I'm working on three hours of sleep, so probably a good time fire off my election #hottakes 🔥🔥🔥🔥
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#Hottake 1: D house performance in 2018 was comparable to GOP performance in 2010 for 2 reasons: overall pop vote margin was about the same and CRUCIALLY, D's had a much bigger majority in 2010 (257 seats!), so were overexposed. A GOP majority of 257 seats woulda lost 60 seats
#Hottake 2: The Democratic party's coalition is bigger than the GOP, BUT the GOP's hardcore, reliable voting base is bigger, and much more spread out across the country. Dems have to turnout lots of different kinds of voters, GOP doesn't really. Which leads to...
#Hottake 3: The Trump coalition is running a fairly successful, and fairly unprecedented, experiment of governing the country from a bunker of 40 - 44% of the population. Constitutional structures help them massively in doing this, but it's a real problem for D's.
#Hottake 4: There was no real, clear ideological through-line for Democrats last night: Joe Donnelly lost and so did Gillum. There was some real promise to the Beto, Abrams, Gillum theory of the case (be authentic, turn out your base, find new voters) but it was not quite enough
#Hottake 5: The biggest problem for Dems to solve is how to reliably put together a high turnout, multi-racial multi-class coalition *while also eating into the margins among white non-college/rural voters*. That's a hard thing to do!
#Hottake 6: Not a novel one, but still important: midwestern snap back in WI, MI, PA, OH is massively important for 2020. There will be lots of attention paid to the internals to figure out what happened and the answer matters *a lot.*
#Hottake 7: Sherrod Brown and Amy Klobuchar are underrated as 2020 D presidential contenders.
#Hottake 8: The economy tends not to loom super large in midterms as a voting determinant but it does in presidentials and markets all sending signals (possibly erroneous) we are now in late cycle. Honestly, probably no single exogenous factor matters more than that.
#Hottake 9: McCain's thumbs down, which killed ACA repeal, probably saved the GOP a bunch of house seats and some senate races. Much easier to walk away from the unpopularity of a bad vote than a bad law.
#Hottake 10: The Democratic party took big strides towards having a professional elected class that more closely looks like its voting coalition. The more of that the better both on the merits *and* the politics (See Lucy McBath).
