Why The House And Senate Are Moving In Opposite Directions
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
At first, I was a little skeptical of the narrative that Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process could send the House and Senate moving in opposite directions. Usually in politics, a rising tide lifts all boats — so whichever party benefited from the Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation would expect to see its fortunes improve in both its best states and districts and its worst ones.
But a House-Senate split is exactly what we’re seeing in the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Democratic prospects in the Senate are increasingly dire, having fallen to about 1 in 5. Indeed, it’s been hard to find any good news for Democrats in Senate polling lately. In the House, by contrast, their opportunity is holding up relatively well. In fact, Democrats’ chance of taking the House has ticked back upward to about 4 in 5, having improved slightly from around 3 in 4 immediately after Kavanaugh was confirmed. And while district-by-district House polling has been all over the place lately, Democrats’ position has improved slightly on the generic congressional ballot.
On the surface, you might reason that House and Senate battlegrounds aren’t that different from one another. Yes, the most competitive Senate races this year are in really, really red states. Specifically, the average competitive Senate race, weighted by its likelihood of being the decisive state in determining the majority according to FiveThirtyEight’s tipping-point index, is 16 percentage points more Republican than the country overall.1 But the average competitive House district is also pretty red: 8 points more Republican than the country overall, weighed by its tipping-point probability.
The more time you spend looking at the battlegrounds in each chamber, however, the more you’ll come to two important conclusions:
The House and Senate battlegrounds really aren’t that much alike. In several important respects, in fact, they’re almost opposite from one another. For example, House battlegrounds are more educated than the country overall, while Senate ones are less so.
The Democrats’ map in the House is fairly robust, because they aren’t overly reliant on any one type of district. (This stands in contrast to the Senate, where most of the battlegrounds fit into a certain typology: red and rural). While House battlegrounds are somewhat whiter, more suburban and more educated than the country overall, there are quite a few exceptions — enough so that Democrats could underperform in certain types of districts but still have reasonably good chances to win the House. This differs from Hillary Clinton’s position in the Electoral College in 2016, in which underperformance among just one group of voters in one region — white working-class voters in the Midwest — was enough to cost her the election.
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The experts seem to think that there are better than average chances that House Control could shift to the Democrats but that the Republicans will retain control of the Senate.
Could this this mean we are back to getting absolutely nothing done or will compromise surprise us and reappear in Washington ?
I'm not counting on compromise taking place. Now, or in the future, which in itself is a pretty darn sad comment to make.
We need the two sides to work together or we need to replace the individuals that make up the two sides until we find a group that can work together, but that is a process that the powerful in Washington fight hard to avoid.