What did the 2018 election mean?
There are three levels to this question.
- What effects will the 2018 election have?
- What did the 2018 election tell us about the will of the people (as filtered through the voting booth)?
- What lesson is at the end of the story?
There are many stories we could tell about the 2018 elections. I have a simple one: The 2018 elections marked rising awareness and a re-balancing of power.
What effects will the 2018 election have?
The 2018 election went well for Democrats, and voters chose Democratic candidates by a large margin. There was a large net shift in power towards Democrats both at the federal level and at the state level — leaving us with a closer balance of power between the two parties. We can call it a blue wave, but one that occurred in the middle of an ebb tide. This wave has not set a new high-water mark for Democrats.
Before the 2018 elections, however, the Republican party had clear status as the majority party in charge of government. On the federal level, Republicans had control over both chambers of Congress and the presidency. On the state level, Republicans had controlled a remarkable share of power at the state level.
Because governors are disproportionately elected in midterms, this was a major opportunity for Democrats to make gains at the state level. However, while the shift towards Democrats was large even at the state level, Republicans still won a majority of gubernatorial races (20 out of 36) and retained control over most of the state legislatures affected by the midterm elections (57 out of 87). This is partly because of gerrymandering.
Power at the state level is more evenly divided than it was, and most of the shifts in power were incremental.
For example, in North Carolina, the Republicans lost their supermajority in the state legislature, which allowed them to pass legislation over the vetoes of a Democratic governor; however, the Republicans still hold a majority in both chambers of the state legislature. This can be largely blamed on gerrymandering.
What did the 2018 election tell us about the will of the people?
People are engaged. (49% turnout!) This is the estimated share of eligible voters who turned out to vote in 2018. (See here for details.) This may sound bad (about half of eligible voters decided to vote), but this is truly remarkable turnout compared to past midterm elections. It is almost as high as we see in some presidential elections.
This high level of participation is good news.
Democrats won (7.8% margin and 40 seats gained). The voting margin in favor of Democrats (in the House of Representatives) looks to be about 7.8% with a gain of 40 seats. This is the clearest single measure of the national electorate, as the House elections are the only elections that occurred in all 50 states. Voters currently favor Democrats overall.
Neither of those figures is exceptional. In 2008, House Democrats scored a higher popular margin, 10.6%; and in 2010, House Republicans gained 63 seats, a more dramatic shift in power caused by unusually low turnout among Democratic voters.
People want fair but secure elections. There were fourteen ballot measures in twelve different states that will affect who votes and how. All fourteen measures passed. Each could be described as an attempt to secure the integrity of the election process, and it is fair to say that the fact that all fourteen measures passed means that many voters are concerned about the election process itself.
The fact that these measures passed is not surprising. While politicians tend to support voter ID measures, anti-gerrymandering measures, and improved voter registration systems based on which party those measures are expected to favor, polls suggest that voters across the entire country support all three types of measures.
What is the lesson at the end of the story?
Different people will take very different lessons from this election results.
I think there are a couple of very important lessons to learn from this election. First, as I pointed out before the election, some states are still running elections very badly and this needs to be fixed. What happened in Georgia and Florida? We had close state-wide races with low-confidence results. What happened in North Carolina? The election was carried out using a map that had been ruled unconstitutional, on the grounds that it was too late to change this late in the campaign season.
Every time an election produces a close result favoring the party currently holding the levers of power in that state, some people will question whether or not the result was legitimate. This is true for the Republican representatives who lost in Orange County as well as for Democratic gubernatorial candidates losing in Georgia and Florida.
When the election is run poorly, those questions cannot be effectively answered. It is likely that there was at least one politician elected incorrectly in 2018 by either accidental counting errors, deliberate mishandling of election processes by officials, or both.
In the case of Georgia, for example, the gubernatorial election may have been decided by voter purges, unfair distribution of voting machines, security breaches, or software bugs. We don’t know and we probably won’t know.
How we vote matters a lot.
Second, turning out to vote in midterms matters. The results of the election were all about who did and did not turn out to the polls. Democrats turned out in numbers that we hadn’t seen in the previous two midterms.
Third, change happens slowly. It does happen — but it happens slowly, even with great effort. Gerrymandering makes it particularly hard to flip state legislatures. State legislatures are frequently in charge of drawing their won districts.