Yup, you heard that right. There was a blue wave that swept the U.S. Senate contests in the 2018 midterms, but you wouldn’t know it from the news coverage.
Everyone has been so focused on one metric: Did Dems have a net pick up or loss of seats in the midterms? Well, sure, by that one particular metric, Dems lost a net of 1, maybe 2 seats. Boo hiss, Dems bad, no blue wave, or so we have been told to believe by our corporate media overlords.
But looking at the U.S. Senate as a whole of 100 seats, and saying Republicans did well because they may have padded their margin by 1 or 2 seats does NOT tell us ANYTHING about the 2018 election. It tells us ONLY about control of the Senate.
This might not seem like a false narrative, because it’s technically true Dems lost ground overall, but it IS a false narrative if you are trying to evaluate performance of the parties in the 2018 elections. The remaining 65 seats were NOT up for election in 2018, so that’s mixing apples and oranges, and any analyst who relies on metric alone to measure 2018 results is playing into the false narrative.
So let’s throw out this very misleading analysis of just looking who gained or lost seats overall in the U.S. Senate.
To understand how Democrats did in 2018 Senate races, you must look at other metrics. And by those other measures, it was an amazing victory for Democrats.
With a total of 35 seats up for election due to special elections, Democrats won 24 seats, are in a recount for 1 and a run-off for another. That means so far, Democrats have won almost 69% of the Senate seats up for election in 2018, and that number could go higher! Wait what?
Democrats have already won almost 69% of the U.S. Senate seats up for election so far in 2018. Blue wave!
Oh, OK, well, that sounds pretty overwhelming, right? Sounds like a blowout!
Let’s look at how each party did at defending the Senate seats they held. Republicans were defending only 9 seats in 2018, barely over 25% of the seats up this year, while Dems were defending the remaining 26 seats, almost 75%. Wow, that’s some tough ground to cover for team blue.
Sure, Democrats have lost 3 (Heitkamp, McCaskill, Donnelly), maybe 4 of their 26 seats depending on what happens in the Florida recount for Sen. Nelson. That means Dems lost at most just slightly over 15% of the seats they were defending.
Wow, that’s pretty stellar, Democrats won almost 85% of the seats they were defending, and lost barely 15% of the seats in a very tough map! Blue wave!
That 15% looks even more impressive when you compare it to how the Republicans did defending their very limited territory of only 9 seats up for election. Republicans have lost at least 2 of the 9 seats they were defending, and could still lose one more in the Mississippi runoff where Mike Espy is challenging a very flawed candidate who keeps tripping over her own racism. But let’s assume they hold that seat. That means republicans lost 22% of the seats they were defending.
Yup that’s right, Republicans lost AT LEAST 22% of the Senate seats they were defending on their EXTREMELY favorable map, and could lose yet another.
When you are defending almost 70% of the Senate Seats up for election in this cycle, and you win almost 85% of those seats, while the other party is defending 25% of the Senate seats up for election, and they lose more than 22% of those races? That’s a darned good election for your team. I’d take those results ANY DAY, ANY YEAR!
Say it with me friends: Senate Democrats won 85% of the seats they were defending, plus 22% of the seats Republicans were defending! Blue Wave!
If you take an even deeper dive into the specific races that the Democrats won, there’s a plethora of Republican target states and swing states that Trump won in 2016 that were not even close. Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania? All easy wins for team blue. Throw in Minnesota and Virginia, and Dems had a stellar night in swing states.
Beyond winning handily in these battleground states, Dems made or sustained inroads in traditionally more red states such as Montana, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and West Virginia. Only the Senate seat in Florida could be considered Democrats ceding a battleground state, and that’s a razor thin margin in recount still.
Dems held their ground in almost every ‘swing’ state, and made significant inroads into red territory in the Southwest.
It’s true that Republicans held the seats they should have held in strongly Republican states, however all of their wins topped out in the 50-60% range except for Wyoming and Utah which made it into the 60’s. Gone are the days when Republicans would post double-digit wins across the board in deeply red states. Republican wins in red states were often kept into the single digits, most shockingly of course in Texas, but also in 2 of their pickups (Missouri, Indiana).
In other words, Republicans are not winning blow outs where they normally would expect them, and had to divert massive resources to defend in places like Texas and flip a couple seats in Indiana and Missouri.
Democrats, by contrast, ran vigorous races in the swing states but were rarely threatened in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the midwest swing states that gave the electoral college to Trump.
Any way you slice the U.S. Senate seats that were up for election in 2018, it looks like a blue wave. Don’t fall for the false narrative that dilutes those 35 contests by talking about the margin of control of the Senate, which includes 65 other seats that were not even up this year.
DISCLAIMER: all statistics were hand-calculated based on current ABC news results linked to above. My math might be wrong, despite double checking it. If you find a flaw, please comment.
===========================
PS — heading to work now, but if you want to make that blue wave even deeper, please open your wallets one last time in the 2018 election cycle to support Mike Espy in the U.S. Senate runoff in Mississippi. This is another race where one might typically expect Republicans to win by 20 or 30 points, but instead Espy ran neck-and-neck and kept his opponent well below 45% of the vote to force this run-off. You might say, “Well, Dems will win a run off Senate contest in Mississippi right after they win a Senate special election in neighboring Alabama!” Damn right, and they just did that in 2017, so let’s keep this train rolling.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Updates: yup, I did some bad math in my haste to publish yesterday. Corrected 2 things: 1) Republicans will pick up a net of only 1 or 2 seats at most, not 2 to 3 seats as I originally wrote, and 2) the seats up for election in 2018, divided by party, should be split 26 Dems vs. 9 Republicans, not 27 Dems vs. 8 Republicans as I had originally. The dreaded “off by 1” bug. Both of these numbers are corrected.