THE FATEFUL SLATE
IN 2018 DEMOCRATS FLIPPED 41 REPUBLICAN House seats, 23 of them in districts that Donald Trump won in 2016. This year Democrats are hoping those midterm wins stick for a second round—and turn out to have been harbingers of growing dissatisfaction with Trump among conservatives and independents, dissatisfaction that could now be decisive in the race for the White House. The logic: if some GOP voters will vote for moderate Democrats in the House, they should also, after nearly four years of Trump, be willing to cast their ballots for a moderate in the White House.
Eight of the flipped seats are in three key states Trump won by narrow, and in one case razor-thin, margins: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida. All eight of those freshman Democrats are running for re-election this year and those elections are being closely watched by the brass of both parties.
“The districts Democrats flipped in 2018 are the places where we might expect to see the most voters move from Trump to Biden, but there aren’t many of them,” says Dave Wasserman, House editor for The Cook Political Report, which is non-partisan. “These are largely suburban seats with swaths of voters who used to support Republicans and have shifted pretty strongly over.”
The Democrats are making a big bet on a small group of voters. In the U.S.’s system, though, a relative handful of votes can make a
