On the blue side, the Democrats are gonna get big gains in the House - it happens almost every midterm in modern history, and Trump is making this one especially likely. Talking heads may want you to worry so you’ll watch/click their stuff but it’s just hot air.
On the red side, Republicans will hold the Senate. There’s just too much gerrymandering, voter suppression, and red-base frothing at the hands of our President for it to flip this time around. Again, media everywhere will be talking about low-probability Democratic wins so they can get your eyeballs/clicks, but don’t take it seriously.
Of course I’d love to be wrong about the Senate, but I’ve got my expectations set so I can only be pleasantly surprised there.
Changes almost daily heh. From morose despondency to defiant optimism.
I do find the Hispanic vote patterns in Sunbelt states worrisome. But I can’t tell if it’s fear or a (futile, probably) effort to stay objective.
As far as the Senate, I don’t see Dem’s taking over there either, even if a wave materializes. Nate Silver had a piece the other day where the not-wave party usually defends their seats. Kinda weird. (Gerrymandering by the way shouldn’t impact Senate races, that’s more at the House level.)
Does gerrymandering affect senate elections? I thought they were statewide votes?
The main issue with the senate, I thought, is that there are many low-population red states and a few high population blue states, and each state gets two senators regardless of population.
Like @MrGrumpy said, gerrymandering doesn’t affect Senate races. It just happens that this is a bad year for Democrats because they’re defending like 3 times as many EDIT: states seats as Republicans.
Isn’t the election of senators mandated somewhere at the federal level? I know originally it was up to the states to choose them how they saw fit, but I thought that was changed after some shenanigans.
In 1911, the House of Representatives passed House Joint Resolution 39 proposing a constitutional amendment for direct election of senators. However, it included a “race rider” meant to bar Federal intervention in cases of racial discrimination among voters.
I’m so glad we fought a war and poured an insane amount of resources into Reconstruction to keep the South in the country. Totally worth it.
And now, thanks to a wrong-headed decision by the Supreme Court a few years back, the usual suspects are back up to their old voter suppression tricks, slowly eroding a half century of progress.
The Senate is pre-gerrymandered, because it gives a bunch of extra seats to rural, conservative patches of land with a few scattered humans at the expense of, you know, the places people actually live.
People think of the south as a bunch of racist white folks, but it’s worth remembering that about 50% of African Americans in the U.S. currently live in former Confederate states/territories (which have about 37% of the total U.S. population.)
EDIT: New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Michigan are the only non-Confederate states where the AA population proportion is higher than the national average. Texas is the only Confederate state where it’s lower (not counting New Mexico and Arizona.)