The following article by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, senior fellows at the Center for American Progress, is cross-posted from americanprogress.org:

Americans took to the polls in record numbers in the 2018 midterms, shifting party control of the House of Representatives and sending a clear message of disapproval to President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans. Although the president and his party gained ground in the U.S. Senate, primarily in states Trump won handily, they failed to capitalize on the low unemployment rate or overall positive sentiments about the economy. The signature GOP legislative achievement of the first two years—the $1.5 trillion tax cut that passed last year —failed to boost Republicans’ chances overall and hurt candidates in several seats.

Subsequently, they lost in major suburban and urban districts across the country and also lost ground in some rural areas. The president’s gamble of nationalizing the election around his personality and his administration’s harsh immigration policies ultimately cost Republicans their House majority and failed to persuade voters outside of already conservative or rural counties and states to stick with the GOP. Likewise, health care dominated voters’ minds this year according to both pre-election and Election Day polls, with Democrats benefitting from their commitment to protect and expand Americans’ health care and House Republicans suffering for their repeated attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Democrats are on pace for around a 34-seat gain in the House (outstanding races are still to be called in a few places), with a record number of women candidates winning overall. This is slightly above historical average gains for opposition parties in midterm elections but below the massive 2010 shift of 63 seats during the Obama presidency. Democrats gained seven governors’ seats, including in important presidential battleground states such as Michigan and Wisconsin and flipped six state legislative bodies, with about 330 state legislative seats gained across the country. Ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid won in three red states, while several measures to increase the minimum wage, legalize marijuana, and expand voting rights also emerged victorious. And, although definitive turnout data will not be available for a while, preliminary estimates suggest a massive increase in voter participation, with likely more than 110 million votes cast for the House—far above 2014 levels.

Midterm elections typically unfold on fleeting political terms and local issues that cannot be applied easily to future elections. But, given the highly polarized nature of U.S. politics under President Trump and the partisan divisions in control of the House and Senate and in key states, a few trends should be noted. The first two favor Democrats going into 2020, and the second two favor Republicans.

• First, President Trump has not expanded his support in any significant manner and his policy agenda has dragged down his popularity, particularly with independents. The president’s disapproval ratings have been higher than his approval ratings for his entire tenure. Strong disapproval of Trump has hovered around 40 percent for the past two years, with less than one-quarter of voters strongly approving of his presidency. This is unlikely to shift, particularly since the president could not improve his numbers even with strong economic indicators. President Trump’s signature policy achievement, the 2017 tax bill, failed to produce gains, and in fact served as a liability for some Republicans, as most Americans concluded that it did little to help them while primarily benefitting corporations and the wealthy. Likewise, Trump’s immigration agenda remains potent among his base supporters, but it is not moving the needle his way in large swaths of suburban and urban America. The repeated attempt to undermine national health care policy remains a significant drag on his support among independents and moderates across the nation. Unless the president changes course toward a more popular national agenda, it is unclear how he plans to both secure and expand his 2016 vote base. Exit polls indicate that Republicans lost significant ground with independents in 2018, relative to Trump’s decent showing among them in 2016.
• Second, Trump’s standing in the Electoral College is uncertain. Outside of Florida and Ohio, where Republicans appear to have held off an opposition surge this year, Democrats made substantial statewide gains in key states in the 2018 midterms, controlling the governorships of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and picking up Obama-Trump districts in the state of Iowa. Trump’s hold on the Electoral College, which was weak in 2016 with only a narrow victory of around 80,000 votes in three states, is therefore tenuous—at best. Democrats only need to add Pennsylvania and Michigan back to their column plus either Wisconsin or Iowa to win in 2020. This assumes Florida and Ohio remain for Trump and no changes occur in emerging battlegrounds such as North Carolina, Arizona, or Georgia, neither of which are given.
• Third, Democrats have demographic and geographic challenges in relation to both the Senate and some key Electoral College states. Despite advantages that emerged in the 2018 midterms and overall favorable demographic trends, the Democratic Party base of support is still shaky in terms of potential turnout and support rates going into 2020, relative to the geographic structure of the Electoral College and the Senate. Youth turnout and turnout from voters of color looks very strong for 2018, but even minor dips in key Electoral College states can shift the terrain toward Trump. Likewise, the concentration of Democratic support in metropolitan areas diffuses overall demographic advantages and increases the chances that large turnout and support from Trump’s base, primarily white noncollege-educated voters in more rural and working class states, can once again lead to a narrow victory.
• Fourth, Democrats need to develop a strong and popular vision to counter Trump’s nationalist message. Despite Trump’s manifest political deficiencies, he does benefit from very strong support and fervent backing from most Republicans. In contrast, the Democrats successful, mostly nonideological “big tent” strategy for 2018 will not hold for 2020. In order to ensure strong Democratic base turnout, encourage new voters, and persuade Obama-Trump and more white noncollege voters to return to the party, Democrats will need a very clear and compelling vision that convinces voters that they are on their side on economics and social policy and are willing to make significant changes to a political system that is viewed as corrupt and often unresponsive to voter needs.

With this overall context, here is a concise overview of what we know so far about who voted and how they voted in 2018 and what it may mean going forward.

Who voted in 2018?

Perhaps the shortest answer to this question is “everyone.” This was an exceptionally high turnout for a midterm election. It would therefore be surprising if the turnout of most demographic groups did not go up. However, that does not mean that the share of voters attributable to these various groups necessarily went up. That would only be true if turnout of a given group went up more than the average among eligible voters and/or if the eligible voter share of a given group went up.

With that in mind, some patterns can provisionally be seen in the results currently available. We emphasize provisional since the exit polls are typically an unreliable guide to turnout patterns and need to be supplemented with other survey data and modeling that integrates actual election returns. Those supplementary resources are not yet available.

