Results have showed the midterm elections were better for Democrats than they initially seemed. But what are the real lessons to be taken from 2018?

What the midterms can teach the Democrats about winning in 2020

How to beat Donald Trump? As the final midterm results come in, it’s clear the elections were even better for Democrats than they at first seemed. Democrats won significant new legislative majorities, lured wayward voters home, reclaimed lost territory and broke new ground.

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Yet anxiety is palpable among Democrats yearning to translate the 2018 blue wave into a 2020 White House washout. Is it possible the party might misplay what looks like a strong hand?

Trump is clearly vulnerable, with key pieces of his 2016 coalition – starting with educated women voters – calving off and his victory map in tatters. More than anything else, if suburban white women break against Trump in 2020 the way they broke in favor of Democrats in 2018, analysts say Trump looks like a one-term president.

But interviews with pollsters and strategists from across the political spectrum reveal potential pitfalls for Democrats, too.

Voter enthusiasm could slacken. A hollow economic message could squander the upper midwest. Inroads among educated voters could be reversed. And perhaps most chilling of all for Democrats: the party might nominate the wrong candidate.

So what are the real lessons to be taken from 2018 for voters looking ahead? Here’s what some pollsters and strategists had to say.

‘A record role for women’

Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners, a Democratic pollster and strategist, said “a big story” of the midterms was the role of women: candidates, donors, activists and voters.

“In all of these close races, to the extent the Democrats win, it will be because women took them over the top,” Lake said, adding that Democrats “won women by 19 points and lost men by three to four points, depending on the exit poll you’re looking at”.

“The one group that have defected from Trump are college-educated white women,” Lake said. “Those Trump voters have gone Democratic and some have switched their party identification. That said, Democrats still lost white non-college-educated women by a pretty substantial margin.”

The gender gap is insanely high, and it’s showing no signs of getting better Evan Siegfried, Republican strategist

Republican strategist Evan Siegfried said the party needed to find an answer to the exodus of women in the midterms.

“The gender gap is insanely high, and it’s showing no signs of getting better” from the Republican perspective, he said. “And yet the party itself is seemingly going to try and push more Trumpism.”

Going state by state, the widening gender gap could spoil Trump’s map. Trump lost college-educated white women in 2016 by a 61%-35% margin, according to a voting records-based analysis by Pew Research. But Trump won enough of them to make the difference in large suburban blocks of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and to come close in Minnesota.

That might be impossible in 2020.

“The gender gap expanded dramatically” in Pennsylvania in 2018, said Christopher Borick, director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College in Allentown.

“Throughout the south-east of the state, including the Lehigh Valley, you saw enormous turnout among women voters,” Borick said. “And the break [toward Democrats], according to the exit polls, was just gigantic, and that made a lot of these races non-competitive in terms of Republicans’ chances.”

Start with educated women, these pollsters and strategists say, and you have the first ingredient of what could be Trump’s downfall. But while women represent a majority of voters and are the most reliable voters in any election, other ingredients – other voting groups – will be needed for a Democrat to take the White House.

‘The electorate has changed already’

Not every demographic showed erosion in support for Trump. Non-college-educated voters and rural voters, notably, did not show significant movement toward Democrats in the midterms.

The power of Trump’s base was reflected in the success of Republicans at knocking off Democratic Senate incumbents in states like Indiana (which Trump won by 19 points), Missouri (+18.5 Trump), North Dakota (+36) and possibly Florida.

But Republican strategists worry that the Trump base is not big enough to win re-election, especially considering how tight his 2016 victory was.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Democratic senator-elect Kyrsten Sinema in Washington DC meets the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, in Washington on Tuesday. Photograph: Alexander Drago/Reuters

“The base by itself can’t sustain this party,” said Siegfried, who has urged Republicans to reach out more to millennial and non-white voters. “We need to find things that are going to excite the base without alienating the rest of the country.”

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One reason Trump will not be able to replicate his 2016 victory – even if he repeats it – is that “the electorate has changed already”, with an influx of new, younger Democratic voters and a shrinkage of older Republicans, said Borick in Pennsylvania.

“Where you have seen declines in voters in the state are in Trump counties, because of age and other factors – that portion is modestly down already since 2016,” he said, “with new voters coming in on the side of the Democrats.”

The new voters drove Democrats to a national popular vote advantage in House races of more than 7%, Dave Wasserman of the Cook Report has estimated, exceeding Republican margins in their huge wave years of 2010 (+6.8) and 1994 (+7.1).

“There are some Republicans who have pointed to, ‘Oh, it wasn’t really a blue wave because we beat the historical average for seat losses,’” said Siegfried. “Um, we lost over 30 seats [at least 32 and as many as 36]. It’s sort of like saying: ‘Yeah, the Titanic hit the iceberg, but all hands weren’t lost when it went down’.”

Educated women voters, young voters and some older voters, too – all those categories are on the move. But as Hillary Clinton found out the hard way, a popular majority does not always win the election. The map has to be right, too. So how does it look?

