Elections in the United States 2018

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The 2018 election in the United States took place on November 6, 2018 . It is mid-term elections ( English midterm elections ) during the administration of US President Donald Trump . They are exactly in the middle between two presidential elections .

The following were elected:

Also held on the same day were some extraordinary by-elections and state-level elections for many seats in the state legislatures (over 6,000 seats in 46 states) and government offices (such as Attorney General and Secretary of State ). There were also referendums on factual issues at the state level and elections at the local level.

background

Against the background of various rampages in schools and other firearm violence such as the Parkland school massacre and the subsequent widespread protests against the political influence of the US gun lobby , all of them the National Rifle Association (NRA), after the United States' withdrawal from Trump in 2016 the Paris World Climate Agreement of 2015 as well as the current denial of man-made global warming and after the widespread protests against Donald Trump , various mobilization campaigns were run, especially with regard to young and first-time voters, women and voters from ethnic minorities, including the registration necessary for the elections.

Result

In 2018, over 38.1 million eligible voters (around 1/3 of the electorate and around 1/7 of the eligible voters) cast their votes before the actual election day by postal vote or in person (2014 mid-term elections: 27.2 million people). In Texas , Nevada, and Arizona , the number of early voters in 2018 was even higher than the total number of voters in 2014. This surge is seen as an indication that the election was being taken very seriously on both sides of the political spectrum. Election researcher Michael McDonald calculated on election day that a total of 105.5 million people would vote in 2018 (45 percent of the electorate), after almost 82 million in 2014 and 137 million in the 2016 presidency. For a mid-term election, this was the highest turnout in decades.

The Democrats received 235 seats in the House of Representatives, which corresponds to a gain of 40 seats, and thus regained the majority in this lower chamber of Congress after eight years. Overall, Democratic candidates received 53.1 percent of the vote, an advantage of over 8.6 million votes over Republicans , who won 200 seats. However, they defended their majority in the upper chamber, the Senate, and added two more seats. Among other things, electoral analysts explained this divergence with the fact that the Democrats achieved record participation from their supporters in the country's urban and suburban centers, while the Republicans achieved record numbers in the rural areas. Observers concluded that there was a growing division in the country. However, only a third of the Senate seats were up for election, and most of them were not in Republican hands, so the Democrats had to mainly defend their own seats, while the few Republicans who stood for re-election were from states with a very stable majority came for the GOP.

Most of the electoral districts in the House of Representatives that have passed from Republicans to Democrats are located in the affluent suburbs ( surburbs ) of the big cities. Since the Democrats made gains especially among women and the more educated, electoral analyst Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report spoke of the “ Whole Foods election,” as 70 percent of all Congressional constituencies that moved from Republicans to Democrats went into them Populations included particularly popular Whole Foods Market .

In the gubernatorial elections, Democratic candidates won from a weak starting position, since the gubernatorial posts, which are usually elected every four years, have been predominantly in their hands since the Republican wave election 2010 , but in seven states that had previously been ruled by Republicans failed to win the two important states of Ohio and Florida . It was in the state legislatures that the Democrats made their greatest profits. They won majorities in six chambers in which they had previously been in the minority, and expanded their position in others. The Republicans had significantly expanded their majorities in the state parliaments during Barack Obama's presidency and in 2016 achieved a majority in around two-thirds of them, while the Democrats had lost a total of around 900 seats. The Republicans had used their majorities for gerrymandering and the restrictive admission of eligible voters to elections and thus secured their majorities at the federal level.

Estimates shortly after the election assumed a total of over 113 million voters, which corresponds to a turnout of 48.1 percent, the highest since the all-time high in a mid-term election in 1966 (48.7 percent). In the 2014 mid-term election, voter turnout was 36.7 percent, its lowest level since World War II . The proportion of young voters under 30, at 13 percent of the total electorate, was the highest in a mid-term election since 1990 (1994: 12.2 percent, 2014: 10 percent, presidency 2016: 15.7 percent); 31 percent of all 18–29 year olds eligible to vote voted. According to a Harvard Kennedy School estimate , the Democrats would not have won the Nevada Senate election and would not have come close to winning the Texas Senate election without the strong participation of Junge ; in addition, the elections in the congressional constituencies of Texas-32 and Georgia -6 fell due to the high number of young voters in the Democrats. According to election polls , the majority of these young voters voted 67 to 32 percent for the Democrats in the House of Representatives election .