The National Election Pool (NEP) exit polls, compiled by Edison Research for a consortium of news organizations, indicate that the share of white voters fell from 75 percent in 2014 to 72 percent this election. Note that this does not necessarily tell us much about the turnout of white voters, since some of this declining vote share (if real) was attributable to the declining white share of eligible voters.

The same could be said about the rising share of nonwhite (black, Hispanic, Asian, and other race) voters, which increased from 25 percent in 2014 to 28 percent in the 2018 NEP exit polls. Some of this increased vote share, if real, was due to the increasing nonwhite share of eligible voters, rather than unusually high nonwhite turnout.

Within the broad group of nonwhite voters, these exit polls indicate that Hispanic vote share went up from 8 percent in 2014 to 11 percent in 2018, while black vote share declined slightly from 12 to 11 percent over the same time period. (The AP-NORC VoteCast voter survey, which is new and has a different methodology than the NEP exit polls, reports the Hispanic share as 9 percent and the black share at 12 percent; since the survey is new, there are no comparisons available to 2014.)

Within the overall group of white voters, it has become important to look at education divisions. However, while it seems likely that both white college graduate and white noncollege voters increased their turnout levels this election, it is impossible to say how much their vote shares really changed. Because the NEP exit polls changed their methodology around education, they now show a much more realistic distribution of voters between white college and white noncollege: 31 percent white college and 41 percent white noncollege. But this methodology change invalidates any comparison to their previous exit poll voter shares among this demographic.

Voter share among 18- to 29-year-olds remained stable at 13 percent between the 2014 and 2018 elections, according to these exit polls. This implies that young voter turnout did indeed go up in this election but by no more than the average turnout increase.

How did they vote?

The most interesting changes in this election, in comparison to 2014, took place in the realm of voter preference. As we might expect, there were big shifts toward the Democrats among many voter groups, given that the overall House popular vote shifted from +6 Republican in 2014 to the current estimate of +7 for the Democrats this election.

Notably, women went heavily for Democrats, with a +19 margin in the NEP exit polls, while Republicans had a +4 margin among men. Comparable figures for 2014 were +4 for Democrats among women and +16 for Republicans among men. The gender gap is alive and well.

Turning to the white vote, these exit polls indicate that Democrats lost the white congressional vote by 10 points this election, a substantial improvement over their 22-point loss in 2014. Among nonwhites, Democrats improved their margin among Hispanics from +26 to +40 across the two elections, from +79 to +81 among blacks overall (with black women at +85 in 2018), and from a mere +1 among Asians to +54 this election. Again, we await further data to evaluate these changes, but this is the story told by the NEP exit polls.

While possibly affected by changes in methodology, these exit polls indicate a very strong pro-Democratic shift among white college voters, improving from a 16-point deficit in 2014 to an 8-point advantage in this election. Democratic performance also improved among white noncollege voters but only modestly, moving from a 30-point deficit in 2014 to 24 points in 2018. Other data indicate that Democrats did particularly poorly among white noncollege voters in the South.

White college women were particularly good for the Democrats, supporting their candidates by a 20-point margin; white college men gave Republicans a 4-point advantage. White noncollege men were the worst for the Democrats—they lost this group by a whopping 34 points. Democrats did better among white noncollege women, losing them by a comparatively modest 14 points.

Young voters may not have increased their share of voters but, according to the NEP exit polls, they were very pro-Democratic this year, increasing their support for Democratic candidates from +11 in 2014 to +35 this year. Notably, the 18- to 24-year-old group, which now includes a healthy share of post-Millennials—the pro-Democratic Millennials’ successor generation—actually voted more Democratic (+37) than the 25- to 29-year-old group (+33).

What does this mean for 2020?

America remains a deeply divided nation in its politics and partisan preferences. The 2018 midterms clearly did not settle these divisions. If anything, it appears to have solidified them. Republicans under Trump maintain a strong hold on white noncollege voters in more rural and exurban counties and states across the country. However, they are rapidly losing support among college educated whites in many suburban and metropolitan areas and face particular challenges with women and voters of color.

Democrats, on the other hand, have broader but less intense support that can manifest itself in strong majorities with the right leadership, as in 2008 and 2012 under former President Barack Obama, or fall just short when facing intense partisan support from Trump and his base. Democrats lack both intense bases of support and the ability to reach into voting blocs that are deeply upset with the political status quo. These challenges may be amplified by Trump’s geographic advantages in some key Electoral College states, as seen in 2016.

President Trump appears committed to his strategy of base mobilization built on maximizing conflict on cultural and racial grounds. If he wants to succeed in 2020, he will need to broaden his outreach, adopt a more accommodating style, and focus on the economy more or else risk serious blowback across his narrow Electoral College pathway. Democrats, in turn, must quickly solidify an inclusive and forward-looking vision and agenda that offers voters turned off by Trump’s style, corruption, and ethno-nationalism a real reason to vote for their party. They cannot afford to remain in constant locked-horn battle with Trump on his terms and must stay focused on building consensus behind principled and pragmatic progressive policies on jobs, wages, health care, and democratic participation.

Whichever side figures out how to both maximize its partisan advantages and make inroads with voters who do not fit their ideological profile will most likely emerge victorious in 2020.

I was staring at the 2018 and 2014 exit polls yesterday, for signs of a different electorate showing up this year, and was surprised at what I saw, as I explained at New York.

If you heard it once, you probably heard it a hundred times: the 2018 midterm elections, and perhaps all midterm elections, were “all about turnout.” With the electorate polarized down to its every molecule, the winning equation was simply to identify demographic groups that were in or trending towards one’s own side, then nag and scare and excite and anger and knock and drag them to the polls.

If “base mobilization” was in fact all that mattered, then it would be logical to expect that the shape of the 2018 electorate would be dramatically different from that of the 2014 midterms, in which Republicans had a very solid performance, gaining 13 House seats, 9 Senate seats, and 2 governorships.

