15% of the vote will have one opportunity to realign. They could vote for candidates who have already passed the threshold, they could simply go home, or they could support other candidates below the threshold to try and get them up to the 15% mark.

The impact of this system is that second preferences become immensely important. Bear in mind that Iowa voters are generally exceptionally well informed on the candidates due to the intensity of campaigning there, so many will have a well thought out list of preferences. Generally speaking, the field could be sorted into a moderate lane dominated by Biden and Klobuchar and a progressive lane dominated by Sanders and Warren, with Buttigieg in the middle. One would expect voters’ second choices to be from the same ideological lane as their first choice. Campaigns have explicitly reached out to one another to encourage their supporters to select each other as their second choices. The voters themselves will be in the room attempting to convince those realigning to come and support their candidate, all of which makes the process very challenging to predict.

Further complicating matters is the system of delegate allocation, with just 14 delegates being awarded based on the statewide popular vote, and the remaining 27 split between Iowa’s 4 congressional districts. Not only will the allocation be related to the candidates’ popularities in a non-linear manner due to the system of realignment and the 15% threshold, but some of the delegate allocation will be very approximate. Delegates afterall, are people, no candidate can win half a delegate, so the resolution of the system is very low. For example, the 4^th congressional district has just 5 delegates, so candidates with very different vote totals could receive the same number of delegates. Furthermore, a candidate with only a few more votes than a competitor could just pip them to the post for an extra delegate, winning far more representation despite having similar vote totals. Currently, our model is predicting that on average, Sanders will win the caucus with 14 delegates. He will be followed by Biden with 12, Warren and Buttigieg with 6 each, Klobuchar with 2, and another candidate with 1, most likely Yang or Steyer. It is worth noting that these predictions come with a very high degree of uncertainty owing to the complexity of the process.

Media Narratives

This year, for the first time, Iowa will release 3 sets of results. Historically, Iowa simply released the number of delegates allocated to each candidate. However, this year, both the first preference totals and the votes after realignment will be released. It is entirely plausible that these metrics will not all be won by the same candidate, potentially resulting in 2 or even 3 candidates declaring victory tomorrow! Whether or not that happens, the media narrative regarding the results will guide the public interpretation of them. This is not trivial, it is the public interpretation of the Iowa results, especially in terms of tactical voting and changing perceptions of which candidates are electable, which makes Iowa so important. Essentially, it doesn’t help a candidate much to win 13 delegates instead of 12, what matters is whether or not CNN declares them the winner.

Typically, the winner in Iowa receives a substantial bump in the polls. This might be more complicated this year due to potential disagreement over who the “winner” is, but remains electorally crucial. The popularity boost the winner gains is usually greater if they were not expected to win, indeed it may be more useful to consider each candidate’s performance not against one another, but against the respective expectations of each candidate. Currently, the media narratives are effectively, as ever, following intelligent averages of the polls but not accounting enough for uncertainty. Hence Sanders is broadly expected to win a narrow victory over Biden, and Buttigieg has largely fallen out of media coverage. In fact, it is still perfectly likely that any of the top four candidates could win in Iowa, although Sanders does have the best chance. High expectations of Sanders could limit the boost he receives should he win, whereas the potential upside for Buttigieg is massive, something he is counting on given his weak national polling.

Finally, candidates for whom expectations are very low can gain in the polls simply by coming second or third, exceeding expectations. This is effectively what Klobuchar is banking on. With 3 different sets of results it is also plausible that multiple candidates will be clamouring to claim second or third place. As you can probably tell, this is all becoming rather confusing and far too complicated to fit into a typical TV news segment. The manner in which journalists navigate this sea of information, and the spin candidates put on the results, will have a profound impact on the remainder of the primary.

Introducing Our 2020 Democratic Primary Model

There are a lot of conflicting media narratives about the race for the Democratic nomination. Is Biden falling in the polls? Is Warren a “front-runner”? Is Hilary Clinton about to leap into the race and cruise to victory? In such a large and chaotic field engaging in equally numerous and confusing arguments, it can be difficult to see past exaggerated news articles and the biases of those writing them. One way to decode this information is by simply ignoring all the punditry and going straight to the data. That’s why we’ve created a new probabilistic model to provide an overview of how data, not people, predict the primaries are going to go.

