Midterm elections provide a valuable measure of the success of a presidency. When the presidentâs party does poorly in midterms, it is seen as a rebuke of the president and the presidentâs party. When the presidentâs party does well, it is seen as an endorsement of the president and the presidentâs party. And some of the impacts of these midterm elections are immediate: a loss of seats in Congress, for instance, will impede a presidentâs legislative ambitions and alter the political terrain for the next presidential election. We have seen this play out time and time again in American politics. In 1874, Democrats took control of the Senate and ended the period of the Reconstruction, ultimately derailing and stalling civil rights for minorities for the next 75 years. The 1966 midterms signaled public discontent with Lyndon Johnsonâs Great Society programs and the war in Vietnam. The Republican Revolution of 1994 gave the GOP control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years, introducing wide-spread tax cuts that defunded social welfare programs. Republican success in the 2002 midterms was seen as an endorsement of George W. Bushâs policies in the war on terrorism, while Democratâs success in 2006 repudiated the war in Iraq. The 2010 midterm saw the emerging power of the Tea Party and upended Barack Obamaâs presidency.
But midterm elections have impacts beyond the immediate, which are often unforeseen and take time to reveal themselves, but are no less important than which party controls Congress and which party lost more governorships on the election night. The voters who expressed their disapproval for Lyndon Johnsonâs handling of the war in Vietnam likely had little idea that one of the candidates elected that year, Ronald Reagan, would become the 40th president and usher in an era of conservative dominance. The voters who in 1986 returned Democrats to control of the Senate could not have imagined that the following year would see, with the Senateâs rejection of President Reaganâs nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, the beginnings of a decades-long partisan battle over the federal judiciary. And the Republican wave of 2010 left that party with so many rising stars with national ambitions that, six years later, there were so many candidates seeking the GOP nomination that Donald Trump was able to float above them all and become the partyâs nominee for president.
The 2018 midterms were of particular interest to observers of American politics. The 2016 electionâs improbable result, in which Donald Trump won the electoral college vote while losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by roughly three million votes, led many to question whether the normal rules of politics still applied, and one of the most enduring of those rules is that the presidentâs party tends to lose seats in midterm elections. Democratsâ successes in 2018âfrom winning control of the House of Representatives to flipping control of the governorâs office in states like Illinois, Kansas, and Wisconsin to gains in state legislatures all over the countryâthus provided some reassurance that at least some of the old rules still governed American elections.
But a narrow focus on the partisan wins and losses in the 2018 election, however relevant they may be to setting the stage for the 2020 presidential election and the impeachment of Donald Trump, risks missing out on other, more subtle consequences from the midterm elections. The 2018 midterm, like every other midterm election, will have impacts on American politics that are less obvious and direct than those that became apparent in the weeks after Election Night 2018. This book seeks to identify what some of those deeper, less obvious, and unforeseen impacts will be. It collects research by nine established and emerging scholars of American politics who gathered at Saint Anselm Collegeâs New Hampshire Institute of Politics in the spring of 2019 to dissect the recent election.
In the second chapter of this book, Jesse T. Clark, Matthew P. Dube, and Richard J. Powell examine how gerrymandering and redistricting shape elections with cutting-edge methods. The authors discuss the debates and legal proceedings about district boundaries in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm election, with particular attention to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Maryland, and North Carolina, four states whose congressional and state legislative district lines have been the subject of lawsuits. Clark, Dube, and Powell analyze the impact of current district boundaries on electoral outcomes in the 2018 election at the State House, State Senate, and Congressional levels. They compare the actual election results from 2018 to those generated by an advanced algorithm that allow them to efficiently simulate thousands of randomized redistricting plans in each state. The simulation technique relies upon advanced geographic information systems (GIS) and principles of graph theory to create a baseline of partisan voting for each state. While their results overall demonstrate that the Republican Party benefited from redistricting in 2018, the full story is more complicated than a simple partisan bias. They conclude that while Democrats should have gained three additional seats in the House of Representatives, up to 25 House seats were carried by the âwrongâ party, thanks to redistricting. Furthermore, 51 seats in State Senates and over 100 State House seats were misaligned due to redistricting. These misalignments will likely have significant impacts on representation and policymaking at both the federal and state levels.
