Election to the United States House of Representatives 2018

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← 2016Election 20182020 →
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40
30th
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53.4
44.8
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Gains and losses
compared to 2016
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Otherwise.
Distribution of seats in the 116th Congress
   
A total of 435 seats
  • Dem . : 235
  • Vacant : 1
  • Rep .: 199
Result by constituency, as of November 30, 2018 (gray: not yet decided; strong colors: takeover or gain by the respective party.)

The elections for the United States House of Representatives took place on November 6, 2018 . All 435 seats in the US House of Representatives were elected that day . They were part of the mid-term elections (English: midterm elections ) in the middle of the first term of US President Donald Trump .

The Democrats regained a majority in the House of Representatives after eight years in the minority, particularly by winning suburban Congressional constituencies that had previously represented Republicans . The Democrats won 41 seats and got 235 seats, the Republicans got 199 seats. The election in the 9th Congressional constituency of North Carolina , which was won by the Republican candidate, was canceled on February 21, 2019 for violating the electoral rules and had to be rescheduled on September 10, 2019. One seat was therefore initially vacant; the Republicans won the by-election.

Election process and date

The United States is divided into 435 congressional electoral districts, each with roughly the same number of residents (710,767 average according to the 2010 census ). In contrast to the other Congress Chamber , the United States Senate , the number of seats per state is different and ranges from one (in 7 states) to 53 in California ; their size ranges from 27 km² (part of New York City ) to 1,481,354 km² ( Alaska at-large). In 45 states, mandates are awarded for each congressional electoral district based on a relative majority vote . In four states (California, Washington, Louisiana and Georgia) an absolute majority is necessary, which is why there are often runoff elections between the two most voters in the first ballot. In Maine, voting will take place for the first time in 2018 after a referendum with instant run-off voting .

There are individual applicants, no party lists, to vote, mostly the most promising candidates from the two major parties, the Republicans and Democrats , but also independents and applicants from smaller parties (such as the Libertarian and Green Party ), who are usually considered to have no chance. The selection of applicants within the party takes place by means of area codes , in which either only those registered for the party (closed area code) or all eligible voters in the congress electoral district (open area code) are allowed to vote.

The election for all mandates takes place every two years on United States General Election Day , the Tuesday after the first Monday of November, i.e. November 6th in 2018.

Starting position

Map of the USA with the electoral districts:
(excluding suburbs and DC) Republican MP does not run again or was defeated in the primary elections Republican MP is not running for again Democratic MP is not running again or was defeated in the primaries Democratic MP is running Vacant seat






The Republicans have had a majority in the House of Representatives since the 2010 election and were able to defend it in 2016 when they received votes of 49.1 percent to 48 percent for the Democrats, losing six seats to them, but with 241 seats a majority of 23 mandates retained over the absolute majority (218 out of 435 total seats). The Speaker of the House of Representatives appointed by the Republicans is Paul Ryan ( Wisconsin -1), the group chairman (English "Minority Leader") of the Democrats Nancy Pelosi ( California -8).

Structural conditions

Structurally, mid-term elections are considered difficult for the incumbent president's party because they serve as a referendum against unpopular decisions at the federal level; In 36 of 39 mid-term elections since the Civil War and in 16 of 18 since World War II , the incumbent's party has lost seats, an average of 33 seats, and an average of 36 seats when the president is less than 50 percent popular.

The following demographic patterns regularly play a role in mid-term elections in the US: While it helps Republicans that the electorate tends to be whiter and older than in presidential elections, proportionally more well-educated people usually vote - who voted below average Republicans in the 2016 presidential election.

Structurally, the Republicans have an advantage due to gerrymandering and the unequal distribution of the electorate (disproportionately high in rural districts of the “red” states ); they won the generic House of Representatives seat in 2016 by 3.4 percent, while Trump lost the popular vote at the same time, 2.1 percent behind.

Situational conditions

The turmoil of the previous presidency of Trump - who after six months was the least popular incumbent since the beginning of representative polls - has contributed to the fact that observers assumed that the Republicans could lose seats, some saw their majority in danger - such a political landslide is called a wave election called.

