In the 2024 Elections, It's a Man's Man's Man's Republican Party

One of the most important consequences of Donald Trump's political ascendance in 2016 was the effect it had on the political engagement of women. They played a leading role in the "Resistance" movement of anti-Trump activism in the 2018 and 2020 elections, which often portrayed Trump as uniquely threatening to women's interests in both his substantive policies and personal behavior. The number of female candidates in the Democratic Party made a noticeable jump in 2018, the first election after Trump became president, and Democratic primary voters seemed especially motivated to express their aversion to Trump by nominating women for Congress and other major offices. The Democratic House majority elected that year contained a record number of women, and in 2020 a majority of non-incumbent Democratic nominees were female for the first time in American history.

Less predictably, the proportion of women nominated by the Republican Party also increased during Trump's presidency. Women rose from 13 percent to 22 percent of all Republican House nominees between 2018 and 2020, and jumped from 18 percent to 33 percent of all non-incumbent nominees. Media reports revealed that Republican officials and interest groups, worried about stereotypes of a male-dominated party, had invested in efforts to recruit more women to run for office. The representation of women in the GOP still lagged well behind the Democrats, but seemed to be on a similar trajectory.

However, the parties have since diverged. The picture for Democrats is of relative stability. Since 2018, the proportion of Democratic House nominees who are women has remained between 42 and 48 percent, as depicted in the figure below. But Republicans proved unable to sustain the growth of female nominees achieved in the 2020 election. This year, 84 percent of Republican House nominees, and 83 percent of non-incumbent nominees, are men.

In Senate and governors' races, both parties have produced a fairly steady pattern of increased female representation since the 2000s, but the Republicans experienced a decline in female Senate and gubernatorial nominees from 21 percent in 2022 to 16 percent in 2024—the lowest proportion of women nominated by the party since 2016:

The 2024 election has exhibited especially overt "gendered" elements that are hard to ignore. Trump, facing a female opponent for the second time in his political career, made his entrance to the Republican National Convention this summer to the accompaniment of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," while Harris prefers a soundtrack of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift—both of whom have endorsed her campaign. Commentators and analysts discuss the possibility of a record gender gap and the possibly central role of abortion and trans rights in shaping voters' preferences. Even the candidates' media outreach strategies reflect gender differences, with Harris appearing on podcasts hosted by Alex Cooper and Brene Brown that are especially popular with women while Trump targets the mostly male audiences of Joe Rogan and Logan Paul.

But even a historically unprecedented partisan divide between male and female voters in 2024 is unlikely to match the dramatic contemporary gap in gender representation separating Democratic from Republican politicians. For the Democratic Party, a future of relative gender parity among its elected leadership is realistically within sight. But for Republican politicians, it's still very much a man's world.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Bad Candidates Were Only Part of the GOP's Problem

 The Republican Party's unexpectedly disappointing performance in the 2022 midterm elections has inspired some finger-pointing at its flawed slate of Senate nominees in key states (and the former president whose endorsement helped these candidates gain nomination). But as I argue in a new piece for Bloomberg Opinion, candidate quality was not the only reason why the GOP underperformed last week. The results are consistent with a larger party image problem that extended beyond a few unappealing candidates.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Trying to Nationalize a Nationalized Election

Kevin McCarthy and the House Republican leadership recently released their "Commitment to America," the latest in a series of successors to Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America. Today in Bloomberg Opinion, I argue that the minority parties engaging in this strategy are making two flawed assumptions: that voters will care (or even know) about these manifestos, and that they will help nationalize the election. Because today's congressional elections are already nationalized, these policy plans are mostly an exercise in redundancy.

2020 Has Quietly Become Another "Year of the Woman"

The entire House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate are up for election every two years. But congressional elections tend to lead the news only every other cycle, when there isn't a concurrent presidential contest. James Madison may have believed that the "legislative authority necessarily predominates" over the executive, but most Americans don't seem to behave accordingly; a development or trend in congressional politics that would be treated like a big deal in a midterm year will always receive much less attention if it happens to coincide with the selection of the president.

In 2018, the leading story of the congressional midterms was the anti-Trump backlash that handed control of the House of Representatives to the opposition Democrats. The "resistance movement" widely credited with fueling the Democratic victory was distinctively female in its complexion—not only among voters and activists but also at the level of the candidates themselves. A record number of women sought public office in 2018, and a record number were elected to Congress.

Though it hasn't received the same degree of notice this time around, the records broken in 2018 will be broken again this year. With yesterday's Delaware primary election marking the end of the congressional nomination season, the numbers are now available to make full historical comparisons. Among Democrats, 48 percent of all House nominees in 2020 are women, exceeding the all-time high of 42 percent set in 2018. And for the first time in history, a majority (58 percent) of non-incumbent Democratic nominees are women.

An even bigger change has happened on the Republican side this year. The mobilization of women was a single-party phenomenon last election, but now it's become bipartisan. The share of female Republican House nominees grew from 13 percent to 23 percent between 2018 and 2020, and the share of women among non-incumbent nominees surged from 18 percent to 33 percent—not only easily outpacing any previous election for Republicans, but even exceeding the Democratic rate in every year before 2018.

The picture in Senate and governors' races is less dramatic, but still shows an upward trend over time in both parties. The total number of female Democratic nominees declined a bit between 2018 and 2020, but that reflected a more heavily male class of sitting senators seeking re-election this year; the share of women continued to rise slightly among non-incumbent Democrats. In the Republican Party, 2020 did not produce the same abrupt spike in Senate and governors' contests that it did in House elections, but the party still narrowly set an all-time record with women constituting 19 percent of all nominees (up from 17 percent in 2018).

Most female congressional candidates won't win in November, since most non-incumbent nominees suffer defeat regardless of gender. Even so, it's likely that there will be a modestly higher number of women in the 2021–2022 Congress than there are today, especially since Republican women are sure to increase their representation in the House from the mere 13 now serving. With the possibility of a first-ever female vice president winning office as well, 2020 could quietly turn out to be the biggest electoral "year of the woman" yet.

Impeachment Is Important—But Don't Expect It to Matter Much in 2020

Once Democratic control of the House of Representatives made the impeachment of Donald Trump hypothetically possible, discussion of the topic has been accompanied by a widespread assumption (held inside as well as outside the party) that pursuing impeachment is a high-risk political strategy with a very good chance of seriously backfiring regardless of its substantive justification. This conventional wisdom reflects the Washington community's collective memory of the events of 1998, which goes something like this: zealous Republicans insisted on impeaching Bill Clinton despite strong opposition from American voters, who exacted their revenge by raining electoral blows upon the GOP in the congressional midterms as Clinton snickered with delight.

But that's not really what happened. It's true that impeachment was unpopular, but the actual results of the 1998 election were hardly calamitous for Republicans. The party suffered a very minor loss of 5 seats in the House, while there was no net partisan change in the Senate. Republicans held a majority in both congressional chambers prior to the election, and they retained this majority afterwards with little change in their margin of control. The 1998 midterms were the epitome of a status quo election, with no measurable wind or wave in either direction.

There are two main reasons why the Clinton impeachment is misleadingly remembered as such a disaster for the Republican Party. The first is that most journalists and commentators assumed that Republicans would reap major political benefits from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal from the moment it first emerged in January 1998. Even when polls began to roll in showing that most Americans weren't outraged by the revelations—and certainly didn't believe they warranted removal from office—pundits repeatedly waved them off, insisting that the electorate would be properly scandalized once it learned more of the facts. For example, Sam Donaldson of ABC News was predicting as late as mid-October that the public was about to turn against Clinton for good, forcing his resignation from the presidency.