But a comparison of exit polls, the best preliminary indicator we have of the shape of the 2014 and 2018 electorates, doesn’t show as much change as you might expect. Yes, the 2018 electorate was much bigger than 2014’s: an estimated 114 million people voted this year, as opposed to 83 million four years ago. But the shape of this bigger electorate is familiar, according to the Edison Research exit polls for both midterms.

The white makeup of the electorate was 75 percent in 2014 and 72 percent this year, though the modest difference is mostly attributable to demographic change rather than some sort of voter mobilization effort. African-Americans formed 11 percent of the electorate in 2014 and 12 percent in 2018, another modest change. Latinos are a rapidly rising share of the population, so it’s not too surprising that they grew from 8 percent to 11 percent (they were only 9 percent, by the way, in a separate NORC exit poll).

How about that most notorious category of voter, the non-college educated white voter (a.k.a. the white working-class voter)? Its membership constituted 36 percent of the electorate in 2014 and 41 percent in 2018. That’s not very consistent with a demography-driven Democratic Wave, is it? So is gender turnout a factor? Did women show up in droves to punish Trump and the GOP? Well, yeah, women were up a tick (from 51 percent to 52 percent) as a percentage of the electorate. But white women, supposedly super-mobilized, actually dropped from constituting 38 percent of all voters in 2014 to 37 percent this year.

One difference that might look significant is that the percentage of voters identifying as “white evangelical or born-again Christian” dropped from 26 percent of the electorate to 22 percent. But much of that is simply owing to the general relative decline in the size of the white population, compounded by the erosion of membership that is now hitting conservative Protestant denominations just like their more liberal counterparts. It doesn’t mean Republicans didn’t do as good a job herding the Evangelical flocks to the polls as they have in the past.

So if the electorate isn’t all that different in its component parts than it was four years ago, what did change? It’s hard to say definitively, since it’s always possible that one party or the other did better at turning out their particular share of various demographic groups than the other. But it looks like public opinion changed, with or without partisan efforts to sway it.

The example that jumps off the page in reading the exits is voters over 65. Republicans won them 57-41 in 2014, but only 50-48 in 2018. That’s about the same margin as in 2006, the last Democratic “wave” election, before the tea party movement-driven realignment of the electorate made “old” all but synonymous with “Republican.” White college graduates shifted from 57-41 Republican in 2014 to 53-45 Democratic this year. By contrast, white voters without a college degree changed marginally, from 64-34 Republican to 61-37. White women didn’t trend as massively Democratic in 2018 as some of the anecdotal evidence suggested, but did go from 56-42 Republican to 49-49 this year. The 2014 exits didn’t provide a breakdown by race, gender, and education-level, but given the relatively low change in the vote of non-college educated white voters generally, you can figure this year’s 59-39 Democratic margin among college-educated white women was a pretty big shift.

Yes, the exit polls are quite fallible, as the evidence of the undercounting of white non-college educated voters in the 2016 exit polls shows. But if the change of partisan outcome between 2014 and 2018 was strictly a matter of one mobilization machine outperforming another, it would show up pretty dramatically in the numbers.

It’s not fashionable to say it, but perhaps persuasion by candidates and campaigns had a bit more to do with the Democratic surge in 2018 than we might otherwise suspect. And there’s a good chance that objective reality did, as well: the experience of having Donald Trump as president for two years, with a supine Republican Party doing his bidding. It’s worth pondering as 2020 approaches.

FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich provides an update on “The 16 Races That Are Still Too Close To Call,” which notes “As things stand right now, Republicans have picked up two seats in the Senate, but that net gain could be anywhere from zero to three when the races in Arizona, Florida and Mississippi get resolved…Of the 12 unresolved House races, Democrats lead or look like they’re in good position in nine of them…the gubernatorial race in Georgia remains uncalled — not because Democratic former state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams has a chance at taking the lead, but because Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp needs to win at least 50 percent plus one vote in order to avoid a rematch with Abrams in a Dec. 4 runoff.” It looks like we can add the Florida Governor’s race to this list, now that additional votes have Democrat Andrew Gillum approaching recount range.

Among the many revealing observations from Ed Kilgore’s “The 2018 Electorate Wasn’t All That Different. It Just Voted Differently” at New York Magazine: “The example that jumps off the page in reading the exits is voters over 65. Republicans won them 57-41 in 2014, but only 50-48 in 2018. That’s about the same margin as in 2006, the last Democratic “wave” election, before the tea party movement-driven realignment of the electorate made “old” all but synonymous with “Republican.” White college graduates shifted from 57-41 Republican in 2014 to 53-45 Democratic this year. By contrast, white voters without a college degree changed marginally, from 64-34 Republican to 61-37. White women didn’t trend as massively Democratic in 2018 as some of the anecdotal evidence suggested, but did go from 56-42 Republican to 49-49 this year. The 2014 exits didn’t provide a breakdown by race, gender, and education-level, but given the relatively low change in the vote of non-college educated white voters generally, you can figure this year’s 59-39 Democratic margin among college-educated white women was a pretty big shift.”

While at New York, also check out Kilgore’s three “All the Key Results” posts on the Senate, House and Governors races, which provide some background nuggets for individual races, posted as the stories broke. Among the upsets of 2018, Kilgore notes of Democrat Kendra Horne’s ‘shocker’ victory in OK-5 over incumbent Republican Steve Russell that “The race in this Oklahoma City-based district that Trump carried by double-digits was rated Likely Republican by the Cook Political Report.” For Max Rose’s NY-11 upset of Republican incumbent Dan Donovan on Staten Island, Kilgore writes “Pollsters figured that the former district attorney and Staten Island borough president would be able to beat back a “blue wave” in a district that went for Trump by nine points in 2016. But army veteran Max Rose rode Democratic mobilization (and, possibly, gentrification-induced shifts in the district’s demography) to a narrow win.”

Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin roll out the demographic breakdown of the vote at The Center for American Progress web page, noting that “the overall House popular vote shifted from +6 Republican in 2014 to the current estimate of +7 for the Democrats this election…Notably, women went heavily for Democrats, with a +19 margin in the NEP exit polls, while Republicans had a +4 margin among men. Comparable figures for 2014 were +4 for Democrats among women and +16 for Republicans among men. The gender gap is alive and well…Turning to the white vote, these exit polls indicate that Democrats lost the white congressional vote by 10 points this election, a substantial improvement over their 22-point loss in 2014. Among nonwhites, Democrats improved their margin among Hispanics from +26 to +40 across the two elections, from +79 to +81 among blacks overall (with black women at +85 in 2018), and from a mere +1 among Asians to +54 this election. Again, we await further data to evaluate these changes, but this is the story told by the NEP exit polls…While possibly affected by changes in methodology, these exit polls indicate a very strong pro-Democratic shift among white college voters, improving from a 16-point deficit in 2014 to an 8-point advantage in this election. Democratic performance also improved among white noncollege voters but only modestly, moving from a 30-point deficit in 2014 to 24 points in 2018. Other data indicate that Democrats did particularly poorly among white noncollege voters in the South…White college women were particularly good for the Democrats, supporting their candidates by a 20-point margin; white college men gave Republicans a 4-point advantage. White noncollege men were the worst for the Democrats—they lost this group by a whopping 34 points. Democrats did better among white noncollege women, losing them by a comparatively modest 14 points…Young voters may not have increased their share of voters but, according to the NEP exit polls, they were very pro-Democratic this year, increasing their support for Democratic candidates from +11 in 2014 to +35 this year. Notably, the 18- to 24-year-old group, which now includes a healthy share of post-Millennials—the pro-Democratic Millennials’ successor generation—actually voted more Democratic (+37) than the 25- to 29-year-old group (+33).”

At Vox, Ella Nilsen argues that “Progressive Democrats running in competitive House districts had a bad night on Tuesday: Progressive energy helped moderate Democrats win on election night. But progressive candidates weren’t so lucky.” As Nilsen eplains, “Moderate Democratic candidates were the big winners of swing congressional districts in the 2018 midterm elections, flipping most of the 28 key House districts from Republicans’ control and winning key gubernatorial races, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Illinois. Democrats’ net gain in the House was 26 seats…Progressive candidates flipped few of those seats. For the most part, the biggest upsets for the left occurred during the summer primaries; most of those districts were already blue and primed to elect Democrats. Many of the left-wing candidates who tested the theory of turning out their base, even in more conservative districts, lost on election night.” However, Nilsen ads, “Even with these losses, election night wasn’t a total disaster for progressives; in the House, the Congressional Progressive Caucus will likely get high-profile new members. Some of the notable wins include: Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts’s Seventh Congressional District; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York’s 14th Congressional District; Deb Haaland in New Mexico’s First Congressional District; Rashida Tlaib in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District; Ilhan Omar in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District…A bright spot for progressives was Democrat Katie Hill defeating Republican Rep. Steve Knight in California’s 25th Congressional District (the race was close, but Knight conceded on Wednesday afternoon). Hill is in favor of Medicare-for-all, a key progressive litmus test.” Looks like both progressive and moderate Dems have ample bragging points.

Also at Vox, Sean Illing has an instructive interview with David Daley, author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, a 2016 book about the GOP’s REDMAP strategy, which gerrymandered House districts across the nation. “What the Republicans created, Daley writes, was a firewall against the popular will of voters by carving out districts that systematically favor the GOP and neutralize support for Democratic candidates. What’s more, district lines are only drawn once a decade, in conjunction with the census, so there aren’t many opportunities to reverse them. (The next census is in 2020 and the following one will be in 2030.)..One of the big questions heading into the 2018 midterm election was whether the Democrats would gain enough power — particularly in state legislatures — to redraw some of these district lines and level the playing field. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop recently explained, Democrats have a plan to win the redistricting game, but much of it turns on winning elections.”

In the interview Daley explains, further, “What’s important to understand is that flipping the House doesn’t do anything to change who draws the maps after the 2020 census. That process, in most states, is run by state legislatures and governors. What the Democrats needed to do last night was win themselves back seats at the table for a redistricting after 2020, seats that they simply did not have in 2010…They won a handful of those seats. They appear to have won the governorship in Wisconsin, which will give Democrats a seat at the table in a state where Republicans have been able to win super-majorities in the state legislature even in years when Democrats won 175,000 more votes statewide…Democrats also won the governorship in Michigan, which is one of the key states. Michigan, however, also passed a redistricting reform ballot initiative on Tuesday night, so that the process there will be conducted by an independent commission for the first time, which is great news for reform and competition…Democrats simply got wiped out in Ohio. There were three key races on the ballot that would have given them seats at the table on the redistricting commission, and that’s the governor’s race, the secretary of state, and the state auditor, and not a single one of them even turned out to be close…What we know is that when one side has complete control of the process, the lines always end up more extreme. When both sides have a seat at the table, you end up with some semblance of a compromise. It’s not always perfect, but the maps tend to be at least slightly more representative of the state when both sides have seats at the table.”

In her NYT op-ed, “Democrats’ Biggest Wins Are in Statehouses: Forget Congress. State legislatures are where real progressive action is most likely to happen,” Bryce Covert writes “Democrats made strides in a number of statehouses. They seized control of seven legislative chambers, flipping the State Senates in Colorado, Maine, and New York; the House in Minnesota; and both chambers in New Hampshire. Connecticut’s Senate, previously evenly split, is now held by Democrats. They broke Republican supermajorities in Michigan and Pennsylvania’s Senates and both chambers in North Carolina…Democrats also flipped seven governorships on Tuesday. They now completely control all three statehouse branches in 13 states and Washington, D.C., compared to the seven statehouses where they held trifecta control before Election Day…These victories arguably hold the same, if not more, heft than the inroads Democrats made in Congress. At the federal level, legislative achievements have ground to nearly a complete halt in recent years…They seized control of seven legislative chambers, flipping the State Senates in Colorado, Maine, and New York; the House in Minnesota; and both chambers in New Hampshire. Connecticut’s Senate, previously evenly split, is now held by Democrats. They broke Republican supermajorities in Michigan and Pennsylvania’s Senates and both chambers in North Carolina…Democrats also flipped seven governorships on Tuesday. They now completely control all three statehouse branches in 13 states and Washington, D.C., compared to the seven statehouses where they held trifecta control before Election Day.”

