[h=2]There Are Plenty of Obstacles to This Outcome[/h]
All the early readings so far — special elections, voter participation in primaries — have signaled that 2018 will be a typical midterm election, with the out-of-power party gaining seats in Congress. Furthermore, centrist Democrats have generally been primary winners so far, while non-establishment Trump loyalists have won in the GOP primaries, raising the threshold of difficulty for Republican success in the mid-terms.
There is also the question of the “Hillary Effect” in the 2016 vote. No one can say with confidence how many small-town and rural Midwest voters positively preferred Trump, and how many Democrats and Independents felt the Hillary Aversion Syndrome. Sen. Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Wisconsin primary and Minnesota caucus with outsized majorities, and small-town and rural voters in both states showed very strong shifts away from the Democrat at the top of the ticket in November.
So did Iowa, where Hillary and Bernie ended in a dead heat in the nation’s first caucus vote, despite Hillary’s overwhelming support from the established machinery of the Democratic Party, including near-total control of the finances of the Democratic National Committee starting in the summer of 2015.
The smaller-town and rural voter is a “wild card” in this year’s midterm elections. Neither party can be sure exactly who the 2016 switch voters are, or even what they want today. If they were “change” voters in 2016, are they ready to go to the sidelines and see how Trump does in the next two years, with or without a Congress loyal to him? How many are eager to give him what he’s asking for?
None of the by-elections or primaries so far has directed any light onto smaller-town and rural voters’ preferences this year. The dead heat in the Aug. 7 vote in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, which includes parts of Columbus, is not even a leading indicator. Columbus’ Franklin County gave Clinton a 152,000-vote margin over Trump, versus Obama’s 130,000-vote margin over Romney.
Urban and suburban voters in Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin gave Hillary more than 60 percent of their votes versus Trump. Only one — Minnesota — gave her its electoral votes. It was the “downstate” or “upstate” voters who won the other three for Trump. If these voters come back to the polls in a similar frame of mind in 2018, Midwest Democrats are in trouble.