The written report of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, engineered by congressional Republicans to be released to the public in the midst of the campaign season in mid-September, contained a number of salacious details that consumed the news media for weeks. When combined with the "iron law" that the president's party "always" loses House seats in the midterm election (which had held true for every midterm since 1938 at that point), this well-timed additional exposé was supposedly poised to hand the GOP a major political advantage. So while the election itself hardly produced a Democratic landslide, the outcome was interpreted against a backdrop of contrary expectations as a decisive victory for Clinton at the expense of his partisan opponents.

The second reason why the Clinton impeachment went down in history as a political fiasco is the messy leadership succession that occurred after the election. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was immediately forced out by his own party, though the disappointing election returns represented the final blow to an already weakened Gingrich (who had faced an internal Republican coup attempt the year before) rather than the central factor precipitating his exit from the speakership. It was easy enough for media reports to frame Gingrich's downfall as representing Clinton's ultimate triumph over an arch-nemesis, but the abrupt withdrawal of the next prospective speaker, Bob Livingston, from consideration for the job several weeks later—Livingston had carried on an extramarital affair, which became disqualifying under the circumstances on grounds of perceived partisan hypocrisy—merely cemented perceptions that the whole production had turned into an utter wipeout for Republicans even before the Senate trial of Clinton ended in an anti-climactic acquittal early the following year.

But there is no clear evidence that Republican candidates as a group performed any worse, either in 1998 or thereafter, than they would have absent the impeachment push. Clinton was an unusually popular president due primarily to an unusually robust national economy, and many of the most promising congressional seat targets for the GOP had already been picked off in the 1994 or 1996 elections. Congressional elections expert Gary Jacobson of UC San Diego concluded at the time that "the results of the 1998 elections are in no way extraordinary. . . . [they] are about what we would expect if no one had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky."

If Clinton's impeachment didn't really matter much in the 1998 elections (Washington lore aside), there's little reason to believe that a potential impeachment of Donald Trump will be decisive in 2020. Trump is much less popular than Clinton was; public attitudes have become more consistently partisan and less malleable over the 21 succeeding years; fewer members of Congress are cross-pressured by representing a constituency that normally leans toward the opposite party; and even an impeachment process that stretches on for a few months will conclude well before next November. The currently developing scandal is important for a number of reasons, but it's very possible that its influence on future elections never extends beyond potentially pushing this or that odd congressional seat in one partisan direction or the other.

An impeachment proceeding is such a momentous, historic event that it's only natural to expect it to have a transformative effect on the attitudes of the American public. This was certainly a common assumption in 1998—how can such a big political story not produce a correspondingly big electoral impact?—and some analysts continue even today to treat impeachment as a perilous political proposition for one side or the other. But the Trump presidency has already generated more than the usual number of big political stories, and the effects of all of them on mass opinion have been modest at best. Americans have already made up their minds about this president, and it will take a truly dramatic set of future developments for most of them to re-evaluate his performance in office. That doesn't mean this isn't an important story—it surely is, just as Clinton's impeachment was. But not everything that's important in politics leaves a major imprint on the voting returns.

Yes, Some Suburbs Are Turning Blue—But Others Have Stayed Quite Red: New Op-Ed in the New York Times

The results of the 2018 elections have repeatedly been interpreted as demonstrating a weakened Republican Party in suburban America, as Donald Trump's antics are supposedly driving exasperated suburbanites into the Democratic camp. In my latest op-ed piece for the New York Times, I explain that this story indeed holds true for the nation's largest metropolitan areas. In the remainder of suburban America, however, where the electorate is whiter and more socially conservative, the GOP remains electorally dominant in the Trump era. The research paper upon which the article is drawn, "The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992–2018," also served as the basis of a recent column by Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report and is available here.

2018 Election Recap: It Ain't Over Yet!

In this age of instant hot takes and pre-written post-mortems, it's frightfully gauche for a political analyst to wait more than a minute before weighing in on a major national event. But while unrelated professional responsibilities prevented me from updating the blog until now, perhaps I can take advantage of having had a little more time to assess the evidence before adding my voice to the chorus of electoral interpreters. After all, it's been amusing to watch the conventional wisdom evolve from "the Democrats are underperforming in the House vote" to "the Democrats did fine in the House, but have to be disappointed by the Senate and governors' races" to "the Democrats engineered a big House wave, plus they also held their own in the Senate and made key gains downballot" over the 48 hours that elapsed after the first returns arrived on Tuesday night.

Besides, the election itself isn't exactly over: plenty of ballots remain to be counted in California and Arizona, while both major statewide contests in Florida are headed to recounts that have already plunged into legal challenge amid charges of fraud and maladministration. Those of us with students too young to have consciously experienced the extended postgame in 2000 will surely welcome the opportunity to guide them through a remarkable replication played out in real time over the rest of the current academic semester. And with that, some initial observations on the results of the 2018 midterm elections—or at least the results so far—with more to follow in the coming weeks:

1. The shifts in party fortunes that resulted from this week's vote are of course important, but not enough is being made of the astounding voter turnout rate—now estimated at 48.5% of eligible citizens, which would be the highest level in a midterm election since 1966 (before the national voting age was lowered to 18) and would even approach the 51.7% of Americans who turned out for the 1996 presidential election. The opposition party is typically well-mobilized in a midterm year, and Democrats certainly succeeded in stimulating exceedingly high participation by those dissatisfied with the ruling regime. But Republicans also marched to the polls to defend a president whom many had only reluctantly supported in 2016, just as pre-election indicators of interest and engagement had suggested, and succeeded in salvaging control of the Senate and a majority of state governors and legislative chambers from the national Democratic tide.

Whether they land on the pro or con side, Americans are thinking, talking, and doing politics much more since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Trump's ubiquity is, in general, a massive liability for his party—given the state of the economy, the Republican House majority would surely be intact today had virtually any other 2016 presidential candidate won the office instead—but it does have its specific uses, such as a super-charged rural vote that helps to deliver midwestern and southern Senate seats and governorships into Republican hands. From today's vantage point, the turnout rate in 2020 seems likely to hit or exceed 65 percent (it was 60 percent in 2016)—which would represent the highest proportion of eligible citizens participating in a national election in more than 100 years. It sure looks like we've found a solution for the much-lamented "vanishing voter" problem of past decades; weirdly enough, though, few people these days seem to be cheering that American civic virtue has been restored to a robust state of health.

2. Trump's alienation of previous Republican supporters among the white-collar professional suburban class (especially the female members thereof) continues to leave its marks on the electoral map. Most of the gains made by Democratic House candidates were located in the nation's largest metropolitan areas: greater New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles all produced at least one (and, in some cases, much more than one) R-to-D seat flip. (And in metro Boston and San Francisco, there simply are no remaining GOP-held seats for Democrats to capture.) But many of these shifts are either located in states that are already solidly blue (like New York and California) or are potentially neutralized by countervailing trends in smaller cities or towns elsewhere (as in Florida or Pennsylvania), limiting the consequences for state-level partisan alignments—which remain quite stable.