Also at FiveThirtyEight, Amelia Thomson-Deveaux has some good news about coming improvements in voter access in several states: “In addition to Florida’s constitutional amendmentrestoring voting rights to many felons, several measures that could make it easier to vote were successful: Automatic voter registration passed in Nevada and Michigan, where people applying for driver’s license will now be automatically registered to vote, unless they affirmatively opt out…Michigan voters also approved several other sweeping changes to their election laws, adding same-day voter registration, making it easier to request absentee ballots, and reinstating the straight-ticket voting option that was nixed by the Republican legislature a few years ago…Maryland voters approved same-day registration.” Unfortunately, notes Thomson-Deveaux, North Carolina and Arkansas tightened up voter i.d. requirements.

In his Washington Post op-ed, “The first five things the Democrats should do with their House majority,” Ronald A. Klain writes:

Let’s start with where the new majority should not start: investigations, accusatory hearings or impeachment proceedings. However tempting it might be for freshly empowered congressional Columbos , not a single subpoena should fly in the first 100 days.

Not, of course, because there is a shortage of things to investigate — just the opposite. The Trump administration has been the most corrupt since Ulysses S. Grant was in the White House. The administration has flouted the constitutional limit on taking moneyfrom foreigners and flagrantly disregarded the rule of law. The transgressions merit serious inquiry and long overdue accountability. Voters chose a Democratic House, in part, to impose missing checks on Trump’s excesses and to get to the bottom of the many questions raised in the past two years.

Klain argues that “Nonetheless, a Democratic majority charging out of the gate with investigative hearings would be making a mistake, for a number of reasons,” among them the fact that a good investigation takes time, loud, reckless hearings could muddle up the perception of Mueller’s nonpartisan investigation and Dems should avoid being branded as a party more concerned with investigation than needed legislative reforms.

All good points, especially the latter one. When an election is complete, the public wants to move on and expects the majority party to take the lead in securing needed legislative reforms. With House and Senate control divided between the two parties, that’s a highly problematic challenge, even more so with a Republican President. But Democrats have to do their best, or be perceived as endlessly campaigning instead of working for real change.

But let’s not forget that Americans also want clean government, and they deserve a look at Trump’s hidden tax returns. It’s not a matter of “if” his tax returns should be revealed; it’s more about when. But Dems should take care not to be perceived ‘out of the gate’ as shirking their responsibility to propose and pass needed legislative reforms.

Klain goes on to propose a credible legislative agenda, incuding raising the minimum wage, strengthening the Affordabe Care Act, restoring the Voting Rights Act and other measures to protect voting rights, infrastucture initiatives and immigration reform. Later, urges Klain, for the investigations.

Dems experienced a number of bitter disappointments in marquee races, including the defeats of Beto O’Rourke’s Senate bid in Texas, Andrew Gillum’s race for Governor of Florida and Amy McGrath’s campaign for a House seat in Kentucky.

However, Democrat Tony Evers narrowly won a marquee governor’s race over Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Democrat Stacy Abrams may make it to a run-off in the Georgia governor’s race, and Lucy McBath holds a narrow lead in the GA-6 contest, one of the more interesting, yet under-reported House contests, featuring an African-American advocate of gun control nearing an upset in a predominantly white southern district. Many Dems will also cheer Laura Kelly’s defeat of the GOP’s chief voter suppression advocate Kris Kobach for Governor of Kansas and Harley Rouda’s lead over putinista Dana Rohrabacher in CA-48.

Looking toward 2020, Democrats are expecting a bumper crop of presidential candidates, including some fresh faces. California Governor-elect Gavin Newsome will get lots of presidential buzz, and  Sherrod Brown’s Ohio victory was the very first MSNBC call for the Senate.

Democrats certainly cemented their brand as the party that merits the support of women, with a record number of women Democrats who will take office in the new congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who calmly weathered the GOP’s hysterical attacks with impressive grace and strategic smarts.

All in all, Democrats ran an extremely good campaign in 2018, with no major gaffes or blunders. There is still plenty of room for improvement — Dems have a lot of hard work ahead in terms of securing better performance in working-class communities, rural, urban and suburban. Here’s hoping the sound strategy that won the House will help Dems win the Senate and White House, just two short years from now.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Democratic supporters are as nervous as a long-tailed cat in room full of rocking chairs! (I’m sure some of you saw the hilarious SNL skit on Democrats’ lack of confidence.) Besides the intrinsic uncertainty of the day before an election, no doubt nerves are fraying due to some prominent media stories suggesting Democratic chances may be slipping.

These stories mostly seem to be based on the idea that a lot of races are still close and, if an unexpected number don’t go the Democrats’ way, it might be a disappointing evening for the party. Well, true enough. But I think the preponderance of evidence still points to a very good night for the Democrats. (FWIW, 538 now has the Democrats’ House-flipping probability at 88 percent.)

Here are three excellent forecasts/assessments that support this view and provide a lot of very useful information.

1. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball released their final 2018 picks. They see Democrats taking the House with an estimated 34 seat pickup (interestingly, this is exactly the average of the quantitative model-based estimates I previously covered). They also see the Democrats doing very well in governors’ races.