In Chap. 3, Hanna K. Brant and L. Marvin Overby delve into the retirement patterns of members of the House of Representatives. These authors analyze the partisan patterns of retirements and resignations in the months leading up to the 2018 campaign season. Was the 2018 midterm unique in terms of the partisan makeup of retiring and resigning House members? Yes and no, according to Brant and Overby. In testing retirement patterns for the House of Representatives, they find similar trends in historical congressional retirement patterns, but they also find that there were a number of factors unique to the 115th Congress. The high âmortality rateâ among termed-out chairs, along with the statistically significant relationship between voluntary departures and being a termed-out subcommittee chair, certainly suggest that Republican retirements were something of a self-inflicted wound on their partyâs prospects for maintaining control of the House. Similarly, members who retired in 2018 do not appear to have done so because of fundraising difficulties; indeed, those who opted to retire from the chamber in 2018 had significantly outraised their non-retiring colleagues in 2016. Instead, it appears that these members saw a Democratic wave coming and decided to get out of the way. The exit of skilled veteran GOP members in 2018 could have impacts far into the future; next time the Republicans hold the majority in the House of Representatives, they will do so without the benefit of these departed membersâ experience and perspective.
The next two chapters consider the impact of issues related to gender on the 2018 midterms. In the wake of the 2016 election and woman-driven protests such as the Womenâs Marches on January 21, 2017, some political observers speculated that women would run for office and engage in other forms of activism and political organizing in greater numbers during the Trump era than they ever had before. In Chap. 4, Jack D. Collens takes a deep look at novice candidatesâespecially women, minorities, and veteransâduring the primaries and how they fundamentally altered the story for the US Congress. He finds that favorable electoral factors (such as an open seat or a Republican incumbent in a Democratic-leaning district) play little role in motivating candidate entry. This in turn suggests that 2018âs âhigh opportunityâ environment was influential across all districts, regardless of the local electoral environment. He also finds that traditional regional patterns in candidate entry did not hold in 2018, providing further evidence for nationalized congressional elections. Finally, the candidates who seemed to perform best in these primary contests were women and those with prior electoral experience, suggesting the âquality candidateâ effect still held and that the Democratic primary electorate was particularly disposed to support women in the Trump era.
Chapter 5 gives us a new story to emerge in the 2018 midterm election, the historic advances made by women. Was this election part of broader secular trends for womenâs political story moving forward? Or was 2018 just another copycat of the 1992 Year of the Woman? Emily Baer examines women candidatesâ agency and strategic decision-making, using the Gendered Political Message Typology, which she developed and tested. Her findings suggest that salience of issues that advantage women among the public enables female candidates to broaden their message and address traditionally male-advantaged issues such as the economy and taxes. She demonstrates that the 2018 election provided an especially advantageous environment for strategic women candidates as issues the public gives women an edge in addressingâsuch as health care and workplace sexual harassmentâwere especially salient. Baerâs results provide mixed support for the theory of gendered political messages. In an election year in which female-advantaged issues were more salient, men and women candidates both sought to emphasize those issues in which they are stereotyped as being more competent to address. However, this story was more complex; the diversity of campaign messages developed by incumbent and non-incumbent women and Democratic and Republican women, suggest that women candidates are strategically shaping their campaigns to maximize their perceived strengths and minimize their perceived weaknesses in their appeals to voters. Further, conservative women have unique challenges as female-advantaged policy issues run counter to long-held Republican party policies on the economy, immigration, and guns.
The final chapter of the book analyzes the middle of the longer story: the impact of Donald Trumpâs presidential policies and rhetoric on voting. The economics of 2018 included trade sanctions on imports and subsequent protectionist tariff retaliation from China. Domestic race relations were tense. Farmers were worried. Further, campaign rhetoric from 2016 targeted the Latinx population, a constituency that historically has occupied the agricultural migrant work force and that GOP would like to lean right. Would these factors, economic (in)security and political identity politics, impact Republican district-level voting patterns at the midterm? To find out, Kevin Doran and Tauna Sisco analyze the change in Republican vote share in 48 states and 340 districts from 2016 to 2018, focusing on race and threats to job/exports threatened by retaliatory tariffs. Using state-level fixed effects, they find that districts with growth in the percent White and percent Hispanic (between 2012 and 2017) had significantly more positive change in Republican vote share. They also find that districts in states with a decline in the White-Hispanic income gap and the White-Black education gap (between 2012 and 2017) showed significantly more positive change in Republican vote share, controlling for overall change in White incomes and education. Surprisingly, they find a positive association between reduction in the White-Black education gap and change in Republican vote share; specifically, they find a negative association between this outcome and reduction in the White-Black income gap in the state. Combined, the authors interpret these findings as suggestive of a complicated racial threat response among White voters. Despite media narratives about the potential impact of retaliatory tariffs on voting outcomes, the authors do not find a significant association between either the percent of jobs or the percent of exports in a state that were threatened by retaliatory tariffs and the change in Republican vote share in districts in those states. All told, Doran and Sis...