Thread by @JewhadiTM

If the midterms were a referendum, Trump won washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-th…

After flipping dozens of seats in the midterm elections, Democrats are set to take control of the House of Representatives. Many pundits and analysts have attempted to frame the results as a referendum on President Trump.

Among these, there seems to be a consensus that the president has somehow been “repudiated.”

Not so fast.

On balance, Democrats should be more disturbed than comforted by how the elections shook out.

For instance, turnout was much higher than in 2014. However, the increased engagement proved to be bipartisan: Trump’s supporters also showed up in force, significantly undercutting the expected “blue wave.”

Yes, Republicans ultimately lost control of the House — but even here, the Democrats’ continued weakness shines through:

It was expected that the Republicans would lose a significant number of seats, irrespective of public opinions about Trump.

Republicans had many more difficult House seats to defend than Democrats overall. There were twice as many Republican incumbents defending House seats in states Hillary Clinton won in 2016 than there were Democrats defending seats in states Trump won.

Republicans also had more than twice as many “open” House seats to hold on to as their Democratic rivals had: 36 Republican representatives chose not to stand for reelection this year because they were retiring or seeking another office.

Seven others either resigned or otherwise left office before the election. As a result, Republicans had 43 House seats to defend without the benefit of a true incumbent candidate.

On top of this, Republicans had three “open” Senate seats, and one more with a pseudo-incumbent (interim Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith took office in April).

Yet Democrats managed to win surprisingly few of these “open” contests. In the vast majority of cases, a new Republican was elected instead, and they tended to be even closer to Trump than their predecessors.

So Trump actually cemented his hold over the Republican Party: Most of his staunchest Republican critics have either stepped down, been removed through a primary challenge or otherwise failed to win reelection.

On top of this, virtually all of the Senate Democrats who voted against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh from the states that Trump won in 2016 were voted out of office and replaced by Republicans.

Historically speaking, Democrats delivered a thoroughly average result in their first round as Trump’s opposition.

Going all the way back to the Civil War, there were only 2 instances when a new party seized the presidency but didn’t lose seats in the House during their first midterm: Under Roosevelt in 1934 (during the Great Depression), and Bush in 2002 (after 9/11).

Even including these outliers, the average attrition during a party’s inaugural midterms is 35 House seats; excluding these two exceptions, the average loss is 41.

Regardless of which number we run with, Trump could end up performing better than average in preserving his party’s influence in the House.

He performed much better than his last two Democratic predecessors: Clinton lost control of both chambers in the 1994 midterm elections. Obama saw historic losses in the House in 2010, and lost seats in the Senate as well — the most sweeping congressional reversal in 62 years.

Yet, not only did Trump suffer far less attrition than Obama or Clinton in the House, his party will gain in the Senate. This may not be surprising given the slanted map against Democrats.

It is also somewhat typical overall: Between 1862 and 2014, the president’s party picked up seats in the Senate during their first midterms 56 percent of the time, lost seats 37 percent of the time and broke even once.

In other words, there did not seem to be a thorough rebuke of Trump. In fact, there was little exceptional in the results at all, beyond the fact that they were so very normal.