And while Democrats have reason to be encouraged by rising electoral strength in Sun Belt population centers from Georgia and Texas to Arizona and Nevada, their performance in the Midwest—while markedly better than its 2016 nadir—still stopped short of a full rebound to Obama-era levels. In fact, while the pre-election polling was for the most part impressively accurate, it consistently underestimated Republican strength in statewide races in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, and Missouri. The Midwest will remain the nation's biggest battleground in 2020, but it's clear that Democrats can't simply depend on Trump's New York-style brashness pushing the region's voters back in their direction. (And this observation, in turn, has associated implications for a Democratic presidential nomination contest that will soon kick into high gear.)

3. While the 2018 election was largely a referendum on the president, the identity of the individual candidates still mattered as well—as confirmed by the margin of victory in the Texas Senate race. Departing, perhaps out of necessity, from its usual practice of favoring veteran elected officials in its candidate recruitment efforts, the national Democratic Party managed to assemble a very strong assortment of "not a typical politician" congressional challengers who, for the most part, proved good fits for their districts and convinced the electorate of their qualifications for office even as they lacked long public records ripe for mining by the Republican opposition.

What we don't yet know, however, is how many of these self-styled new voices will attempt to keep their distance from older generations of Democratic leaders once they take their seats in the Capitol. There's little reason to expect a collectively demanding and persistently unruly class of House freshmen à la 1995 or 2011, but the number of Democratic candidates who promised not to support Nancy Pelosi for speaker on the campaign trail this year suggests the perceived political value that lies in maintaining public independence from the existing congressional party. Pelosi herself may be safe, at least for a while—among her other advantages, there doesn't appear at present to be a clear alternative candidate for the speakership from within the Democratic ranks—but the newly-elected members will need to be given some kind of visible accommodation once they arrive in Washington, and the question of what the post-Pelosi future looks like will hang in the air even if she successfully reclaims the speaker's gavel.

Uncertainty Remains High Even as Election Day Awaits

Close observers of American politics seem to live in a world of constant suspense and frequent unforeseen plot twists, but the state of public opinion out in the country at large is in fact remarkably stable these days. President Trump's approval rating has varied within a fairly narrow band ever since he took office nearly two years ago, and the "generic ballot" measuring congressional party support in the 2018 election has likewise drifted only marginally during that time. As usual, some commentators have attempted to manufacture drama by treating events such as the Kanavaugh confirmation hearings as electoral "game changers," but the national political climate simply hasn't shifted very much over the course of the 2018 campaign.

Stability isn't the same thing as certainty, however, and the lack of large-scale change in the prevailing partisan trends over the past few weeks and months doesn't mean that the picture is much clearer as we look ahead to Election Day. In some years, what may initially seem like a sprawling national battleground resolves itself into a relative handful of doubtful races as the election approaches. That hasn't happened in 2018. In fact, at least in the House, active partisan warfare seems to be expanding into new territory in the final weeks of the campaign—due in part to the unusually flush coffers of candidates, parties, and independent groups.

The sheer number of highly competitive seats this year is remarkable. Any list of recent House polls—such as the series conducted by the New York Times and Siena College in their "live polling" project—will reveal many districts in which the candidates are separated by a few percentage points at most. In this week's House ratings, 31 seats are classified as "tossups" by at least one of the three most prominent election handicappers (the Cook Political Report, Inside Elections, and Sabato's Crystal Ball), with another 50 seats deemed only "leaning" to one party or the other. As of Thursday night, the 538.com "classic" forecasting model projects that 107 House seats will be decided by 10 points or less in the two-party vote—virtually triple the number of seats (36) that produced a margin that narrow in 2016.

Even if that estimate overshoots the final results by a bit, it's likely that the number of close races this year will at least double that of two years ago—and will surely be higher than it was in any congressional election since 2010. Analysts once debated whether the 2018 House election would be fought on the geographic turf that Trump took from Barack Obama, or the turf that Hillary Clinton took from Mitt Romney; today, it seems that the answer is "both." Democrats remain favored to gain a majority, though not prohibitively so, and the range of plausible post-election seat margins is still quite wide.

Of the nine most electorally vulnerable Senate seats entering this year—six (FL, IN, MO, MT, ND, WV) held by Democrats and three (AZ, NV, TN) held by Republicans—in only one, North Dakota, has one party (in this case, the Republicans) established a strong advantage over the course of the past few months. While the probability of a Democratic takeover remains fairly small, the large number of tossup races makes it difficult to forecast the likely outcome, and anything from continued virtual parity between the parties to a 55-45 Republican advantage in 2019–2020 has to be counted as fully consistent with the available evidence at this stage.

State governorships have also contributed some of the most fascinating and hotly-contested races of the year, from Florida to Ohio and from Georgia to Wisconsin. For every state like Michigan or Minnesota where the governor's race appears to be less competitive than originally anticipated, there is another state—Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, even South Dakota—that is unexpectedly tight heading into the final stretch. And with another round of congressional reapportionment awaiting after the 2020 census, these state-level elections will have significant consequences for the balance between the national parties as well.

Some political junkies may be tempted to spend the final days before November 6 hunting through late polling trends and early voting figures for hints of the likely outcome—and perhaps a few such hints will surface over the next week or so, though accurately separating signal from noise at this stage is a very difficult endeavor. Most of the big stories of the 2018 election, however, seem set: the president is especially polarizing, the public is unusually energized, a historic number of women are running for office, and two closely-matched parties are fighting hard for power up and down the ballot. It's enough to inspire feelings of envy in those of us who reside in places where the electoral contests this year are sleepy, one-sided affairs. Here in Massachusetts, at least, we have a World Series to supply some extra October excitement.

Why the 2018 Election Won't "All Come Down to Turnout"

The claim that an upcoming election "all comes down to turnout" is one of the most venerable clichés in American punditry. But it's become more popular than ever in an era when the mass public is commonly characterized as consisting of two implacable partisan tribes, equally unshakable in their preferences and aversions. If virtually every potential voter is a loyal member of either the red team or the blue team, the outcome of a national election is presumably determined simply by which party can motivate its supporters to participate at the highest rate.

Swing voters are indeed less numerous than they used to be, and the geographic polarization of the American electorate has reduced the number of states and congressional districts that are politically competitive in any given contest. But at a time when the two major parties are closely matched in national strength, the voters who remain open to persuasion continue to hold a lot of electoral power. And it's far from clear whether there will be a large enough difference in the participation rates of committed Democrats and Republicans for turnout to be the primary factor deciding the 2018 election.

To be sure, evidence is piling up that Democratic voters are unusually mobilized this year compared to the recent past. A September survey by the Pew Research Center found that 67 percent of Democratic supporters reported being "more enthusiastic than usual" about voting—a much higher rate than Pew found in either 2014 (36 percent) or 2010 (42 percent). Turnout in Democratic primary elections surged to 23 million voters in 2018, up from 14 million in 2014. And the astounding fundraising totals reported by Democratic congressional candidates, fueled by an unprecedented explosion of small-dollar contributions by individual donors, surely reflects an unusual degree of engagement among politically attentive Democratic citizens—and also ensures a series of generously-funded Democratic get-out-the-vote operations from one end of the country to the other.

But 2010 and 2014 were both unusually poor elections for the Democratic Party nationwide. Improved Democratic participation in 2018 compared to the two most recent midterms may prevent another disastrous performance, but it hardly guarantees a blue wave. And while Democrats are clearly much more engaged this year than in the recent past, Republicans are not necessarily less engaged.