House: “Our ratings changes leave 229 seats at least leaning to the Democrats and 206 at least leaning to the Republicans, so we are expecting the Democrats to pick up more than 30 seats (our precise ratings now show Democrats netting 34 seats in the House, 11 more than the 23 they need). We have long cautioned against assuming the House was a done deal for the Democrats, and we don’t think readers should be stunned if things go haywire for Democrats tomorrow night. That said, it may be just as likely — or even more likely — that we’re understating the Democrats in the House. Many of our sources on both sides seemed to think the Democratic tally would be more like +35 to 40 (or potentially even higher) when we checked in with them over the weekend.”

Senate: “Because of the bad map Democrats faced this year, the GOP picking up seats always seemed like a possibility, even a strong possibility. Our final ratings reaffirm this potential; we have 52 Senate seats at least leaning to the Republicans, and 48 at least leaning to the Democrats. If that happened, the GOP would net a seat.

The potential GOP gain would come from places that make sense: We have them favored in three of the five strongly Republican states that have Democratic senators running for reelection: Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. Meanwhile the two Republican-held seats where we now favor Democrats, Arizona and Nevada, are much more competitive states at the presidential level and thus are susceptible to Democratic takeovers in a challenging environment for Republicans.

The reasonable range of outcomes in the Senate still seems fairly wide, with a bigger GOP gain possible, or no gain at all or even a Democratic gain. The Democrats still essentially have no path to the majority without winning one of these three states: North Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas, and the Republicans retain what appear to be edges in all three.”

Governors: “Right now, the Republicans hold 33 governorships, the Democrats just 16, and an independent, Bill Walker holds Alaska. Our ratings suggest the Democrats could net 10 governorships, while the GOP could lose nine (we favor Republicans to pick up Alaska, which throws off the net change statistic a little bit). That does not include Georgia, where we are maintaining a unique “Toss-up/Leans Runoff” rating in anticipation of a possible runoff on Dec. 4 if neither major party candidate gets a majority. If the runoff happens, just think about how much money former state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams (D) might raise from the Democrats’ hyper-active small donor network. This is something that concerns Republicans if there’s a runoff.

More than half of the Democratic pickups could come in the Midwest. While we think the GOP could claw back one or two of these states — Iowa, Kansas, and Wisconsin are the picks we’re the least confident in – we thought the data and the year’s overall trends pointed to the Democrats in each of these states individually. Besides the national environment, there may just be a fatigue with eight years of conservative GOP rule in places like Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, particularly in a time of conservative governance in Washington. The public is idiosyncratic and often wants what it doesn’t have; the same dynamic helped Trump win many states in the Midwest after eight years of a liberal Democratic president.”

2. Analyst Henry Olsen published his midterm memo on the National Review site. Olsen is one of the most astute handicappers on the conservative side and he does not see a good might ahead for his side. Worth reading in its entirety though YMMV on his encomium to Ronald Reagan at the end.

“Tomorrow the RINOs will take their revenge and Republicans are going to take a beating in the House and the governorships.

Conservatives love animals, but there is one species they have long wanted to make extinct: the RINO. Not the horned African rhino, mind you, but rather the hoity-toity political RINO — Republicans in Name Only. Movement types have long been enraged by RINOs’ cool attitude toward tax cutting and social conservatism and their willingness to cooperate with, and occasionally vote for, Democrats. Hunting RINO officeholders during primary season has been the Club for Growth’s primary mission for years, and together with activist muscle, the group has successfully pushed the party to the right….

Tuesday…is going to be the RINOs’ revenge. Romney-loving RINOs are coming out of their preserves with fire in their hearts and a gleam in their eyes. They are decked out in hunting gear of their own, and their prey is the Trump-backing, change-seeking GOP. They might not be able to win primaries anymore, but in league with their new friends, the Democrats, they are eager to take down some big game of their own. And they will.

The new Democrat–RINO alliance is going to retake the House, sweep the GOP out of governor’s mansions in most purple states, and end the careers of hundreds of suburban state legislators. In the Senate, it will most likely hold Republicans to a one- or two-seat gain despite an incredibly favorable map — and may even win the Democrats a seat. Come Wednesday, the RINOs will mount their trophies on their walls and resolve to continue the hunt until the big game is caught: the orange-plumed woodpecker from Queens.

Senate Breakdown

• 52 Republicans, 48 Democrats (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats).

• States switching to the Democrats: NV, AZ.

• States switching to the Republicans: ND, MO, IN.

House Breakdown

• 209 Republicans, 226 Democrats. This is a gain of 32 seats for the Democrats; a plausible range is that they will gain 25 to 40. Anywhere in that range, Republicans will lose control of the chamber…..

Governors Breakdown

• 25 Republicans, 25 Democrats. This is a gain of nine governorships for the Democrats.

• States switching to the Democrats: FL, OH, NV, MI, NM, ME, IL, WI, IA.

• State switching to the Republicans (from an independent): AK.”

3. Perry Bacon, Jr. has an very detailed rundown on all the competitive governors’ races on 538. A lot of great data and tables in this article. Again, this analyst sees big gains for the Democrats in governorships.

“The big story about the 36 governors races this year is that Democrats are very likely to win control of several governorships from Republicans — and the GOP may not pick up any from Democrats. Indeed, it’s almost certain that more Americans will have a Democratic governor than a Republican governor in 2019. According to FiveThirtyEight’s “Classic” forecast,1 195 million Americans will have a Democratic governor after the 2018 elections, compared to 134 million with a Republican one. Democrats are forecasted to control 24 states, on average; Republicans to control 26. (Currently, 33 states have Republican governors, 16 states have Democratic governors and one (Alaska) an independent.)

If the election goes as expected, the GOP’s grip on policy at the state level is likely to be severely weakened. According to Ballotpedia, about 48 percent of Americans currently live in states where Republicans have total control of the state government,2 compared to 21 percent where Democrats have full control. (The rest live under divided government at the state level.) If things go according to our governors’ forecast, the Republican number will decline to about 32 percent and the Democratic number will increase to about 26 percent — and that’s not even considering expected gains by Democrats in state legislatures.”

