Pres Winners House of Reps Trump-Era Elections 2012 2016 # R Seats # D Seats # Regular RE Win Rate # Special SE Win Rate Romney Trump 206 3 56 2% 51 25% Romney Clinton 15 0 9 44% 3 33% Obama Trump 12 9 5 80% 6 67% Obama Clinton 8 182 69 91% 24 96%

The data in the table above really fascinates me. The presidential winner provides only a partial picture of a district’s voting patterns, but we can get a surprisingly nuanced view of the midterms from these data alone. I’ll use this as a starting point to dive into some of the issues facing Democrats as they seek to take back the House.

Romney-Trump Districts

Let’s start with the most depressing category: Romney-Trump districts. There are 209 such seats, or 48% of all congressional districts. And, unsurprisingly, they are represented overwhelmingly by Republicans.

Current Representation

Just three Democrats represent Romney-Trump seats — Josh Gottheimer in NJ-05, Tom O’Halleran in AZ-01, and Collin Peterson in MN-07. The former two districts were reasonably close in both 2012 and 2016 at the presidential level. The latter is very Republican at the top of the ticket, but Peterson is a strong incumbent. Nonetheless, these are some of the few seats where Democrats actually need to be on defense. Thankfully, all three incumbents are running for reelection.

Learning from Trump-Era Elections

And what about Democratic opportunities in these seats? Well, we have a big sample of Trump-era elections from these types of districts — 51 contested special elections and 56 contested regularly scheduled elections (all from Virginia and New Jersey), the vast majority of which are state legislative races.

There has been some debate on Election Twitter about whether the Democrats’ dramatic over-performance in special elections can translate to victories in the midterms. The logic is simple: special elections typically draw microscopic turnouts, favoring the party with more enthusiastic voters. Democrats are pissed off and itching to vote, so they’re turning out disproportionately in specials and helping Dems win in Republican territory. But turnout in November will be much higher, meaning Democrats can’t just rely on a small cadre of enthusiastic voters to win elections.

Trump-era election data broadly supports this idea. Democrats have done very well in special elections in Romney-Trump districts, winning over a quarter of them. But in regular elections, they’ve done much worse. In fact, Democrats have won only one out of 56 such elections: Cheryl Turpin’s victory in VA House of Delegates district 85. And it should be noted: she won by 2% in a district that had favored each of Romney and Trump by less than 1%.

Opportunities

Democrats’ expectations should probably lie somewhere between these two extremes. They certainly aren’t going to win 1/4 of Romney-Trump districts in November. But their opportunities extend beyond the three seats they currently hold, too.

Four Romney-Trump districts are listed as toss-ups by Cook Political Report. Two have incumbents running for reelection: Don Bacon in NE-02 and Claudia Tenney in NY-22. The other two are open seats: MI-11 and NJ-11, where Dave Trott and Rodney Frelinghuysen are retiring. All four of these seats are absolutely winnable.

The redistricting in Pennsylvania has thrown a bit of a wrench in things (the data in the table above makes use of the current maps). The prior versions of PA-08, PA-15, and PA-16 were competitive Romney-Trump districts. Assuming the new maps take effect (which Republicans are contesting) many of the newly drawn districts will be even more competitive. I’ve yet to find 2012 presidential results by CD for the new map, but will update the table accordingly.

Plenty of other Romney-Trump districts could be in contention, especially in a wave environment. A not exhaustive list includes: FL-18 (Brian Mast), NC-13 (Ted Budd), MI-08 (Mike Bishop), IL-13 (Rodney Davis), VA-07 (Dave Brat), NM-02 (open), and FL-06 (open).

If Dems can win just a small percentage of Romney-Trump districts, they’ll be well on their way to taking the House.

Next time, we’ll talk about Romney-Clinton and Obama-Trump districts, which generally provide better opportunities for Democrats (can you believe not a single Romney-Clinton district has a Dem Congressperson? That’s about to change!).