House Democrats' 2018 victories came about in some ways that might surprise you

One of the most common intramural arguments that Democrats seem to have is which voters to reach out to in order to try to win close elections: Do you try to turn out “base voters”—usually meant to mean young people and/or people of color—who don’t usually vote at high rates but are likely to vote Democratic if they do vote, which means convincing them to vote at all? Or do you try to win over “swing voters” who tend to alternate between voting Democratic or Republican—where you don’t have to convince them to vote, but you do have to convince them to vote Democratic?

As with many long-winded arguments, though, it’s one that turns out to be something of a false choice. Doing one doesn’t preclude you from doing the other as well. And based on new research, doing one will help strengthen your position, but to make really big gains, you need to do a lot of both.

And a good example of big gains is the 2018 election, where Democrats gained a net 41 seats in the House. That’s not as big as Republican gains in 2010, but it’s still the largest one-year Democratic gain in the House that most of us have seen in our lifetimes. It’ll be difficult to expand much further in the House in 2020, but there are still a White House and a Senate that need to be won back in 2020, and the lessons of 2018 will be helpful.

This week, Yair Ghitza of Catalist, the Democratic data-gathering firm (they maintain the vast depository of information known as the “voter file” that you sometimes hear political professionals speaking of in reverent tones), put out a deep dive into how those 2018 victories came about. As you may have guessed, Democrats substantially expanded the electorate for 2018 compared with previous midterms; the composition of the electorate, in terms of the races and ages of those who showed up, was a more Democratic-friendly composition, thanks to an influx of people who don’t usually vote in midterms.

But Ghitza also points out some details that may challenge the conventional wisdom about 2018: Democratic gains in 2018, relative to 2016, were actually the largest in rural areas, not suburban areas, and the bulk of the impact in 2018 came from winning back the votes of 2016 Trump voters, not from the newly activated voters.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2YXe5RV