Didnt Remake The Political Map

By Harry Enten

After last week’s loss in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, Democrats still need to gain 24 seats to take back the House in 2018. The question is how they get there ...

Since Trump was sworn in as president, there have been 23 special elections1 for the U.S. House and state legislatures. In previous years, the average result in both of these types of special elections has been at least somewhat predictive of the following midterms.2 So if the Obama path were better for Democrats in 2018, we’d expect the special election results to look more like the 2012 map. If the Clinton path were better, they’d look more like the 2016 results.

So which map have the special elections followed? A multiple linear regression in which we try to explain the 2017 results by the district’s partisan lean in 2012 and its lean in 20163 reveals that the special election results so far this year track more closely to the 2012 lean. The analysis suggests that the best starting point to explain special election results in the Trump era is a weighted average in which the 2012 lean is weighted close to twice as much as the 2016 lean ...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/maybe-trump-didnt-remake-the-political-map/