Our model draws on polls from dozens of organisations including national and state level research. Combined with data on historic voting patterns and the political similarities of various states, we simulate the primary, including adding random variations to polling averages to model uncertainty. After thousands of simulations, the results are averaged, allowing us to analyse results in individual states and the nation overall.

The headline is that Joe Biden is clearly in the lead. Elizabeth Warren is in second and Bernie Sanders third. That said, pollsters are coming to differing conclusions on the state of the race. Some give Biden double-digit leads on his competitors, others put Warren and Sanders neck and neck or even slightly ahead of the former Vice President. These differences are mainly due to the differing sampling techniques polling organisations employ, and it’s very difficult to say which are more representative of the truth. Our model takes an average of the results, affording more weight to pollsters with strong records and large sample sizes.

You may wonder why so few candidates are winning a significant number of delegates despite the crowded field. This is down to the all important 15% threshold. Each delegate is attached to either a particular district in a state or to the state as a whole. If a candidate fails to win at least 15% of the vote in a particular district, that candidate receives none of the district’s delegates. If they win less than 15% of the overall state vote, they win none of the statewide delegates. This makes the primary very punishing for anyone but the top three, who are the only candidates consistently polling above the threshold. The chart also demonstrates Biden’s significant lead, which appears even more pronounced when we focus in on how likely each candidate is to win the most delegates.

Although he may be winning the most pledged delegates, Biden is still struggling to win an outright majority of them. So long as this is a three horse race that could be a major issue for all the candidates. If nobody controls a majority of pledged delegates by the time the national convention in Wisconsin comes around, superdelegates will get involved. If they can’t push one candidate to an overall majority, there could be an unpredictable brokered convention. This could be quite likely according to the current data, as more than 90% of the time, nobody secures a majority in the first round of voting at the convention.

The chaotic nature of this primary doesn’t stop there though. Iowa and New Hampshire are looking to be highly competitive three or even four way races. Pete Buttigieg is gaining ground in Iowa, reaching second place with 20% of the vote in his best polls. By contrast, Biden is struggling in the two earliest voting states. He could very conceivably come fourth in Iowa and then third in New Hampshire, meaning that even if he does win this primary, it will hardly be a coronation, as he is reported to have been expecting when he joined the race. Our model does simulate voters changing their minds in response to the results of earlier primaries, with our calculations based on voter behavior in previous primaries. However, this year features an exceptionally large number of candidates, and the front-runner coming fourth in Iowa would be unusual, so there is a high degree of uncertainty involved. Therefore it’s important to keep track of simulation results in early states as well as the primary overall.

Iowa and New Hampshire are not especially diverse states. Many Democrats there are the white college-educated voters who form Warren and Buttigieg’s bases, explaining their above average performance in these early states. However, the often overlooked but still crucial Nevada and South Carolina also vote before Super Tuesday, when over a third of pledged delegates are assigned, and play a key role in shaping the narrative of the race early on. These two states are a lot more racially diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire, allowing Biden to thrive. In some polls Warren and Sanders are struggling to even reach 15% in South Carolina due to their low support among people of color, a severe problem they face in much of the South.

Overall, the race continues to be a highly competitive affair. But with many candidates struggling to qualify for the December debate it may start to become a little easier to follow. There are surely plenty of twists and turns left, such as Michael Bloomberg considering entering the race. And there’s still everything to play for as the majority of key party figures, such as Obama, are yet to issue endorsements, and most voters are still considering multiple candidates.

Introducing RedvBlue’s House Model

With little more than three weeks until election day, the races for the Senate and the House are intensifying. And after much data collection and programming, the RedvBlue model for the House of Representatives is up and running. Broadly speaking, this works in a similar way to the Senate model, with a few minor additions and alterations such as an increased incumbency advantage that is more uniform for each district, unlike incumbency advantages for Senate seats, which vary significantly depending on the population of the state. The main new feature for the House model is the incorporation of trickle down effects. This is modelling the fact that voters tend to be more motivated to turnout to vote for higher level positions, such as Governor or Senator, than lower ones such as Representative in the House. Therefore if, for example, a Democratic candidate for the Senate in Texas is boosting Democratic enthusiasm in the state and getting left leaning voters to turnout on election day, it’s likely that those voters will also vote for their Democratic House candidate as they happen to be in the polling booth anyway, so Democrats across Texas get a boost.