According to Pew, 59 percent of Republican supporters are "more enthusiastic" about voting than usual in 2018—not far behind Democrats and at least equal to Republicans' own reported enthusiasm levels in 2014 (52 percent) and 2010 (57 percent). Among respondents to a recent Washington Post poll, 81 percent of Democrats and 79 percent of Republicans claimed to be "absolutely certain to vote" in November (surely a massive collective exaggeration of the actual turnout rate, but not one that reveals a significant difference between the parties), and an NBC-Wall Street Journal survey found that 72 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans reported "high interest" in the 2018 elections. Similarly, while the GOP didn't experience a spike in participation as large as that of the Democrats this year, turnout in Republican primaries was still higher in 2018 than 2014, growing from 15.5 million to more than 19 million votes.

Moreover, few pollsters are finding that restricting their analyses to the fraction of respondents identified as certain or likely voters (as opposed to all registered voters) produces significantly more favorable results for Democratic candidates in 2018. In fact, it's relatively good news for Democrats that they don't seem to lose ground when survey analysts use a "likely voter screen" to compensate for the projected composition of this year's electorate. Republicans normally enjoy a persistently higher turnout rate in midterm elections that diminishes or disappears in good Democratic years but seldom, if ever, transforms into an actual pro-Democratic turnout advantage. As Nate Cohn of the New York Times observes, "When Democrats hold the presidency, Republicans generally have a big midterm turnout edge . . . [and] when Republicans hold the presidency, Democrats fight back to parity."

Based on the incomplete signs so far from state election officials' reported early voting and absentee balloting totals, turnout is likely to increase across the board in 2018 from its 2014 levels. Democrats, of course, are strongly motivated this year by their deep antipathy to the Trump presidency. But Republicans don't appear to be staying home either—certainly not to the degree that Democrats did during the two Obama midterms. The polarizing figure of Trump may be inspiring elevated engagement on both sides; at minimum, it seems likely that the constant public attention commanded by the current president has resulted in Americans of all partisan persuasions thinking and talking more about politics than they did before he took office.

With Democrats and Republicans both invested in this year's election, a potential nationwide blue wave will require a non-trivial proportion of voters to shift from the GOP (or third parties) in 2016 to Democratic candidates in 2018. There are 25 Republican-held House seats that were carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016, barely more than the minimum net gain (23) needed by the Democrats to take control of the chamber, and it seems unlikely that Democrats could win enough of these seats alone to gain an overall majority. But there are also 16 Republican-held seats that Trump carried with less than 50 percent of the total popular vote, 23 additional Republican seats where Trump received between 50 and 52 percent of the total vote, and another 24 seats where Trump received 53 or 54 percent of the vote. These are the pivotal districts that hold the partisan balance of power in the House. Democrats don't need to peel off a large share of voters who previously preferred Republican candidates in order to capture majority control, but merely energizing their own habitual partisan supporters is probably insufficient to flip enough seats their way absent a modicum of successful persuasion as well.

In the Senate, the Democrats' need for a lopsided advantage among swing voters is even more evident. Five of the six most vulnerable Democratic incumbents this fall were elected in 2012 even as Mitt Romney carried their states over Barack Obama (Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia); the sixth, Bill Nelson of Florida, represents a state where Obama achieved a narrow plurality win. All six states shifted further toward the Republicans in 2016; these Democrats are thus dependent upon a significant share of their constituents continuing to divide their partisan preferences, and this dependence increases further with every sign of a mobilized Republican base in 2018.

According to exit polls, self-identified independents preferred Republican candidates by margins of 56 percent to 44 percent in 2014 and 59 percent to 41 percent in 2010, making an underappreciated but critical contribution to the national GOP sweep in both elections. In 2006—the last Democratic midterm victory—independents gave Democrats an equally favorable margin of 59 percent to 41 percent. Leads for Democratic candidates in 2018 voter surveys, including a persistent advantage for the party in the national generic congressional ballot, have similarly been fueled by a steady erosion of Republican support among independents since the 2016 election. The addition of these independent votes to the revved-up Democratic "resistance" seems like a formula for electoral success in November, but many persuadable voters are not as attentive to politics as strong partisans are, and their preferences are likely to be somewhat unsettled even as Election Day swiftly approaches. With so many seats in play at all levels of government, it's still too soon to tell exactly how far the swing vote will swing.

There Are Two Gender Gaps—And the Gap Between Them Is Growing

The gender gap, produced by the relative pro-Democratic lean of women and pro-Republican lean of men in party affiliation and voting habits, has been a fact of American electoral life since the 1980s. In 2016, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, women voted Democratic for president by a margin of 15 points (54 percent to 39 percent), while men voted Republican by 11 points (52 percent to 41 percent). This difference was somewhat larger in 2016 than in other recent elections—probably reflecting the specific candidates on the ballot last time—though not dramatically so; Gallup estimated in 2012 that Barack Obama had carried the women's vote by 12 points while losing to Mitt Romney by 8 points among men.

But gender differences in the composition of the parties become greater as we move up the ladder of political engagement from average voters to activists, candidates, interest group leaders, and elected officials. Today, for example, 74 percent of female senators are Democrats, as are 73 percent of female U.S. House members—even though Republicans outnumber Democrats overall in both chambers. And this elite-level gender gap is certain to grow after the 2018 midterms. Democrats have nominated 183 women for the House this year (compared to 52 for the Republicans), representing a record 43 percent of the party's candidates. Among non-incumbents, a full 50 percent of Democratic House candidates are female, compared to 18 percent for the GOP:

This imbalance between the parties is also evident in senatorial and gubernatorial races, where women constitute 38 percent of Democratic nominees in 2018, compared to 17 percent of Republican nominees:

Democratic women are still undercounted in leadership ranks; because they reliably outnumber men among the party's supporters in the national electorate, even the perfectly balanced gender ratio among non-incumbent House candidates in 2018 gives female Democrats less than their proportionate share. But Republican women are underrepresented among the politician class to a much greater degree. According to the Pew data, women provided Donald Trump with about 48 percent of his popular votes in 2016, yet they constitute only 14 percent of the party's 2018 congressional candidates, 12 percent of its sitting senators and governors, and 10 percent of its current House membership. And it's quite possible that the share of female Republicans in Congress will decline further after 2018, since several veteran incumbents are retiring and a few others face tough races against Democratic challengers this November.

So there are really two gender gaps—one each in mass and elite politics—that differ markedly in magnitude. But they differ in their character as well. Scholars have not settled on a consensus explanation for the emergence of the gender gap among rank-and-file voters, but some analyses have suggested that, despite common assumptions that political disagreements between male and female citizens center mostly on stereotypical "women's issues," its existence mostly reflects distinct views on economics. In general, women tend to be more liberal than men on kitchen-table domestic policy concerns like health care and Social Security, perhaps reflecting the fact that they are collectively more economically vulnerable than men—especially if unmarried.

In the echelons of political leadership, however, the partisan loyalties and policy priorities of many women on the Democratic left are visibly fueled by a personal commitment to feminism and related social causes. Because the top ranks of the conservative Republican opposition are so heavily dominated by men, the landscape populated by nationally prominent politicians and activists—as well as the related professional worlds inhabited by reporters, intellectuals, social critics, media personalities, and the rest of the "creative class"—can resemble a perpetually polarized battle of the sexes in which gender differences closely map onto other stark political divisions separating participants along lines of partisanship, ideology, and cultural perspective.