There were concrete signs that the Democrats were in good shape: By the end of June 2017, they had found 209 candidates with more than $ 5,000 in donations as challengers to Republican mandate holders, while the Republicans, conversely, had only 28; before the Republicans last landed a landslide victory in 2010 , they had only 78 serious challengers by that point in 2009, the highest number since 2003.

The four by-elections to the 115th United States Congress since the last regular election in November 2016, which previously affected Republican congressional electoral districts , never led to a victory for the Democratic challenger, but the Democratic candidates were each time able to gain ground against the 2016 House election do well - from an average of 23.7 percent deficit in the regular election to 4.7 percent in the by-election.

Of the Republican mandate holders, fourteen announced by mid-September 2017 that they would not run again, seven of whom were not seeking any other office or mandate (one among the Democrats, Niki Tsongas , Massachusetts -5). For the Democrats, the more republican district of Minnesota -1 in particular was in danger, since its mandate holder Tim Walz is not running again to run for governor . Of the previously republican districts that did not have a mandate in the election, in particular the 27th congressional district in Florida (previously Ileana Ros-Lehtinen ), the 8th Washington (previously Dave Reichert ) and three (5th, 6th, 7th) the judicially reallocated constituencies of Pennsylvania (previously Pat Meehan, Ryan Costello and Charlie Dent ) good chances for the Democrats. Hillary Clinton won a majority in the 2016 presidential election (and Trump in 12 Democratic constituencies) in a total of 23 Republican-held Congressional constituencies, while there were 118 such “crossover” constituencies in 1996 , an expression of increasing political polarization . At the same time, of the 241 victorious Republicans in 2016, only 15 had a single-digit (and thus realistically catchable) percentage gap to the Democratic challenger. A not insignificant factor that motivated voters to vote for Republican MPs in 2016, namely the unpopularity of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton , was eliminated in 2018. In September 2017, the Political Action Committees of the two centrist-conservative groups of Democrats in Congress named the Blue Dog Coalition and the New Democrat Coalition , the first candidates they support for the election - also against candidates from the left, progressive party wing - earlier than in previous comparable elections. Of the 53 Republican elected officials at risk, according to the Cook Political Report , 21 had received fewer campaign donations than their Democratic challenger in mid-October 2017, which was seen as a bad sign for Republicans.

The first Democratic television spots for the House of Representatives election in October 2017 focused on criticizing spokesman Paul Ryan as part of the aloof establishment and for his commitment to overturning Obamacare . In doing so, the Democrats pursued a similar strategy to the Republicans during the Obama presidency , in that they exploited the general unpopularity of the opposing party leadership instead of directly attacking President Trump, who is still popular with Republicans.

Surveys and Forecasts

Since November 2016, the Democrats have been leading in the aggregated polls on the generic voting intent for the House of Representatives on the statistics websites FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics with a fluctuating but clear gap, mostly between six and eight percentage points. The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia had calculated that the Democrats had to achieve a lead of about five percentage points in the election to win back the majority in the House of Representatives.

The Center for Politics and the Cook Political Report (see Cook Partisan Voting Index ) provide regularly updated forecasts for contested congressional electoral districts. The policy website Roll Call saw 48 previously Republican and 14 previously Democratic seats in the game in mid-September 2017, each twice as many as at the same time in 2015.

Result

The Democrats gained votes in all parts of the country. They lost three seats, namely the one in Pennsylvania -18, which was won in a by-election, but whose mandate holder Conor Lamb won from the Republicans after a redesign of the Pennsylvania -17 constituencies, and the rural constituencies of Minnesota -1 and -8. The Democrats captured only two rural Congressional electoral districts , New Mexico -2 and Maine -2 - which meant the Republicans lost their only MP in New England - but otherwise mostly suburban constituencies with well-educated, wealthy electorates and were elected by women in particular. They won almost all of the seats in which Hillary Clinton had won the majority in the 2016 presidential election, for example in Orange County in southern California, which was previously a reliable republic . In New Jersey , the Democrats won four seats, so that the state, which until 2014 had a balanced congressional delegation (six to six), will send only one Republican to the House of Representatives from 2019. Three Democratic victories surprised political observers, namely in South Carolina -1, Oklahoma -5 and New York -11, with which the Republicans lost their last all-inner city constituency. As with the 2018 elections in the United States, there was a general tendency towards nationalization of the results: The best indicator for the results in the House of Representatives was the percentage that Donald Trump had achieved in the respective congressional constituency in the presidential election. The Democrats won about three-quarters of the seats previously held by Republicans where Trump had performed poorly, with it being of minor importance whether a mandate holder took office or the seat was open. According to analyst Amy Walter, the Democrats maximized their profits by putting up good and well-funded candidates in many individual election campaigns, and even popular Republican mandate holders - as in previous wave elections - did not come up against the president's persistent unpopularity.