Without further ado, here are our predictions for 10/14/2018:

Democrats chances in the House are looking very good. There’s certainly a reasonable chance that Republicans hold on to a majority in the House, and that shouldn’t be ignored, but the most likely scenario is that Democrats gain somewhere in the region of 40 seats overall, a fully-fledged blue wave, providing them with a solid majority in the lower chamber of Congress. What’s more, there’s a slim but significant probability that Democrats gain more like 50 or 60 seats overall, which would probably be a sufficiently resounding victory to consolidate the embattled House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s position at the forefront of the party, and would certainly be a worrying sign for Donald Trump. That said, in 2010, the Obama Administration’s first midterm, the Republicans achieved a net gain of 63 seats. Yet Obama went on to win re-election fairly smoothly despite approval ratings only a little higher than Trump’s, so a big blue wave should not be interpreted as too bad a sign for the Trump Administration. The truly remarkable thing for Democrats is that even in the worst case scenario for them that has a reasonable chance of occurring, they actually make a small net gain of around 10 seats. This is simply because Republicans made such huge gains in 2010 and 2014, and held on to almost all of them in 2012 and 2016, that almost all the remaining Democratic seats are in deep blue districts, so Republicans have very few opportunities to make gains, and need to defend some quite blue districts of their own.

By stark contrast, the Senate is looking fantastic for Republicans. Not only have they pulled ahead into comfortable leads in Texas and Tennessee, likely as polls come out showing these red states react to the Kavanaugh confirmation battle, but Nevada and Arizona appear to have turned into much closer races, each now being an almost perfect toss up. But how are these two forecasts so different?

Firstly, it’s worth reiterating just how good the Senate map is for Republicans is this year. Their only really vulnerable seats are in Nevada and Arizona, and they have a wide selection of red state Democratic incumbents to target. Add to that the fact that popular former Governor of Florida Rick Scott is bringing his considerable political weight to bear in the state’s Senate race, posing a serious problem to Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson, and Republican chances end up looking very good despite a left leaning national environment. This overall environment is what is giving Democrats such good odds in the House, where of course all 435 seats are up for election, as opposed to just 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate.

Secondly, the key races in the battles for the House and Senate are happening in very different parts of the country. The most important Senate races are in deep red states like North Dakota, Texas, and Tennessee. Hyper-partisanship means that it’s very difficult for a Democrat to win any of these in 2018. Meanwhile, the most important House races this year seem to largely be in the rural parts of California, New York, and New Jersey. These districts tend to be 5 or 6 percent more Republican leaning than the nation as a whole, but with a national environment leaning towards the Democrats by about 8 points, it’s perfectly plausible that these could change hands. It’s also worth noting the aforementioned trickle down effects in these states. All 3 have Senate races this year, with a Democratic nominee strongly favoured to win. In California, some Republican voters may stay home, as due to the “top two” primary system in California there isn’t even a Republican candidate for Senate on the ballot paper.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that Congress is really, really unpopular, with about a 17% approval rating. This means that incumbency is not actually very powerful this year. This works against Democrats in the Senate, as they are totally reliant upon strong Democratic incumbents in red states holding on for dear life. But in the House, it actually works in their favour. Almost none of their incumbents there are in any kind of danger as they are all in very blue districts, and the key races are being fought over seats currently held by Republicans. All things considered, 2018 is shaping up to be a rough year for incumbents, especially Republicans in the House, which is probably why a full 26 of them retired this year without seeking to run for higher office.

The big picture then, is that the most likely outcome is that of a split Congress, with Democrats controlling the House and Republicans the Senate. This would be very interesting indeed in the polarised politics of the modern day, as politicians may be forced to actually compromise with the other side of the aisle in order to get anything done.

Do Democrats Really Have A Chance In Tennessee and Texas?

