Politics 10 Maps That Explain the 2014 Midterms

Kyle Kondik is managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan political newsletter produced by the University of Virginia Center for Politics. He also directs the center’s Washington, D.C., office.

What the Democrats wouldn’t give to swap this year’s Senate map for the one coming up in 2016. This year’s Senate class, filled with Democratic incumbents in hostile territory, would be difficult to defend any year—it’s especially so when there’s an unpopular Democratic president in the White House. But the next Senate map, coming in 2016, is filled with Democratic targets and Republican vulnerabilities. Simply switch them—leaving all else the same—and the 2014 midterm takes on a completely different character.

That’s obviously impossible, but it does get at an essential truth of American politics: For all the plaudits heaped on the winners and derision dumped on the losers after an election, structural factors controlled by neither side dictate the results to a significant degree. Big gains one year lead to big losses another; races won in certain environments would be defeats in others. Due to the mix of seats up for election this year, just 2 million voters across six states—0.6 percent of the U.S. population—could end up deciding the fate of the Senate.


What follows is an attempt to illustrate the structure of the current state of American congressional politics through a series of maps, some explaining the Senate, some explaining the House and some explaining where certain key races will be won and lost.

***

1. 2012 presidential election results

In 2012, President Obama won 26 states while Mitt Romney, his Republican rival, took 24. That’s relevant in any discussion of the Senate—this year’s main electoral event—because the upper chamber treats all states the same: Each gets two senators no matter how big or small it is. Based on the presidential results alone, Democrats should currently have a 52-48 edge in the Senate, but they actually have a 55-45 seat majority. This is because, over the past few election cycles, Democratic senators have done a better job than Republicans of winning in states where their presidential candidates lose.

2. Current occupants of U.S. Senate by state

Democrats hold 12 seats in states Mitt Romney won: two apiece in Montana and West Virginia, and one each in Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota and South Dakota. Republicans hold nine seats in Obama 2012 states: Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

That Democratic advantage becomes starker when looking only at the heavily Republican states where Democrats currently hold Senate seats—the places where Obama didn’t even get 45 percent of the vote. All but one of the Democratic seats listed above qualify. Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) is the only Democratic senator from a Romney state where Obama surpassed 45 percent. In contrast, there are only two Republicans who represent really blue states, places where Romney got less than 45 percent: Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Mark Kirk of Illinois.

In this cycle, Democrats argue they can localize their tough races, focusing on individual elections rather than disseminating a national message. They hope to prompt voters to choose entrenched, resourceful incumbents such as Sens. Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana over their respective, likely challengers, Dan Sullivan, Tom Cotton and Bill Cassidy, whom Democrats are relentlessly painting as far-right extremists.

It’s true that, for whatever combination of reasons, Democrats have been better at “localizing” than the Republicans. But this time, Republicans aren’t trying to localize—they’re trying to nationalize, making a simple argument to voters: If you don’t like the president and you don’t like the Affordable Care Act, why would you vote for a Democrat? And given President Obama’s middling approval ratings, that approach makes particular sense in the red-state races.

3. The GOP-friendly 2014 Senate map

About one-third of the Senate gets elected every two years, and not every Senate “class” is created equal.

This year ought to be a good one for the GOP, because Senate Class 2, the most Republican-leaning of the three Senate classes, is up. (The University of Virginia Center for Politics’ Crystal Ball ratings for each race are pictured above.) Over the past four presidential elections, the Democratic presidential nominee has won an average of 51.2 percent of the national two-party presidential vote, while the Republican nominee has taken 48.8 percent. Yet in the Class 2 batch of Senate states, over the same time frame, the Democratic nominee has taken an average of 46.6 percent of the vote.

Compare that to 2012’s Senate Class 1, where Democratic presidential nominees won 50.7 percent of the two-party vote the last four elections, and 2010’s Class 3, where they took 48.2 percent.

Plus, six of the 11 Democrats from places where Obama won less than 45 percent in 2012 are on the ballot this year, which also happens to be the number of seats Republicans must net to win the Senate.

4. This year’s Senate races on the political map of the United States

This map shows the 2014 Senate races in blue and red, with the states sized according to their population and colored based on their current occupant. (The gray states are those with no regular Senate election this year.)