In the House of Representatives election, members of ethnic minorities voted significantly more often than in the last mid-term election in 2014. The number of Latinos who voted rose by 174 percent compared to 2014, the number of Pacific islanders by 218 percent and the number of African Americans 157 percent. All of these groups vote by a large majority - Latinos: 73 percent to 23 percent, African Americans: 90 percent - for Democratic candidates who had spent $ 30 million mobilizing Latinos. The new House of Representatives has 34 additional Latino MPs and a total of 52 African American MPs, all records.

A final result is also pending more than a month after election day because the result from the ninth constituency of North Carolina has not yet been confirmed. The Democrats won at least 41 seats and got at least 235 to 199 seats for the Republicans in an open (as of December 20, 2018), so that the Democratic group in the House of Representatives well over the absolute majority of 218 seats in the 116 , which will be sitting from January 2019 United States Congress is coming. A total of 392 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are expected to remain in the hands of the previous party, which corresponds to a re-election rate of 90.1 percent, which speaks for the pronounced bonus of the mandate holders (incumbency, see re-election rate in Congress ) and is lower than with most previous parties Elections. 29 to 30 Republican mandate holders were defeated, of a total of 61 open seats, 13 moved from Republicans to Democrats, the other way round there were 3.

Election fraud allegations and by-election in North Carolina

In North Carolina's 9th Congressional constituency , the election result was not certified by the regulatory authorities because of allegations of electoral fraud. The FBI started an investigation. A campaign employee of Republican MP Mark Harris was accused of manipulating and suppressing ballot papers from postal voters. The vote count had put Harris less than a thousand votes ahead of over 280,000 votes. Harris and his coworker denied wrongdoing. On February 21, 2019, the responsible electoral commission ordered a new election. The election had to be repeated according to North Carolina suffrage with the primary.