Predictions as of 10/1/2018:

Tennessee has not had a Democratic Senator since Jim Sasser left office in 1995 having lost his re-election campaign by 14.3 percentage points, a huge defeat for an incumbent. The state hasn’t voted for a Democratic nominee for the presidency since 1996, and in 2016 Trump won in Tennessee by a full 26 points. Sure, it’s an open race, so Republicans don’t have the advantage of incumbency, but even so, any state-wide election in Tennessee should surely be an open goal for the GOP. And yet our model is giving Republican Marsha Blackburn only a 58.5% chance of winning its Senate race this year, why?

Firstly, Phil Bredesen is no normal Democratic candidate in a red state. He is a former Governor of Tennessee, and a successful one at that, winning re-election in 2006 with 69% of the vote, winning every county and more votes than any gubernatorial candidate in the history of the state, which stretches back to 1796. His reputation as a moderate Democrat makes him far more palatable amongst independents and moderate Republicans in Tennessee than a typical Democrat, and his political experience is practically unrivalled in the state. In 1991 he defeated Councilwoman Betty Nixon with 72% of the vote to become Mayor of Nashville, a position he used to invest heavily in education, building and renovating 75 schools throughout the city. In 1995, no one even ran against his campaign for re-election. His two terms as Mayor built him a formidable base in Nashville, which is incredibly significant given that Nashville’s metro area contains 1.9 million of Tennessee’s 6.7 million inhabitants (about 28%). Since his governorship, he’s been viewed as a potential Democratic presidential candidate, and was vetted for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama Administration. He is a political giant in only a modestly sized state.

Secondly, the national environment is leaning heavily to the left, with Democrats leading the generic congressional ballot by approximately 8.5 points. Tennessee tends to lean about 14 points to the right, taking away 8.5 from 14 leaves only a 5.5 point lead for the Republicans, which is significant, but by no means insurmountable. Add on to this Trump’s poor approval ratings and Tennessee, along with many other red states, looks a lot more competitive.

The national environment is of course also relevant in Texas (much to the distress of millions of pro-secession Texans), but intuitively speaking the state should be even more hostile to a Democratic Senate candidate than Tennessee. Texas hasn’t had a Democratic Senator since 1993 after incumbent Bob Krueger lost his re-election campaign by an impressively abysmal 34.7 points in what the Houston Chronicle called the worst campaign in the state’s modern political history. Texas hasn’t voted for a Democratic nominee for the presidency since narrowly supporting Jimmy Carter in 1976. Furthermore, the Senate seat up for election this year is guarded by none other than well known incumbent and 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz, armed with a net worth of over $3 million and a comfortable win in his previous election of 16.1 points, even though it occurred in a Democratic leaning national environment as it coincided with Obama’s re-election campaign. So far Cruz has raised a whopping $24 million, and is extremely keen to hold on to his seat as at the age of only 47, practically a child compared to much of the Senate, he could easily use his position as Senator to set himself up for running for President in 2024.

So how do the Democrats compete with a (comparatively) young man with a net worth of over $3 million? It’s simple, an ever so slightly younger man with a net worth of $9 million, and a proven track record of winning the unwinnable races in politics. In 2005, Beto O’Rourke defeated 2 term incumbent Anthony Cobos to win a seat on the El Paso City Council. In 2012, he ran for the Democratic nomination for the deeply left leaning 16th congressional district in Texas, facing off against 8 term Democratic incumbent Silvestre Reyes, who was endorsed by then President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Somehow, O’Rourke won the seat, and is now hoping to pull off a third extraordinary victory, seizing onto the key opportunity presented to him in 2018, with Cruz’s approval ratings as Senator going negative, Trump’s approval in Texas surprisingly low, and a heavily left-leaning national environment. Like Cruz, he’s raised $24 million, and he is swiftly fighting to gain the name-recognition he needs to compete with the now famous Cruz with talk show appearances and a campaign with an active social media presence.