Senate Class 2, the one contested this year, is far less representative of the nation as a whole than the two other classes. Its 33 states contain slightly more than half (51.8 percent) of the nation’s population. Class 1 (the 2012 class) also features 33 states, but those states host three-quarters (75.2 percent) of the population; Class 3, coming in 2016 with 34 states, is similar to Class 1, with 72.6 percent of the population.

One big reason the 2014 Senate class is so unrepresentative is that California, with its 38 million residents (about an eighth of the country’s population), has no Senate election this year. Neither do New York, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, respectively the nation’s third, fourth, sixth and seventh biggest states. No Senate election is ever a national election—but this year’s least of all.

Republicans, as mentioned, need to net six seats to win the Senate, and there are six Democratic-held seats on this map where Obama got less than 45 percent of the vote in 2012. Let’s assume the GOP nets those six seats, but everything else remains the same, which is a perfectly plausible scenario. Those states—Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia—represent just 3.8 percent of the U.S. population.

Of course, the actual number of residents who are eligible to vote, who show up to vote and who cast a ballot for the GOP candidate is an even smaller share. Assuming turnout in line with the most recent midterm, control of the Senate could end up being switched by 2 million Republican voters, or less—just 0.6 percent of the American population. That would hardly be a national mandate, though Republicans would assuredly claim one anyway.

5. This year’s most important county

Just kidding. Waukesha County, a big, suburban Milwaukee county in Wisconsin (pictured above), has become an in-joke among political reporters on Twitter during election nights. “It’ll all come down to crucial Waukesha County,” they say, no matter the state or the race. Waukesha is actually an overwhelmingly Republican county that gave two-thirds of its votes to Mitt Romney in 2012. A few years ago, Democrats thought they had won a state Supreme Court seat before the now-notorious county belatedly reported votes that delivered the race to the Republicans.

6. This year’s actual most important county

Perhaps the key Senate race in the country is in North Carolina, a Republican-leaning swing state that both sides suspect could decide the Senate majority.

Adjust your eyes when looking at the maps above, which feature, on the left, Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan’s victory over Republican Elizabeth Dole in 2008 and, on the right, Republican Sen. Richard Burr’s victory over Democrat Elaine Marshall two years later. In this case, blue is for Republicans, and red is for Democrats. (These maps are from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, a first-rate resource for election watchers.)

Hagan took slightly more than 54 percent of the two-party vote against Dole in 2008, four points better than Obama performed on the same ballot. Two years later, incumbent Burr performed a bit better than Hagan in his reelection bid, winning 56 percent of the two-party vote.

In each of these elections, the winner of the state also won Raleigh’s Wake County. Hagan took the county by 15 points in 2008; Burr won it by a point in 2010. Wake is North Carolina’s second-biggest county, but it consistently casts more votes than the biggest—Mecklenburg, home to Charlotte.

Because Florida and Ohio, with their famous, key counties like Hillsborough (Tampa) and Hamilton (Cincinnati), don’t feature Senate races this year, Wake might very well be the key county this year. Hagan needs to win it again, and not just by a few points, which will be a challenge given the significant turnout problems Democrats face in North Carolina midterms.

7. The GOP’s Rocky Mountain climb

Part of the reason Republicans don’t currently control the Senate is that they kicked away a highly winnable race in Colorado in 2010 by running a bad candidate, Ken Buck, whom Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) beat by less than two points. (Democrats also credit a sophisticated and pricey get-out-the-vote operation for their victory there.) The results of that race by county are above. Democrats are back to blue, Republicans to red.

The Republican nominee this year, Rep. Cory Gardner, is a better candidate than Buck, whom Gardner recently bigfooted out of the race. But Sen. Mark Udall, the Democratic incumbent, is arguably a better candidate than Bennet. Polls here are very close, and if Republicans are to win any Obama-state Senate seats this year, Colorado might be the one (other contenders are Iowa, Michigan and New Hampshire).

One key Colorado county to watch is Jefferson, the sliver of light blue just west of Denver and south of Boulder. The last four Senate races in Colorado have all been competitive (Udall’s 10-point win in 2008 was the biggest during that period), and the winner has carried Jefferson County each time. The county and state both backed George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Jefferson also has the most active voters of any Colorado county. Gardner was right when he said recently: “As Jefferson County goes, so goes the state.”

Jefferson would also be a good choice for most important county in this year’s Senate races instead of the Tar Heel State’s Wake, but North Carolina has a slightly better chance than Colorado of being the Senate’s tipping point.

