Thanks To Trump, 2018 Is Now Anyone's Guess

On paper, 2018 should be a banner year for Republicans. Following the solid Democratic years of 2006 and 2012, Senate Democrats are overextended in red states, to a point rarely seen in modern partisan politics. Democrats in Indiana, West Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, and Missouri are all up for reelection—all states that went for Donald Trump in 2016 by double digit margins. Winning seats in just those five states (while successfully defending the eight seats they hold that are up for reelection) should put Republicans within reach of a filibuster-proof majority. Winning elections in those states, plus in even a few of the swing states that Trump won by single-digit margins, would give the GOP its first legislative supermajority in the Senate in nearly a century.

The gubernatorial map is more difficult, mainly because whereas the Senate class up for reelection next year comes off two successive elections that solidly favored Democrats, the governors up for reelection were elected and reelected in the Republican waves of 2010 and 2014. Additionally, many more governors than senators will be leaving office next year, leading to more open seats that will make it easier for the opposition party to post victories. Still, it should not be impossible for Republican governors nationally to hold their own in terms of total numbers.

But all this, of course, ignores the Trump effect. Maps and data were next to useless in 2016, and their effectiveness will not likely improve with President Trump in office. Despite the convention wisdom about midterm elections being uniformly bad for the party in power, that outcome is not foreordained. Republicans made gains in Congress in 2002, and Democrats broke even in 1998. If Republicans are successful at leading a unified government, voters will reward them.

So far, of course, they haven’t been, due again to the Trump effect. The administration currently lurches from one crisis to the next, with no clear plan for enacting any sort of ambitious reform agenda. The government elected in 2016 has certainly not been a status quo government, but neither has it been one to deliver many meaningful results.

We are now faced with a reversal in hopes from the 2016 election. Republicans now hope that the maps and data are correct, and count on the “Great Red Wall” of the South and West. Democrats, meanwhile, hope for grassroots anger to defy the odds and retake Congress. Whichever party ends up being right, the outcome of 2018 largely depends on the President and his administration getting their act together.