Both of these races are looking extremely close, with O’Rourke trailing Cruz by only 3 or 4 points and Bredesen actually ahead of his opponent Marsha Blackburn by about 1 point. Needless to say, if Republicans were to lose either one of these seats, the consequences for them would be extreme. As discussed in a previous article on RedvBlue, Democratic incumbents in deep red seats are an absolute necessity to Democratic hopes of controlling the upper chamber of Congress. O’Rourke in particular is a huge threat to the GOP, if he were to win, he could potentially stay on in the Senate for a long time. He is young, he’s proving himself an adept campaigner, and with the advantage of incumbency could well hold on to the seat in Texas in future elections, especially as the state is becoming less and less Republican as time goes on. These two elections could very well determine who controls the Senate for the next two years or more, and both are extremely competitive.

The New Blue Wall

Predictions as of 9/30/2018:

The Democrats’ best path to control of the Senate is simple:

Hold all of their current seats
Win the open seat in Arizona
Unseat Republican incumbent Dean Heller in Nevada

Objectives 2 and 3 are both reasonably achievable. Arizona is 4-5 points more Republican than the nation as a whole, but with the national environment leaning 8-9 points in favour of Democrats, the seat is slightly favoured to turn blue, our model gives the Democrats a 69.3% chance of achieving this. Nevada is 1-2 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole, but the Republican incumbent makes matters more difficult for the Democrats. In fact, the advantage provided by incumbency is even greater in less populous states such as Nevada, such that even in spite of the heavily Democratic national environment, Senator Dean Heller has only a 68% chance of losing their seat.

Surprisingly, it is holding onto all of their current seats that will be most difficult for Democrats. 10 Senate seats currently held by Democrats in states which voted for Donald Trump are up for election, including the deep red states of North Dakota, Indiana, Montana, Missouri, and West Virginia. The GOP is not favoured to win any of these states individually, but overall it is unlikely that the Democrats hold on to every single one of these seats.

Since 1992, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all voted for the Democratic nominee for the presidency in every election up to and including 2012. Together they represented an absolutely crucial block of electoral votes which the Democrats came to depend on and refer to as the “blue wall”. In 2016, the entire election hung on these states, and Donald Trump’s successful campaign to win over non college educated white voters in the Upper Midwest allowed him to tear down the blue wall, simultaneously winning the election and threatening to torpedo Democrats’ future chances in the electoral college for decades to come. If Trump’s coalitions in the Upper Midwest hold up in future elections, Democrats would struggle to reach 270 electoral votes. They need 38 more electoral votes than Clinton won in 2016. Florida provides only 29, and after that they are running out of options without the blue wall. Democratic campaigns would have to make bold attempts to win over voters in quite red states such as North Carolina and Arizona, perhaps with attempts to energise ethnic minorities into turning out in larger numbers than have ever been seen before.

The 5 Democratic Senate seats in deep red states, North Dakota, Indiana, Montana, Missouri, and West Virginia, form a similar blue wall in the Senate. They are absolutely crucial to Democratic hopes of controlling the upper chamber of Congress. There are 27 states rated as leaning significantly more Republican than the nation as a whole, compared to only 15 leaning to the left. Hence, in order to control the Senate the Democrats must be able to win over voters in red states, and this year every Democratic Senate seat in a red state is up for re-election, with the sole exception of Doug Jones’ seat in Alabama. This is extremely unfortunate for the Republicans, as the national environment being so unfavourable for the GOP this year may allow many of the strong Democratic incumbents to survive. Every single incumbent the Republicans can defeat hugely improves their prospects in the Senate over not just the next 6 years but the next two decades. Without the advantage of incumbency, Democrats would be hopeless in these deep red states, and without these crucial seats they would also be hopeless in terms of controlling the Senate as a whole.

In terms of 2018 alone, losing even one seat in this blue wall in the Senate would hugely damage Democratic chances of overall control. The only realistic opportunities for Democrats to make additional gains beyond Nevada and Arizona to make up for losing part of the blue wall are an open race in Tennessee, which leans 14 points to the right, and Texas, where strong Republican incumbent and big name Ted Cruz has $24 million and counting to defend the state, which is a full 8 points more Republican than America overall. So Democrats desperately need their incumbents to lock up key states, before they can truly entertain the possibility of control of the Senate.