This pattern is further reinforced by current fashions in liberal thought and rhetoric. The strong individualistic streak that once characterized the American left is gradually giving way to newer intellectual trends emphasizing the inescapable salience of social group membership as a source of common interests, priorities, experiences, and threats. Contemporary liberal activists with visible social media platforms or prominent positions in opinion journalism and the entertainment industry commonly characterize issues like abortion, sexual assault and harassment, and demands for demographic diversity in high-status professions as uniting women as a group ("#YesAllWomen") against a male-identified opposition bent on their subjugation ("#SmashThePatriarchy").

But among the American public as a whole, differences in opinion between men and women on such matters are often modest or nonexistent, and are reliably smaller than more familiar divisions along party lines. For example, a recent Pew survey found no significant gender gap on abortion (59 percent of women and 55 percent of men favored legal abortion in "all or most cases") but a much wider divide separating partisans (75 percent of Democrats took the pro-choice position, compared to 34 percent of Republicans). Another survey conducted this past April asking whether "sexual harassment and assault is a major problem in the workplace today" found a 10-point difference by gender (55 percent of women and 45 percent of men agreed) and a 29-point difference by party (62 percent of Democrats agreed, compared to 33 percent of Republicans). Even the surge in female office-seekers depicted in the graphs above inspires the same pattern; 80 percent of Democrats (including 75 percent of Democratic men) say it's a "good thing" that more women are running for Congress in 2018, but only 39 percent of Republicans—and only 45 percent of Republican women—express enthusiasm about this development.

This doesn't mean that the promotion of feminist thought by liberal elites has had little effect on public opinion more broadly. The reception of these ideas has merely been much warmer among Democrats than among Republicans—even female Republicans—further fueling a societal debate in which the largest divide is between the two parties, not the two genders. Analysis that fails to acknowledge the overwhelming influence of partisanship risks misstating or incorrectly forecasting the public's response to political events or figures that touch on gender issues. Feminist thinkers and activists may claim the standing to speak on behalf of women as a group, but women out in the public at large exhibit much less collective coherence, or distinctiveness from men, than it appears from the vantage point of the politically hyper-engaged.

For example, when the "Access Hollywood" footage of Donald Trump surfaced in October 2016, most pundits, and even leading Republicans like Reince Priebus and Paul Ryan, assumed that scandalized women would abandon his candidacy en masse, leaving him to a certain and perhaps historic defeat. Instead, Trump's female supporters stayed loyal and carried him to an upset victory. Likewise, the emergence this week of sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh inspired predictions from some corners of a popular backlash among women that would soon scuttle his chances of confirmation in the Senate. It's too soon to know for sure, but there's little evidence so far of significant erosion in Kavanaugh's public support; Democrats already disliked him, and Republicans who were initially favorable to his nomination haven't yet heard anything to change their minds.

I've argued repeatedly that the coast-to-coast eruption of female-led Democratic activism in 2018 is the most important electoral development of the year, and probably the most underappreciated. A compositional transformation and mass mobilization on such a large scale is sure to have significant consequences for American political life even if it is confined to only one party. And this "pink wave" is itself a response to key developments in Republican politics that culminated in the election of the current presidential administration.

We don't yet know, however, whether Democratic primary voters' growing preference for female candidates will be shared by the much larger and politically diverse general electorate this November, or how the feminist case against Republican rule made by thought leaders in the national media will resonate among women—or men, for that matter—in the pivotal midwestern constituencies that hold the balance of power in Congress. In the age of Trump, the gender gap among elites seems to be growing more intense by the day. But will the mass gender gap start moving in the same direction, or will the gap between the gaps just continue to grow?

Was the Midwestern "Red Shift" More Pro-Trump or Anti-Hillary? The Answer Matters a Lot for 2018

The election analyst Nate Cohn of the New York Times published an excellent piece today arguing that the Democrats are benefiting from an electoral battleground in 2018 that is broader than was anticipated by the post-2016 conventional wisdom. In particular, he notes, Democratic candidates appear to be doing better than expected this year in heavily white, lower-education congressional districts that voted for Donald Trump. This has allowed the party to contest many more seats than it would if the scope of electoral competition were restricted to the smaller number of Republican-held well-educated suburban districts that had shifted toward Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In general, one of the most challenging aspects of analyzing events in real time is distinguishing temporary blips from more durable trends. Popular pundits and other media figures often tend to overstate the degree to which immediate events portend long-term patterns; as I noted once in another context, "There's a temptation to assume that everything new in politics is a harbinger of the future. But lots of things are dead ends: They rise, and they go away." On the other hand, we academics are often prone to the opposite bias, hanging onto familiar theories and assumptions past the point when evidence has built up that the world has indeed changed.

When it comes to the geographic polarization of American voters, there's an unmistakable decades-long trend of divergence between (pro-Democratic) metropolitan areas and (increasingly Republican) rural areas, but also an especially sharp and unprecedented increase in this gap in the 2016 presidential election—as illustrated in this summary of partisan voting in the pivotal Midwest region taken from Chapter 6 of my book Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics:

The rural Midwest has been trending Republican for a long time; Bill Clinton narrowly carried it twice in the 1990s, but Barack Obama lost this vote 53 percent to 47 percent in 2008 and 57 to 43 in 2012. In 2016, Donald Trump routed Hillary Clinton here, attracting 68 percent of the two-party rural Midwestern vote—6 points better than Ronald Reagan in his 49-state landslide 1984 reelection.

If 2016 indeed represents the "new normal," than it would make sense for analysts to take a bearish view of Democratic chances in white, small-town congressional districts in the Midwest and elsewhere this year. But if 2016 was something of an aberration, and the Trump-Clinton vote does not fully reflect the relative fundamental strength of the two parties, then the map of electoral battlegrounds opens wider, and the fortunes of congressional Democrats improve accordingly.

Midterm elections are always primarily a referendum on the president, and Trump has dominated the political scene so thoroughly since he took office that this rule of thumb is likely to be especially applicable to 2018. If the remarkable Republican strength in the rural Midwest in 2016 was primarily a reflection of Trump's personal popularity, we might expect it to carry over into 2018 unless a significant share of formerly-enthusiastic Trump supporters had become disillusioned in the interim. But if the abrupt partisan shift between 2012 and 2016 visible in the figure above was largely a reflection of Hillary Clinton's personal unpopularity with rural Midwesterners—as well as a Clinton campaign that eschewed economic issues to an unprecedented degree for a modern Democrat—we shouldn't be surprised by a significant Democratic rebound in the region this November, since Clinton will be neither on the ballot nor in the White House.

Cohn's piece focuses exclusively on the House of Representatives, but the question of whether the 2016 "red shift" across the north-central section of the country is a temporary or enduring development becomes even more critical when we turn to the Senate—where Democrats are defending nine seats in Trump-carried states stretching from Pennsylvania to Montana plus two more in Minnesota (which Trump lost by less than two points). Using the 2016 presidential results as a starting point for expectations of 2018 outcomes paints a very optimistic picture for Republicans; Trump carried Indiana, Missouri, and Montana by about 20 points and won North Dakota and West Virginia by more than 35. Yet all of these states elected Democratic senators only six years ago, and all of them but North Dakota were actively contested at the presidential level as recently as 2004 or 2008. 

Many loyal Democrats will not easily accept the belief that the results in 2016 reflected a widespread popular antipathy to Hillary Clinton. And the surprising nature of Trump's victory has encouraged the view, even among his fiercest critics, that he maintains under-appreciated political strengths. But the more validity to the conclusion that Trump was a weak candidate who won a close and fluky election only because he was facing a seriously flawed opponent, the rosier the outlook becomes for Democrats this November.