All for now. Next stop: analysis of actual results!

With one notable exception, a cautious tone about today’s midterm outcome pervades political reporting at The New York Times and Washington Post. In his syndicated column “Why Democrats will do well on Election Day,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. takes a more optimistic view:

In House races, a 30-to-35-seat Democratic pickup is reasonable and may not even be the upper limit.

The Dems will grab a bushel of governor’s races, which I grant you is a vague prediction, but it’s intended to convey a very good night. To be more specific, at least three out of the four key blue-collar Trump states (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin) will go Democratic. I strongly suspect that Andrew Gillum will win Florida and Stacey Abrams will come in first in Georgia, though I don’t know if she will be able to avoid a runoff.

Noting that “there is a habit this year to bend over backward to assume that Trump has some kind of magic,” Dionne nonetheless sees a hopeful possibility for Democrats even in the Senate outcome: “And while the Senate remains a long shot for the Democrats, their chances of the inside straight they need to take the majority are not as distant as many think…Now why would someone want to go out on a limb like this when there is no need to? I have four reasons”:

…Yes, gerrymandering may hold down Democratic gains and make a lot of races close. But virtually all of the evidence we have from the elections that have been held since Trump’s victory — the special elections and regularly scheduled state and local contests in 2017 — is of a rather hard swing away from the Republicans. Mobilization on the Democratic side has been far greater than among Republicans, and primary turnouts, with only a few exceptions, have favored the Democrats…Democratic campaigns have been blessed with a volunteer force the size of which is unlike anything that has been seen since Barack Obama’s first race in 2008. And strong disapprovers of Trump have consistently outnumbered strong approvers by large margins — 43 percent to 28 percent in the pre-election Washington Post/ABC News poll, for example. This is another sign of intensity on the Democratic side.

Second, I believe Trump’s closing “argument,” focused on the “caravan” and his outlandish (and, to put it mildly, racially tinged) fearmongering, has hurt Republicans in the past week. Yes, it just might help a bit in a couple of Senate races in very pro-Trump states, but I am not even sure of that. What I know is that this is the last thing that will help Republicans among swing voters, moderates and especially women in the House races that are taking place on terrain less friendly to Trump…In the swing districts, moderate voters have been reminded of what they really can’t stand about Trump while liberals have been given another reason, if they needed one, to turn out to vote.

Third, when careful analysts such as Charlie Cook have changed their ratings on races over the past week or so, most of the movement has been in the Democrats’ direction. No, please don’t implicate Charlie in my overall analysis here; I’m using his numbers for my own purposes, and I certainly won’t blame him if I’m wrong. But he wouldn’t be moving those races, if he weren’t seeing something like what I am seeing.

…And the last reason I offer this prediction is personal. I have never believed we are Donald Trump’s country, and I do not believe we ever will be…My analysis of the 2016 exit poll data, based on the voters who disliked both Trump and Clinton, is that about 8 or 9 percent of Trump’s 46 percent was far more anti-Clinton than pro-Trump. So he starts with a base of, at best, 35 percent, and he has done nothing to add to it…Except for a couple of outlier polls, Trump has never enjoyed anything like majority support. I also believe that many of the blue-collar voters who backed Trump in protest did not fully buy into what he said and do not have a lot to show for his presidency. That’s what the swing against his party in the Midwest will be about.

Dionne concludes on a note of even bolder optimism: “I think that there are a lot of African American voters who want to stand up for their rights and enough white voters who want to speak up loudly against racism to give Gillum and Abrams a chance — especially since both of these candidates are (contra Trump) highly qualified and have done a very good job at both mobilization and persuasion…In the end, I am predicting that we will turn our backs on Trumpism because I think that as a people, we really are much better than he thinks we are.”

A key Democratic messaging point is well-expressed in Margot Sanger-Katz’s “Republicans Say They Will Protect Pre-existing Conditions. Their Records Say Something Else” at The Upshot. As Sanger-Katz explains, “It is Democrats, by passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010, who introduced meaningful protections for Americans with prior illnesses…And Republican officeholders have taken numerous actions that would tend to weaken those protections — in Congress, in states and in courts. The Trump administration introduced a sweeping new policy just last week that would allow states to sidestep Obamacare’s requirement to cover pre-existing conditions…Pre-existing conditions have been a central theme in Democratic campaigns around the country.” The rest of the article rolls out the shameful GOP record of trying to gut previous illness protection. Not a bad message to amplify in the last full day of the 2018 miderm campaign. 

From “What Americans care about ahead of the 2018 elections, mapped” by Andrew Van Dam at Wonkblog:

It was about what you’d expect from someone who couldn’t even be honest about the size and nature of his own presidential victory. But still, Trump’s plans to spin the midterms even if his party loses the House are amazing, and I wrote it up at New York.

According to Politico, the post-election plan is already set:

“President Donald Trump and his allies have crafted a face-saving plan if Democrats trounce their way to a House majority — tout Trump as the savior of Republicans in the Senate.

“In public and private, Trump and advisers are pointing to the president’s surge of campaigning on behalf of Republican Senate candidates — 19 rallies alone since Labor Day — as evidence that nobody else could have had a bigger impact in the states. The argument is classic Trump, who despite making the midterms a referendum on his own presidency, has a history of personalizing and then dwelling on his victories while distancing himself and diverting attention from his losses.”

So now we know part of the thinking behind the otherwise oddly exclusive focus of Trump on states with Senate races instead of close House races. “Saving” the Senate was an extraordinarily easier task, given the fact that Republicans have the most favorable partisan landscape in living memory for that chamber. As veteran election forecaster Stu Rothenberg recently said: 

“The map continues to be the main reason why the Democrats aren’t likely to flip the Senate. It’s the worst map for one party I have ever seen.”