The map

One of the most painful losses for Democrats in 2016 was in Wisconsin, which had not gone for a Republican president since Ronald Reagan but which Trump won by less than 1%.

The midterm result in Wisconsin potentially pointed to a better 2020 for Democrats. The Democratic Senate incumbent Tammy Baldwin beat her opponent by 11 points, winning generous margins throughout the state including the rural west. The Democrats finally threw out the Republican governor, Scott Walker, a top presidential prospect just two years ago.

In Michigan, the story was similar. Trump edged the narrowest of victories in 2016, winning by 0.3 percentage points. But in 2018, the state re-elected its Democratic senator by six points and Democrats picked off two House seats and grabbed the governorship.

These were major Democratic gains across levels of government Christopher Borick, Pennsylvania

In the upper midwest, turnout among non-white voters, especially African Americans, appeared to be robust, a line the Democrats will have to hold if they want to win in 2020. Successful Democrats, meanwhile, managed to keep the margin with Trump’s base – non-college-educated, white, more rural voters – close.

In Pennsylvania, the story was similar. Borick said the state saw “a really good night for Democrats” that “could have been even better” from their perspective.

“There were Democratic blowouts at the gubernatorial and Senate levels, a pick-up of three seats in the House in addition to the one they picked up last year in the special election. They picked up seats in the state legislature, both the house and the senate. These were major Democratic gains across levels of government.”

Borick pointed out that the state delegation in Congress went from zero women to four overnight.

“In the state as a whole, compared to 2016, you saw the counties that flipped from Barack Obama to Trump go really strongly for Democrats – Luzerne, Northampton, Erie – all Trump counties, were solidly blue across the races that were there. Turnout among Democrats was up.”

Analysts say the Democrats are left with two basic map strategies for 2020: take back the upper midwest, where Trump scored his surprise upset, or build on promising signs in the sun belt states across the south, stretching from Arizona, where Democrats grabbed their first Senate seat in 30 years and a majority of congressional seats, to Texas and Georgia, where the party proved it could compete.

Older parts of the Democratic map, however, appeared to be in trouble. States like Iowa, Missouri and Ohio, long a national bellwether, appeared to slide more decisively to the Republican column, despite the re-election of the Democratic senator Sherrod Brown in the Buckeye state. The Democrats appear to have suffered a double loss in Florida, in the gubernatorial and Senate races.

Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) So here's an updated map showing House popular vote winners, mapped onto the Electoral College. Dark blue/dark red means the party won by >= 5 points, light blue/pink means it was close. pic.twitter.com/nehg9YEZ6u

“Getting stuck in between the Northern Path and the Sun Belt Strategy is a big risk for Democrats: where their electoral college problems become most acute,” wrote the FiveThirtyEight elections analyst Nate Silver. “And although the potential addition of Texas to the Sun Belt Strategy group of states makes it more intriguing, Tuesday night’s results suggest that the Northern Path is still the path of least resistance for a Democrat hoping to win the electoral college.

“If Trump has lost the benefit of the doubt from voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, he may not have so much of an electoral college advantage in 2020.”

The candidate

The Democrats can perfect their demographic and geographic plan, but if they don’t find the right candidate, it won’t matter.

The dilemma facing a party nominating a presidential candidate is always the same: do you go with the star candidate who can motivate the base – an Elizabeth Warren, a Beto O’Rourke, a Barack Obama – or a “safe” candidate with more crossover appeal: a Sherrod Brown, an Amy Klobuchar … an Obama.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beto O’Rourke at an event in Austin, Texas, on 4 November. Photograph: Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP/Getty Images

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In 2020, there will be an added twist to the puzzle: the Democrats must find a candidate capable of tangling with Trump personally, one who can mix it up enough with the president to stop a landslide among base Trump voters, but not become tarnished in the process in a way that tamps down Democratic enthusiasm.

Tucked into this question is the question of ideology. How far to the left can the successful candidate run? Can Medicare for All be a national platform? To what extent should the candidate foreground hot-button social issues?

Democratic voters might have to judge whether a candidate such as California senator Kamala Harris can hold enough rural voters in the upper midwest, or whether Brown, the Ohio senator whose longer presence on the national scene has produced little glamour, can get rank-and-file Democrats excited.

Democrats will have to judge whether a starry young talent like O’Rourke can be trusted with a must-win national election after he lost a state election – and that’s assuming O’Rourke is interested.

“He used a fog machine at his concession speech,” Ted Cruz strategist Jeff Roe told CNN. “He ain’t done.”

Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) Record numbers of women won their elections last week, so of course we’re starting off this week by talking about which of the men who lost should run for president.

From another angle, given what just happened, it is ridiculous to begin the conversation with Sherrod and Beto when you have Kamala, Elizabeth and Amy.

“It’s a long road back – and it was an encouraging result,” said Lake. “I think Democrats had hoped it would be even more encouraging than it ended up being – but yes, it is encouraging.

“The main challenges are to continue to find candidates and messages that mobilize the base and appeal to the swing voter. The second thing is to make greater inroads particularly to white, non-college-educated women. I think that’s the single most important thing we need to do.”