Is The "Resistance" the Most Under-Covered Political Story of 2018?

Last week, candidates for Congress submitted their campaign fundraising and spending reports for the second quarter of 2018, as required by federal law—and a clear pattern emerged from the thousands of individual filings. In more than 70 Republican-held or competitive open House seats, at least one Democratic candidate out-raised the leading Republican over the preceding three months; 56 of these Republicans are incumbent members of Congress. Democratic fundraising success extended from the perennial battleground districts of CO-06, IA-01, and TX-23 to seats that were widely considered to be deeply red-hued even in this year's electoral climate (for example, Democrats Ken Harbaugh and Liz Watson raised more than $500,000 apiece in OH-07 and IN-09, respectively—two districts that are currently classified as "solid Republican" by the Cook Political Report).

The campaign money flowing on the Democratic side this year is just one sign of a larger mobilization of Americans moved to political action in response to current events; as David Wasserman of the Cook Report quipped, "Donald Trump is the best fundraiser Dem candidates have ever had." Reports from journalists and academics describe grassroots organizational activity by left-of-center citizens and groups that is unequalled since Barack Obama's first presidential campaign, and disproportionate political engagement among women that may have been last matched during the push for the Equal Rights Amendment four decades ago. Yet even as the conventional wisdom continues to tilt toward the expectation of major Democratic electoral gains this year, some important micro-foundations underlying this national shift—the changing behavior of citizen activists in local communities—are receiving a small fraction of the media coverage that was directed to the Tea Party movement in advance of the Republican victories of 2010.

One obvious potential explanation for this relative inattention is that Trump himself dominates the daily news to an unparalleled degree, crowding out other stories about other topics. Indeed, the latest fundraising reports might have made a bigger public splash if the president hadn't had a particularly newsworthy few days last week. But that alone isn't enough to explain why the "resistance" in general isn't getting more press. Under the right circumstances, it's actually quite easy for the media to become fascinated with Democratic Party politics, even in the age of an uniquely attention-grabbing Republican chief executive.

For example, when a previously unknown challenger won an upset primary election victory over a mid-ranking member of the House leadership last month, she immediately became a media phenomenon, even sparking serious suggestions by multiple members of the commentariat that the Democratic Party in general was turning toward socialism. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has gained so much attention precisely because she seems like a dramatic exception to the usual pattern. Preoccupation with novelty is an understandable human response—but when translated into journalistic practice, it results in a hurricane of national coverage descending on a single, decidedly atypical congressional candidate.

As I have recently argued, the Democratic Party is indeed evolving in important ways, and the class of candidates running this year is visibly different from those of the past. But these changes have produced little of the internal party conflict and factionalism that tends to interest the media. (Ocasio-Cortez's relatively confrontational approach toward other Democrats is one of the main reasons why she's received so much attention—though here, too, she is unrepresentative of broader trends.) The Tea Party movement's aggressive challenge to existing Republican leaders' hold on power helped to earn significant publicity during the Obama years, but the current activist backlash against Trump lacks the Tea Party's ideologically purist and anti-Washington character.

We are left, instead, with a picture of millions of Americans arrayed from the political left to the center, disproportionately well-educated, suburban, and professional, who are simultaneously captivated and repulsed by the day-to-day behavior of Donald Trump. Perhaps the real reason that reporters and editors don't find this story more interesting is that they feel like they already know plenty of people like that. (In fact, many of them are people like that.) Yet if the balance of partisan power shifts after November, it won't just be because of Trump himself, but will also reflect the actions of citizens who responded to his presidency by making room in their own lives for heightened engagement in the political arena.

In the Democratic Party, Even "Anti-Politicians" Tout Policy Credentials

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the large congressional freshman classes elected in the Republican midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 was the sizable proportion of new members in both years who had never before held elective office. These "citizen legislators" effectively harnessed longstanding public suspicion of Washington and temporary time-for-a-change popular sentiment to cast themselves as untainted outsiders rather than professional politicians, successfully jumping directly to Congress without climbing the traditional career ladder via town councils and state legislatures.

On the Democratic side, candidates have historically been less likely to adopt the persona of the insurgent outsider, and Democratic organizations have normally preferred to recruit and reward candidates for Congress who have previously served as elected officials. (From the party's point of view, potential congressional nominees who have already attained positive name recognition among voters, who have built extensive fundraising networks, and who can boast a successful track record in managing political campaigns have normally been considered the safest bets to perform well in general elections.) Thus even the national Democratic victories of 2006 and 2008 did not produce freshman classes packed with self-styled "anti-politicians" who had won their seats by advertising their status as electoral newcomers.

This year, however, many of the Democratic nominees in competitive districts lack previous elective experience—a pattern that could foreshadow a more reformist House if the 2018 elections return the Democrats to power. But these new Democratic "amateurs" are still not exactly the mirror images of their Republican counterparts. As Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report recently wrote after interviewing twelve Democratic challengers in pivotal House districts:

Only four of the 12 hold elective office or have ever run for office. Most of the others, however, are policy veterans. Some worked in the Obama White House or other branches of the federal government during the Obama era. Others worked as advocates in their states/districts on issues ranging from voting rights to child advocacy to housing issues. In other words, they aren’t your local dentists or lawyers or business owners who suddenly got "fed up" or "activated" to service. Their lives have long been defined by activism of one sort or another.

Walter doesn't name the specific subjects of her interviews, but it's not hard to identify candidates who fit this description. Here are a few examples of Democratic House candidates who have never held elective office but have served in government or as policy activists, all from competitive seats that the Cook Report currently classifies as "Tossup" or "Lean Republican/Democratic" in the coming election:

Katie Hill (California 25): Anti-homelessness non-profit organization executive

Lauren Baer (Florida 18): Former State Department staffer

Lauren Underwood (Illinois 14): Former Heath and Human Services Department staffer

Cindy Axne (Iowa 3): Former state employee and local education activist

Elissa Slotkin (Michigan 8): Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense, CIA analyst, and White House national security staffer

Susie Lee (Nevada 3): Education non-profit organization executive

Andy Kim (New Jersey 3): Former White House National Security Council member and State Department staffer

Tom Malinowski (New Jersey 7): Former Assistant Secretary of State and White House National Security Council member

Leslie Cockburn (Virginia 5): Journalist, author, and environmental organizations board member

Abigail Spanberger (Virginia 7): Former CIA operations officer

It appears that even non-traditional congressional candidates get ahead in the Democratic Party by promoting themselves as holding relevant political or governmental experience, even if it's not specifically elective experience. Voters in Republican primaries chiefly demand ideological qualifications, but voters in Democratic primaries also value policy expertise—a natural asymmetry given that Democratic constituencies have a much greater perceived interest in effective government action. (Recall that in the liberal fantasyland of the West Wing TV show, the Democratic president was a Nobel Prize-winning economics professor who also spoke four languages and was an excellent chess player with a mind for trivia.)

Even the non-"career politician" bloc among future House Democrats is therefore likely to have less of a purist, insurgent character than was displayed by the aggressively anti-establishment Republican freshmen of 1994 and 2010. At the same time, the first order of business for newly-elected Democratic members after the November election will be a leadership vote that could well result in a shakeup deposing one or more of the current regime. So while they won't have come to Washington to attack government itself, this potential new generation of first-time legislators may still be in a position to bring immediate change to Capitol Hill.