According to polls, 59 percent of the women who voted voted for the Democrats and 40 percent for the Republicans, so the Democrats were 19 percent ahead of the Republicans while the Republicans won the men by 4 percent. The gender gap was 23 percent, the largest in the United States in the general election, but only slightly larger than in the 2016 election (22 percent), as the Republicans had won even more than men (16 percent) Head Start). Whites won the Republicans nationwide with a 10 percent lead, while the Democrats won Hispanics with a 40 percentage point lead and thus a greater margin than usual and college graduates with a 20 percent lead. From this, analysts at NBC News concluded that Ohio could become a reliably Republican and Colorado a reliably democratic state, both of which could lose their status as swing states in 2020 . Surprisingly, the Democrats also did well in Midwestern states like Pennsylvania , Michigan , Wisconsin and Iowa , where they gained a total of 9 seats, which for Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight is taken as a sign that the Democrats are defeated in those states will remain the exception in the 2016 presidential election . Significantly more Latinos than usual in mid-term elections cast their votes and in Nevada, Arizona and Texas about two-thirds voted for the Senate candidates for the Democrats, while in Florida alone they tended more towards the Republicans. This section of the population is therefore believed to be of crucial importance for future elections, should the previous trends associated with President Trump's rhetoric against immigrants continue.

The result for candidates with the highest positions in the states (such as governorships) who did not belong to either of the two major parties was 2.8 percent of the vote, the lowest since 1982 (1.8 percent); the highest proportion had candidates from small parties and independents in 2010 with 5.4 percent. The Democrats gained four Attorneys General in states and, after the election, held this important law enforcement institution in 27 states, which also serves to control the federal government under Trump.

classification

Although the Democrats were able to make profits in a few crucial places, their supporters were initially disappointed, as on election night it looked as if the Democrats had only gained a slim majority in the House of Representatives. Many had hoped for a clear rejection of President Trump's policies and Trumpism , which did not appear to have materialized. Instead, the trend in the 2016 presidential election was intensified that the strongholds of the parties are tending even more in the polar direction; In the House of Representatives, for example, the Democrats did not win a congressional electoral district where Trump received more than 55 percent of the vote in 2016. That is why many political observers did not initially speak of a wave election for the Democrats, but of a mere realignment , i.e. a consolidation of the political orientation pattern . The election analyst Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report also pointed out that the Democrats had initially lost the authority to interpret the result against the media-savvy president by declaring his victory at a press conference the following day and moving on to other topics that the media followed. In addition, no opponent to Trump was profiled in the election who would impose himself as a candidate for the 2020 presidential election , as the gubernatorial candidates Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum and the Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke - all of whom had attracted a lot of attention - in their elections all briefly documents. Overall, it is therefore unclear whether the Democrats should rather focus on a clearly progressive or a moderate candidate in 2020.

During the rolling count over the following days, however, it became apparent that the Democrats had achieved a considerably better position than they had first seen on election night, especially since some of their worst results ( Kentucky , Indiana , Florida) were reported at the beginning, while important successes only manifested in the following days. They won more congressional seats, with a total of 40 seats, more than in any congressional election since the 1974 Watergate affair . While the Democrats managed to capture 43 boroughs that had previously voted Republican, the Republicans were only able to win 3 previously Democratic seats. In addition, in the course of the counting in the Senate election , Kyrsten Sinema surprisingly prevailed in the previously largely conservative Arizona , which limited the expected losses of the Democrats in the Senate to two seats and their prospects for the 2020 Senate election as well as for their strategy, in the increasingly prosperous and Demographically changing Sun Belt to become competitive improved. In some states of the Midwest and the Rust Belt, the Democrats also won the Senate and gubernatorial elections, especially in Pennsylvania , Wisconsin and Michigan , so that the prospects of the Democrats in these states, which in 2016 still had a majority vote for the Republican Trump, but until then had been designated as part of the democratic Blue Wall , improved for the 2020 presidential election . In particular, the educated middle class, who live in the suburbs and traditionally tend towards the Republicans, often turned to the Democrats, according to election analyzes. In addition, if a majority of the voters had already voted against Trump in 2016, this ratio has now shifted even further in favor of the Democrats. The Republicans only made gains in their core constituency of less educated citizens in rural areas.

Many observers therefore considered the election a week later to be a clear victory for the opposition and a wave election , especially since the Democrats were more than 7 percentage points ahead of the Republicans in the overall vote in the House election , which is a larger gap than in the two Republican wave elections of 2010 and 2014, and that with a significantly higher turnout. The fact that the opposition party wins seats in the House of Representatives in mid-term elections, but the ruling party in the Senate, had already occurred in the 1962, 1970 and 1982 elections, which is also explained by the fact that the Republicans in the House of Representatives had to defend all the seats, while the Democrats in the Senate itself had to defend 26 seats against the 9 Republicans, i.e. 74 percent of the Senate seats up for election, most since the 1914 mid-term election. In addition, President Trump had won ten of the states in which Democratic Senate seats were up for election in 2016, five of them with at least 18 percentage points apart. The likelihood that the Democrats would be able to win the Senate majority under these adverse conditions had therefore been assessed from the outset as very low. The statistics website FiveThirtyEight calculated that previous voting behavior in the competitive seats in the House of Representatives had resulted in a lead of the Republicans of around 8 percent, which was offset by the 8.6 percent advantage of the Democrats, while the competitive Senate seats on average 16 percent tended more towards the Republicans. It is therefore very remarkable that the losses suffered by the Democrats in the Senate were so small. Against this background, the election researcher Harry Enten spoke on CNN of the fact that the elections were not just a blue wave , but a downright blue tsunami , in which the Democrats won a significant victory despite major structural disadvantages.