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/984922168910893056?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E984922168910893056&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fintelligencer%2F2018%2F11%2Fhow-trump-will-spin-losing-the-house-he-saved-the-senate.html

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

In the Immortal Words of Jim Morrison, “The Midwest Is the Best”

Well, actually it was “the west is the best”, but I’m sure Mr. Morrison wouldn’t mind this slight alteration. Anyway, evidence continues to accumulate that Democrats will do exceptionally well in the midwest this year. From an excellent Perry Bacon Jr. article on 538:

“During the Obama years, Republicans won total control of the state government in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. Then, on Election Day in 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowly lost in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — states Democrats had won at the presidential level for more than two decades. She was easily defeated in Iowa and Ohio, which had tended to be close.2 Clinton barely won in Minnesota, another state where Democrats are usually strong. Post-election, there was a lot of doom and gloom about the Democratic Party’s prospects in the Midwest, with both nonpartisan analysts and even some party strategists suggesting the party needed a dramatic overhaul or risk losing in this region, which will be packed with white, working-class voters, for the foreseeable future.

Never mind all that now. Democrats are looking strong in the Midwest — it is by some measures the region where they are likely to make their biggest gains this November.”

Why the comeback? Bacon lists several reasons but surely this is one of them most important and one to which Democrats should be paying close attention:

“[N[ational polls suggest that white voters without college degrees favor Republicans in 2018, but the margin between the two parties is likely to narrow compared to 2016, when Clinton lost that bloc by more than 30 percentage points. That shift has outsized influence in the Midwest, which has higher populations of white voters without college degrees than many other parts of the country. So the Democrats’ problem with white working-class voters may not be as severe as it looked on Election Day 2016 — which perhaps had more to do with the conditions in that election than the party overall. What we are seeing in 2018 suggests that working-class whites are not a single national bloc, but still vote much differently by state and region. Working-class whites in Southern states like Georgia and Texas are overwhelmingly opposed to Democratic candidates in key races this year, but they are less GOP-leaning in Midwest states like Ohio and Wisconsin.”

Also, women voters are likely to play a huge role in Democratic breakthroughs, if they come. Jim Grossfeld has an excellent, detailed article up on The American Prospect site about women candidates and voters in Michigan. It is indeed a heartening tale.

“[W]omen make up two-thirds of the Democratic challengers in races for the Republican dominated Michigan House, where Republicans currently outnumber Democrats 110 to 63, and women hold only 33 seats. Women also won just under half of the Democratic nominations for the state Senate, where Republicans now hold a 27-to-11 super-majority. There, men outnumber women by a staggering 34 to four. More than half of the Democrats running for Michigan’s U.S. House seats are women, too.

And at the top of the ticket, the Democratic nominees for the four principal statewide offices are all women: Gretchen Whitmer for governor, Dana Nessel for attorney general, Jocelyn Benson for secretary of state, and incumbent U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow.”

Even before his “immigration speech” at the White House that telegraphed all sorts of panicky militarism about the southern border, the president was making it clear that he only had eyes for his “base” and was determined to get them fired up to save Republican candidates, as I pointed out at New York.

As the midterm election campaign winds down (or given the enthusiasm levels, winds up) to a tense conclusion, there’s not much doubt about the Trump/GOP closing pitch, made almost exclusively to the party’s conservative “base:” it’s about the “caravan,” the evil lying media, the scheming socialist Democrats, and the threat to law and order posed by (non-white) Democratic constituencies. It’s a fear campaign with the president’s usual lurid touches.

But make no mistake: underlying these themes is a politics of race and identity that somehow isn’t seen as malignant by Republicans because of the race involved and its endangered majority status. Adam Serwer does a good job of exposing the truth that is just barely beneath the surface of the GOP midterm message:

“In upstate New York, an embattled Republican incumbent attacks his black, Harvard-educated Democratic challenger as a ‘big-city rapper’; in California, an anti-immigrant Republican under federal indictment smears his Arab American rival as a terrorist; in Georgia, a state far from the Southern border, the Republican candidate for governor brags that he’ll drive around in his pickup truck and ’round up criminal illegals and take ’em home myself.’ Although the president hasn’t spent as much time in recent appearances emphasizing the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, he framed the opposition to his nominee, who faced multiple accusations of sexual assault, as an attack on powerful men by dangerous feminists.

Indeed, white male identity politics has become so central to conservative appeals to the electorate that it has become an obligatory orthodoxy as oppressive as any left-wing campus speech code, as I noted in observing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp’s boasts of being “politically incorrect” earlier this year:

“If Kemp wins…with this strategy, it is going to reinforce the already powerful Trumpian impulse to treat conservative “base” voters as motivated above all by the desire to go back to the wonderful days when a white man could without repercussions tell a racist joke, ‘tease’ women about their physical appearance or sexual morals, and mock people who in some way (say, a disability) differ from one’s own self. At some point we may all come to understand that it’s not (except in some scattered college campuses) the politically correct who are imposing speech norms on the rest of us, but the politically incorrect who won’t be happy until offending the less powerful is again recognized as among the principal Rights of Man.”

It has for years been unclear whether Republicans fully understand that they are living on borrowed time in depending on appeals to the fears and resentments of a shrinking majority, and to an increasingly insecure male minority within that majority. After their 2012 presidential defeat they were briefly chastened by the need for a more inclusive message, before Donald Trump came along and doubled-down on white identity politics one more time – and won.

Now there’s no doubt this is Trump’s party now. Its desire for policies benefiting the largely white business class is harnessed to an appeal to racial solidarity that keeps non-college educated folk in the fold despite the lack of any tangible accomplishments on their behalf. In a pure power struggle bereft of any principles of generosity or common purpose, those who already hold power have a built-in advantage, and that’s what Republicans are counting upon. But let’s please discard the idea that Trump and his allies are innocent of identity politics. They are master practitioners of that art.