In Both Parties, Primary Voters Have Trump On Their Minds

Last Tuesday, Alabama congresswoman Martha Roby was held to 39 percent of the vote in the Republican primary in apparent punishment for her long-ago disavowal of Donald Trump after the Access Hollywood tape surfaced in October 2016. Roby faces a tough July 17 runoff election, where she will need to win an outright majority of votes in order to salvage her congressional career. This Tuesday, fellow House member and ex-governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina lost his own race for renomination to another Republican challenger whose main line of attack against Sanford cited his penchant for criticizing Trump.

Scattered election results don't always add up to a pattern—Sanford, in particular, carries his own personal baggage that long predates Trump's ascendance—but Tuesday brought another revealing set of outcomes in Virginia. Two-term Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock represents a district that Hillary Clinton carried over Trump in 2016, yet her own party's voters do not appear to have much patience for her attempts to maintain an independent political persona in order to preserve her general-election viability. Without much advance warning, a relative unknown challenger from the right held Comstock to just 61 percent of the vote in the Virginia Republican primary. At the same time, Republican primary voters in northern Virginia provided Corey Stewart, an outspoken defender of the state's Confederate heritage, with the margin he needed to capture the party's U.S. Senate nomination.

One might expect that the population of wealthy, well-educated, professional, politically-connected Republicans who reside within the Washington suburbs would render northern Virginia about as promising a place as anywhere in the country to find a GOP electorate that was relatively skeptical of Trump and Trumpism. But there's little trace of such sentiments within the latest primary returns, in Virginia or elsewhere. In fact, it's hard to identify a single consistuency nationwide where Republicans are sufficiently numerous to realistically compete in general elections but where separation from Trump, even in muted form, is devoid of serious political risk for party candidates.

Open criticism of the current president from within the ranks of Republican officials is thus likely to be restricted to the handful of retiring incumbents—Jeff Flake, John McCain, Bob Corker, John Kasich—who no longer fear retribution from their own party's voters. Other Republicans may grumble on background to reporters about the current administration, but the message they hear from their voters these days is, at least in their perception, a demand for unconditional public loyalty. This state of affairs is only likely to change if the conservative media, now acting as the most powerful source of opinion leadership within the Republican Party, sours on Trump—which hardly seems possible in the immediate future.

It's not just Republican voters who are preoccupied with Trump these days. The abrupt surge in the share of women nominated for Congress by Democratic primary electorates that I discussed last month has remained intact through the recent round of primaries, representing an unmistakable response to Trump's election.

As of this week, a majority of states have now held primary elections for the 2018 midterms, and it is safe to say that the number of female House nominees on the Democratic side will set a historical record by a wide margin. In fact, Democrats have nominated 74 non-incumbent women for the House so far, which already exceeds the all-time high number (73) reached by the party in the 2012 election—with 24 states yet to hold primaries this year and several others with unresolved runoffs. Currently, 41 percent of Democratic House nominees are women, including 48 percent of non-incumbent nominees (see below). More than a year into his presidency, the shadow cast by Trump over both sides of American politics seems only to be growing in size.

For Democrats, 2018 Is the Year of the Woman...and 2020 Too?

Opinion polls confirm that Democratic voters don't like Donald Trump any more than Republicans liked his predecessor Barack Obama, but anti-Trump popular activism ("the Resistance") has received a small fraction of the press coverage that the Tea Party movement attracted in 2009 and 2010. There are several reasons for this imbalance: the absence of a liberal counterpart to the powerful conservative media universe; the relative lack of bitter internal conflict within the Democratic Party as compared to the Republicans' persistent battles over ideological purity during the Obama years; and a Trump presidency that has itself produced an overwhelming barrage of daily headlines, making it difficult for any other story to gain sustained notice.

During the rare breaks in the Trump-generated action, media attention has occasionally focused on what has appeared to be a surge in political participation by women, from the well-attended Women's March of January 2017 to reports of an increase in female campaign donors to studies indicating a rise in women-led political organizing efforts. With Tuesday's primaries in Arkansas, Georgia, and Kentucky (plus a primary runoff in Texas) bringing the number of states that have already selected 2018 party nominees to 13, collectively holding 34 percent of the total number of House seats nationwide, it's a good time to examine whether the number of female congressional candidates is in fact historically exceptional, and whether—as one recent story suggested—such a trend is apparent in both parties, not just among the Trump-allergic Democrats.

Calculating the share of women among House nominees, and non-incumbent nominees, within each party in the states that have held primaries so far, and comparing these figures to previous years, yields the chart below. As Susan B. Anthony might say, wowee zowee:

So far in 2018, 43 percent of the Democratic nominees for the U.S. House are women, producing what would be the highest share of female congressional nominees in history for a major party by far if sustained through the remaining two-thirds of the primary calendar (the current record is 29 percent, set by the Democrats in 2016). In the districts with no Democratic incumbent seeking re-election, women actually outnumber men at this point in the nomination season by a margin of 51 seats to 50.

These numbers will shift somewhat in one direction or the other as more states hold their primaries. But it's apparent enough by now that we are witnessing a dramatic and historic change in the gender distribution among Democratic congressional nominees, caused by a rise in the supply of, and demand for, female candidates within the party in the wake of Trump's election (and Hillary Clinton's defeat). It's equally clear that this development is not occurring in parallel on the Republican side. In fact, the GOP is drifting the other way—so far, only 7 percent of the party's House nominees this year are women (compared to 12 percent in 2016), the lowest share for the party since the election of 1988. The proportion of female Republican nominees isn't much bigger when incumbents are excluded (9 percent).

From time to time, I'm asked whom I think the Democrats will nominate for president in 2020. With no obvious heir apparent in the party and a large field of probable candidates, I find it impossible to guess which individual contender is most likely to emerge from the nomination process two years from now. Moreover, the surprises of 2016 have left some of us supposed political experts with an enduring dose of humility that leads us to be wary of forecasting electoral outcomes.

But there is one prediction that I have been making with a great deal of confidence: I think there will be very strong sentiments among many Democratic activists and primary voters to nominate another woman for president in 2020. This doesn't mean a woman will win for sure; the nomination system is complex and multifaceted, and multiple female candidates could easily split popular support among themselves in the pivotal early states to the strategic benefit of a male opponent. But it seems certain that Trump's ascendance will cause gender to be even more salient among active Democrats next time than it was in 2008 and 2016, when the first viable potential female nominee sought the presidency. The primary results of 2018 thus represent both a critical contemporary development and a likely foreshadowing of our political future.

Will the 2018 Elections Create Another "Outsider Class" in the House?

The Republican midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 washed unusually large freshman classes into the House of Representatives; roughly a third of the Republican conference in both the 1995-96 and 2011-12 Congresses consisted of newly-elected members (31% and 35%, respectively). Many of these House freshmen lacked previous experience in elective politics. In 2011, for example, the nation's new federal representatives included people who came to Washington from careers as a roofing contractor, an airline pilot, a nurse, a pizzeria owner, a youth camp director, and a professional auctioneer.