See also

literature

  • Larry Sabato, Kyle Kondik (Eds.): The Blue Wave: The 2018 Midterms and What They Mean for the 2020 Elections. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD 2019, ISBN 978-1538125267 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ March for Science | MFS | Science March. Retrieved November 3, 2018 .
  2. ^ When We All Vote. Retrieved November 3, 2018 (American English).
  3. ^ Vote For Our Lives. In: March For Our Lives . ( marchforourlives.com [accessed November 3, 2018]).
  4. ^ Women's March: Power to the Polls. Retrieved November 3, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Make a Plan to Vote | Gun Sense Voter. Retrieved November 3, 2018 (American English).
  6. ^ Register to Vote - Women's March: Power to the Polls. Retrieved November 3, 2018 .
  7. ^ Everything You Need to Vote - Vote.org . In: VOTE.org . ( vote.org [accessed November 3, 2018]).
  8. ↑ Zach Montellaro: A staggering 36 million people have voted early, setting the stage for big midterm turnout. In: Politico , November 5, 2018; Michael McDonald: 2018 November General Election Early Voting. In: United States Election Project , November 6, 2018.
  9. ↑ Mike Allen, Jim VanderHei: Two Americas: amplified, tearing apart. In: Axios.com , November 7, 2018; Ronald Brownstein: The two Americas just lurched further apart. In: CNN.com , November 8, 2018.
  10. ↑ Eliza Collins: Whole Foods election: Majority of seats the Democrats flipped had the trendy market nearby. In: USA Today , November 8, 2018.
  11. ^ Governor Election Results: Democrats Retake Several States. In: The New York Times , November 7, 2018.
  12. ↑ Emma Green: The Democrats' Most Radical Election Victory Was in the States. In: The Atlantic , November 7, 2018; State Vote 2018. In: NCSL.org.
  13. ↑ Benji Sarlin: Midterm turnout surges to 50-year high, early estimates show. In: NBC News , Nov. 8, 2018.
  14. ↑ Young People Dramatically Increase their Turnout to 31%, Shape 2018 Midterm Elections. In: CIRCLE , Tufts University , November 7, 2018; John Della Volpe: Historic Turnout and Performance by Young Voters. In: Harvard Kennedy School , November 7, 2018.
  15. ↑ Janie Velencia: The 2018 Gender Gap Was Huge. In: FiveThirtyEight , November 9, 2018.
  16. ↑ Dante Chinni, Sally Bronston: New election map: Ohio, Colorado no longer swing states. In: NBC News , November 18, 2018.
  17. ↑ Nate Silver: [1] In: FiveThirtyEight , November 8, 2018.
  18. ↑ Joel Rose: Big Latino Turnout In Midterms Raises Stakes For 2020. In: National Public Radio , November 19, 2018.
  19. ^ Richard Winger: Minor Party and Independent Candidate Vote for Top Offices is Lowest Since 1982. In: Ballot Access News , November 8, 2018.
  20. ↑ Kartikay Mehrota: Democrats Win Majority of AG Seats, 'Last Line of Resistance' Against Trump. In: Bloomberg.com , November 7, 2018.
  21. ^ Ronald Brownstein: It's not a blue wave. It's a realignment of American politics. In: CNN.com , October 31, 2018; Chuck Todd , Mark Murray, Carrie Dann: Last night wasn't a wave. It was a realignment. In: NBC News , Nov. 7, 2018; Amy Walter: Why Aren't Democrats More Excited About the 2018 Results. In: Cook Political Report , November 9, 2018; Sean Trende: So What It A Wave? In: RealClearPolitics , November 16, 2018; Dante Chinni, Sally Bronston: New election map: Ohio, Colorado no longer swing states. In: NBC News , November 18, 2018.
  22. ↑ Dan Balz, Michael Scherer: For Democrats, a midterm election that keeps on giving. In: The Washington Post , November 9, 2018; Alexander Burns: A Week After the Election, Democratic Gains Grow Stronger. In: The New York Times , November 13, 2018. See also Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Is the Sun Belt Really Becoming Progressive? In: The New Yorker , October 23, 2018.
  23. ↑ Eric Bradner: Democrats rebuilt their 'blue wall' in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It's a big deal for 2020. In: CNN.com , November 7, 2018.
  24. ^ John Harwood: A week later it's clear the midterms did produce a blue wave - here are the three main factors that drove the Democrats' triumph. In: CNBC , November 13, 2018; Matthew Iglesias: Democrats' blue wave was much larger than early takes suggested. In: Vox.com , November 13, 2018; Slack Chat Yes, it was a blue wave. In: FiveThirtyEight , November 14, 2018.
  25. ↑ Geoffrey Skelley: Why Did The House Get Bluer And The Senate Get Redder? In: FiveThirtyEight , 16. November 2018.