September 10, 2019 was set as the date for the by-election. The new Republican candidate Dan Bishop won it with 96,081 votes or 50.7% against the Democrat Dan McCready , who had already stood in 2018 , who received 48.7% or 92,144 of 189,363 votes.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ House Election Results: Democrats Take Control. The New York Times , November 6, 2018, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  2. ^ A b Leigh Ann Caldwell, Dartunorro Clark: New election ordered in North Carolina House district after possible illegal activities. NBC News, February 21, 2019, accessed April 21, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Charlie Cook: Midterms Are About the party in power, Not Issues. In: National Journal , July 27, 2017.
  4. ^ Alan I. Abramowitz: Generic Ballot Model Gives Democrats Early Advantage in Battle for Control of House. In: Sabato's Crystal Ball , University of Virginia Center for Politics, July 6, 2017; Kyle Kondik: For House Republicans, Past Performance Is No Guarantee of Future Results. In: Sabato's Crystal Ball , July 20, 2017.
  5. ↑ Chris Cilliza: Why 2018 might not be such an amazing election for Democrats. In: CNN.com , August 8, 2017.
  6. ↑ David Wasserman: 2018 Could Be The Year Of The Angry White College Graduate. In: FiveThirtyEight , September 5, 2017.
  7. ^ David Wasserman, The Congressional Map Has A Record-Setting Bias Against Democrats. In: FiveThirtyEight , August 7, 2017.
  8. ↑ Maxwell Tani: A new round of polls shows that 6 months in to his term, Trump is the most unpopular president in the modern era. In: Business Insider , July 17, 2017.
  9. ↑ Michael J. Malbin: Does the opening predict a wave? In: Brookings Institution , July 24, 2017; Ed Kilgore: Surge in House Democratic Candidates Could Fuel a 2018 Wave Election. In: New York , July 29, 2017; Seth Masket: The Sheer Number Of Democrats Running For Congress Is A Good Sign For The Party. In: FiveThirtyEight , August 17, 2017.
  10. ↑ Nathaniel Rakich: Democrats Are Overperforming In Special Elections Almost Everywhere. In: FiveThirtyEight , June 5, 2017; The hope for Democrats after special election losses. In: The Economist , June 21, 2017.
  11. ^ Nathan L. Gonzalez: House Retirement Tide Is Coming. In: Roll Call , September 5, 2017; Chris Cilliza: Two things happened this week that should really worry Republicans. In: CNN.com , September 8, 2017.
  12. ↑ Chuck Todd , Mark Murray, Carrie Dann: Here Come the Republican Retirements. In: NBC News , September 8, 2017.
  13. ↑ Kyle Kondik: For House Republicans, Past Performance Is No Guarantee of Future Results. In: Sabato's Crystal Ball , July 20, 2017; David Weigel: Dave Reichert, a swing seat Republican, will retire from the House. In: The Washington Post , September 6, 2017. For 1996, Chris Cilliza: Why 2018 might not be such an amazing election for Democrats. In: CNN.com , August 8, 2017.
  14. ↑ Harry Enten: Bad News For House Republicans: Clinton Won't Be On The Ballot In 2018. In: FiveThirtyEight , July 24, 2017.
  15. ↑ Simone Pathé: Blue Dog PAC Endorses Eight Democrats for 2018. In: Roll Call , September 21, 2017; Simone Pathé: New Democrats' PAC Adds 12 Challengers to Candidate Watch List. In: Roll Call , September 25, 2017.
  16. ↑ More Than 20 Incumbents Outraised by Challengers. In: National Journal , October 16, 2017.
  17. ↑ Amy Walter: Are Republicans Going to Get “Pelosi-ed” in 2018? In: The Cook Political Report , October 10, 2017.
  18. ^ Are Democrats / Republicans Winning The Race For Congress? In: FiveThirtyEight ; 2018 Generic Congressional Vote. In: RealClearPolitics ; Nate Cohn: 99 Days to Go, and the 2018 Midterm Battleground Is Not What Was Expected. In: The New York Times , July 30, 2018.
  19. ^ Alan I. Abramowitz: Generic Ballot Model Gives Democrats Early Advantage in Battle for Control of House. In: Sabato's Crystal Ball , University of Virginia Center for Politics, July 6, 2017.
  20. ↑ Ratings from Sabato's Crystal Ball and Cook Political Report .
  21. ^ Nathan L. Gonzalez: Ratings Changes in 15 House Races. In: Roll Call , September 8, 2017.
  22. ↑ Geoffrey Skelley: The Suburbs - All Kinds Of Suburbs - Delivered The House To Democrats. In: FiveThirtyEight , November 8, 2018; David Wasserman: Five Takeaways From Democrats' House Triumph. In: Cook Political Report , November 8, 2018; Amy Walter: Trump's 2016 Showing Was the Most Important Factor in 2018 House Races. In: Cook Political Report , November 14, 2018.
  23. ↑ Lauren Gambino: Latino turnout up 174% in 2018 midterms elections, Democrats say. In: The Guardian , November 14, 2018; Stephanie Akin: Black Voters Propelled Blue Wave, Study Finds. In: Roll Call , November 19, 2018.
  24. ↑ Andrew Tenenbaum: House Rundown. In: Electoral Vote , November 29, 2018.
  25. ↑ Elena Schneider: 'Damaged goods': Alleged fraud has GOP bracing for loss of NC seat. In: Politico , 7 December 2018.
  26. ^ North Carolina orders new US House election after 'tainted' vote. Reuters, February 22, 2019, accessed February 22, 2019 .
  27. ^ North Carolina Special Election Results: Ninth House District. New York Times, September 11, 2019, accessed October 9, 2019 .