8. Appalachia: The No-Dems Zone

Anyone who has driven on West Virginia’s pristine highways over the past several years (RIP, Sen. Robert Byrd) has seen the pro-coal, “Obama’s NO JOB ZONE” billboards that dot the interstates. The billboards all feature a rough outline of Appalachia, which has become poisonous terrain for Democrats.

The federal Appalachian Regional Commission classifies 428 counties and independent cities as Appalachian, stretching from southwestern New York all the way to northern Alabama and Mississippi. West Virginia is the only state that is wholly included in Appalachia. (It’s doubtful that residents of Youngstown, Ohio, really think of themselves as Appalachian, but it helps in getting federal largesse.)

More than five dozen House districts contain at least one Appalachian county, and Republicans control all but 10 of them (52 of 62). While redistricting last cycle makes an apples-to-apples comparison impossible, Democrats have lost at least a dozen of these districts over the last two cycles.

The GOP is nearly tapped out here, having defeated all the Democrats they can, with the exception of Rep. Nick Rahall, West Virginia’s lone remaining House Democrat—and probably the most endangered Democratic incumbent in the country.

A national redistricting disadvantage for Democrats and a tight packing of Democratic voters in urban areas are two reasons Republicans have a firm grip on the House. But another is the tarnished star of the working-class party in the country’s historic working-class region.

9. The Democratic House bunkers

Speaking of redistricting, Democrats rightly complain about the Republican gerrymandering that has limited their House opportunities in many states, including several places that twice voted for Obama but are run by Republicans at the state level, such as Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But Democrats have also benefited from redistricting in some places. They made their own luck in Illinois, where the Democratic state government drew the map, and they hit the jackpot in California, when a nonpartisan map was drawn in their favor. Democrats netted eight seats in the House from these two states in 2012, which accounted for their entire national net gain that year. More than a quarter of the current House Democratic caucus (50 of 199) hails from just these two states.

Politico’s Alex Isenstadt recently reported that Democrats are resigned to be mostly playing defense in the House this cycle, which squares with the expectation from most prognosticators that the Republicans are better positioned to net House seats and thus add to their House majority. After all, the president’s party almost always loses House seats in midterms. So playing to a draw in the House this cycle would be a Democratic win, and that likely requires holding or even adding to their delegations in these two blue states.

Democrats are in good shape to take California’s open 31st district and have a chance to beat Rep. Rodney Davis in Illinois’ 13th. Republicans, meanwhile, can credibly target a few Democratic seats in each state, most notably Rep. Scott Peters’ in California’s 52nd and Rep. Brad Schneider’s in Illinois’ 10th.

10. The long game

The Senate script shifts in 2016, when the Republicans elected in 2010 will have to stand for reelection during a presidential year. Far-sighted Republicans know that to maintain a durable Senate majority, they’ll have to pad their numbers this year because they could lose at least a few seats in 2016. The map above shows the seats coming up next time, along with their current occupants.

Of the nine Senate Republicans who represent states Obama took in 2012, seven will be on the ballot in 2016. Sens. Mark Kirk of Illinois, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin will likely start the cycle with their odds of winning reelection no better than 50/50. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa could easily get another term if he wanted it, but he’ll be 83 on Election Day 2016 and might retire, triggering a highly competitive race. Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Rob Portman of Ohio and Marco Rubio of Florida will probably start as favorites by a small margin, assuming they run for reelection. Additionally, Democrats could credibly target seats in less conservative red states—places like Arizona, Georgia, Indiana and North Carolina—particularly if some incumbents, such as the 77-year-old John McCain, retire.

The only viable Republican targets on this map are Colorado and Nevada, two places where poor GOP primary choices snatched defeat from the jaws of victory four years ago.

Given that the 2015-2016 Congress is going to be full of posturing in advance of the presidential election—churning out an ill-fitting jumble of culture war manifestos and tissue-paper budgets that have no hope of becoming law—each side should look at 2014 as a bridge to the next main event in 2016, when both should have at least some chance of emerging with a unified government.

So here’s some advice to those waiting for action on major national issues: Just wait until after the next election. The next presidential election, that is.

Correction: An earlier version of map 2 incorrectly identified New Hampshire as having two Democratic senators. New Hampshire has one Republican and one Democratic senator.