In part because many members viewed themselves as "citizen legislators" sent by an angry electorate to shake up business as usual, the classes of 1994 and 2010 immediately earned reputations for rebelling against Republican party leaders and other senior members; especially in 1994, a number of freshmen had pledged to serve a limited number of terms in Congress—giving them little patience for following the traditional practice of deferring to veteran colleagues while methodically climbing the ladder of seniority. As my political science colleague Richard Skinner recently explained, there is a long-standing historical pattern of large freshman classes forcing a redistribution of power within the House—aside from the two already mentioned, the reformist "Watergate class" of 1974 is another well-known example—thus leaving an enduring residue on the operation of Congress for years after their arrival.

Given the growing evidence that 2018 is shaping up to be a good electoral year for the Democrats that may well result in a Democratic House majority 12 months from now, Richard considers the possibility that a large and boisterous "Class of 2018" might similarly provide the voting power for further rounds of institutional reform or leadership challenges. At the very least, he notes, it is likely that newly-elected Democrats will claim a mandate to constrain the power of the Trump administration, which may produce innovations in procedural antagonism between the legislative and executive branches.

A resurgence of activist energy in the Democratic Party since the 2016 election is evident in the unusually large numbers of Democratic candidates for Congress and the record-breaking fundraising totals they have collectively achieved so far. Surveying the field of candidates in many competitive seats, however, reveals a relative lack of conventionally experienced potential nominees for a year in which the conventional wisdom predicts a favorable environment for the party. In Colorado-6 and Pennsylvania-6, for example, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—an arm of the Democratic House leadership—has officially endorsed military veterans Jason Crow and Chrissy Houlahan to oppose Republican incumbents Mike Coffman and Ryan Costello. In Texas-7, three lawyers, one doctor, one university administrator, and one journalist are competing in the Democratic primary to face nine-term incumbent Republican John Culberson. In Washington-8, an open seat vacated by retiring Republican Dave Reichert, an even larger assortment of candidates (all lacking previous tenure in elective office) are jockeying to advance to the general election against the likely Republican nominee, a long-serving state legislator. Hillary Clinton carried all four of these districts against Donald Trump in 2016; Democrats probably need to win all four in order to achieve a national House majority in 2018.

National party leaders and interest groups usually prefer experienced candidates as congressional nominees, especially on the Democratic side; political professionals tend to have better name recognition and fundraising ability, and are viewed as less likely to commit damaging mistakes or suffer embarrassing personal revelations over the course of the campaign. In most cases, the DCCC would have first attempted to recruit elected officeholders to run in its top targeted districts, and thus the current raft of less experienced potential nominees represents a kind of "Plan B" for national Democrats. It's possible that some of these candidates will stumble during the long election season ahead, complicating the party's ambitions to regain control of the House. On the other hand, candidates who are not "career politicians" may hold their own distinctive appeal among swing voters, and records of business success or military service are commonly recognized by the American public as more than adequate qualifications in themselves for election to public office.

Due to the larger stable differences between the two parties, it's likely that the next Democratic freshman class will be less rebellious than their Republican predecessors even if it contains a significant proportion of politically inexperienced representatives. But a party leadership that is growing decidedly long in the tooth is unlikely to attract as much collective loyalty from a generation of younger members who are newer to politics as it has received from the fellow congressional senior citizens who have served alongside those leaders for decades. On the first day of the 2019-20 congressional session, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi will be 78 years old, her deputy Steny Hoyer will be 79, and third-in-command Jim Clyburn will also be 78. Regardless of what happens this November, the time is nearing for House Democrats to consider the question of succession—and a large and independent-minded class of 2018 would be in position to exert plenty of influence over the party's next direction.

Why Do People Think Tax Reform Will Swing the 2018 Election?

Last week, I described why we should be skeptical of the view that the outcome of the 2018 midterm elections will be substantially affected by whether or not Republicans succeed in enacting tax reform. But my previous post did not explain why such a belief can become widely accepted in Washington despite the lack of hard evidence behind it.

The extent of this acceptance is illustrated by a Wednesday article in the New York Times stating in its second paragraph that "one political and legislative reality is suddenly becoming crystal clear: Republicans must deliver a tax cut or face an epic backlash that would pose a significant threat to their governing majority and long-term political health." The article presents this claim not merely as one plausible account of the electoral stakes of reform but as a "crystal clear" political "reality" beyond legitimate analytical contestation.

The author of the article, a veteran Capitol Hill reporter, is no doubt accurately portraying the prevailing sentiment among Republican members of Congress—and perhaps among Democrats as well. Republicans really do feel desperate to rack up a major legislative accomplishment. Most of them are ideologically committed to tax cuts as a worthy substantive goal, and it's very easy for them to convince themselves that good policy is also good politics. The assertion that failure to enact tax reform will lead to electoral doom in 2018 is also a powerful argument with which to convince fellow partisans to unite around legislation. Everybody had better get with the program, Republican leaders are no doubt telling their membership, or we'll all feel the pain.

Conservative interest groups are sounding the same message. The Times article includes a quote from Scott Reed, a former Republican campaign professional who now works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that characterizes success on tax reform as politically "vital" for the Republican Party. Reed's remarks are somewhat amusingly framed as a kind of objective analysis, though they are in fact an act of political advocacy: the Chamber wants tax reform to pass and, toward that end, is naturally promoting the idea all around Washington that the GOP has no choice but to deliver if it wants to stay in power.

But journalists and other analysts do not always concur with the strategic judgment of politicians or accept the self-serving spin of interest groups. Why is the view that tax reform represents a "must-pass" proposition for congressional Republicans so convincing to outside observers?

One answer is that media coverage perennially and systematically overstates the extent to which electoral results reflect the calculated behavior of politicians. This is partially because candidate actions are by far the most visible component of campaign dynamics, and partially because journalists are embedded in the same social environment as politicians and campaign consultants, who also habitually overstate their own influence. Within this world, electoral outcomes are typically interpreted as primarily reflecting the traits of particular candidates or the "messages" with which they court voters. It can be hard to accept that elections are mostly decided on the basis of factors—such as the state of the economy or the job approval rating of the president—that are mostly out of the control of congressional incumbents and their advisors.

But there's something else at work as well. Human nature encourages us to perceive the existence of a kind of cosmic justice in which good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds are punished. If a "good" congressional party is focused, harmonious, and legislatively prolific, and a "bad" party is fractious, undisciplined, and unproductive, it's only natural to believe in a world in which a partisan majority that delivers on its policy goals and commitments goes on to reap electoral benefits from a grateful public while one that fails to do so faces the righteous wrath of a betrayed citizenry.

Trouble is, history gives us no particular reason to believe that this is how the world of politics actually works. The current state of the Republican Party is itself a testament to the lack of reliable correlation between popular success and leadership ability; the GOP is in its strongest electoral position since the 1920s but is arguably less equipped to govern, at least at the federal level, than at any point in living memory. Likewise, the Democrats of the late 1930s and 1940s were very good at winning national elections and not very good at uniting behind a common policy agenda.

If there is an actual iron law of politics, it's that few benefits are unaccompanied by corresponding costs and that trade-offs and paradoxes abound. (Hence the seemingly oxymoronic title of this blog.)

Sometimes Congress does little and voters reelect its members anyway; sometimes it does a lot and voters respond by rebelling. Democrats produced a series of major legislative initiatives in 2009–2010 and were "rewarded" with the enduring loss of their congressional majority. Republicans adeptly harnessed popular resentment against Barack Obama to win control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, but that same resentment led to the rise of a troublesome Tea Party movement and the installation of an unusually unpopular and ineffective president as party leader. And it is that president, not their own legislative record (or lack thereof), that represents the biggest impediment to Republican electoral success in 2018.