Election News

Montana's at-large U.S. Representative Ryan Zinke was confirmed as Interior Secretary Wednesday. Zinke's departure creates the fifth vacancy in the House. Four Republicans have departed to become part of the Trump Administration, while the Democratic Representative is now Attorney General of California.

All five seats will be filled by special election this year; the calendar is below. At this point, only the race in Georgia appears to have a decent possibility of being competitive. That seat, formerly held by Tom Price, is in a Republican-leaning district in the northern Atlanta suburbs. Price easily won reelection by a 62-38% margin last November. However, Donald Trump won the district by only 1.5%, and Democrats would like to make this an early test of the new president's popularity.  

CA-34: Formerly held by Xavier Becerra (D), now California Attorney General. Safe Democrat

Our 2018 House interactive map is live, populated with initial House ratings from The Cook Political Report. Those ratings show 205 safe seats for Republicans, 173 for Democrats. The remaining 57 seats are seen at varying levels of competitiveness. At this early date, these are the 57 seats most likely to determine the battle for 218 - the number needed for control.

The GOP currently controls the House, with 238 seats to the Democrats 193. Four seats are vacant, three of which were previously held by Republicans now part of Donald Trump's administration.  The one open Democratic seat, in California, became vacant when Xavier Becerra became California Attorney General. All four seats will be filled by special election in the months ahead. Only one, for Georgia's 6th congressional district, has some prospect of being competitive. 

The 2018 interactive Senate map has been updated to include the special election that will be held in Alabama on the general election date of November 6th of that year. The seat became open when Jeff Sessions was confirmed as U.S. Attorney General earlier this month. Alabama Governor Robert Bentley appointed Luther Strange, the state's Attorney General at the time, to fill the seat.

This is a 'Class 2' seat, and will therefore be contested again, for a full six year term, in November, 2020.  

As reported by GovTrack, Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King has introduced a Joint Resolution for a proposed constitutional amendment that would apportion congressional districts based on the number of U.S. citizens in each state. Currently, this apportionment is determined by the number of residents* of each state, as calculated in each Census.

This is not the first time such an amendment has been proposed. While it is highly unlikely that the current proposal will get anywhere, we were curious how the electoral map would shift if it was only based on citizens.**  

We've updated our Gaming the Electoral College feature to show how different allocation methodologies would have played out had they been in place for the 2016 presidential election. The chart below summarizes the results for 2016 and compares them to 2012.

While all the alternative methods benefited Mitt Romney in 2012, they would have negatively impacted Donald Trump's results in 2016. That said, he would still have won the electoral vote, albeit with a smaller margin over Hillary Clinton, in most of these scenarios. The reason is that the winner take all method is much more volatile than the ones involving congressional districts or the popular vote. 

Our first pass at the 2018 Senate Interactive Map is now live. This three-way map lets you look at the current composition of the Senate, make a forecast for the 33 races scheduled for 2018, and then see the new (2019) Senate based on those predictions.

After gaining two Senate seats in the 2016 election, Democrats currently hold 48 seats (including two independents). The party will need to gain an additional three seats in 2018 to wrest control from the Republicans. That will be a tall order as 25 of the 33 seats to be contested in 2018 are currently held by the blue team.  

We've included three 'Starting Views'. Two of those are initial ratings from The Cook Political Report and Inside Elections (formerly The Rothenberg & Gonzales Report). We've also included a composite battleground map that shows as competitive any race rated toss-up or leaning by one of the above-mentioned forecasters. 

Two vacanies have arisen this week in the House of Representatives as a result of political appointments. Additional vacancies may be forthcoming as President Trump's nominations are confirmed. Lastly, several House Members have announced they will not be running for re-election in 2018.

Vacancies

• Mike Pompeo (R, KS-03) resigned on January 23rd after being confirmed as CIA Director. A special election for this safely Republican seat will take place on April 11.
• Xavier Becerra (D, CA-34) resigned on January 24th after being confirmed as California Attorney General. A primary election for this safely Democratic seat will take place on April 4. In the unlikely event that one candidate gets over 50%, there will be no general election. Otherwise, that election will take place on June 6th.

With these two vacancies, the House sits at 240 Republicans, 193 Democrats.

Awaiting Confirmation

As first reported by Political Wire (subscription required for this particular article; a political feed well worth following even if you aren't a member), Republicans in Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia have introduced legislation this week to modify the winner-take-all allocation of electoral college votes in their states. All three states were won by Clinton in 2016 and have been won by Democrats for at least the last three presidential elections. It will not surprise you that these proposals would benefit the Republican nominee in future elections should the Democratic streak continue.

All three bills would shift the state from winner-take-all to what is known as the congressional district method. In this method, the winner of the popular vote in the state receives 2 electoral votes, with one electoral vote awarded based on the popular vote result within each congressional district. In 2016, Donald Trump would have won 12 electoral votes in these three states if the rules had been in place.

Legislation to manipulate the electoral college vote seems to arise regularly between elections, and is almost always partisan in nature. For example, while proponents of the current bills will likely claim they are 'fairer', Republicans in Nebraska have repeatedly tried to revert back to winner-take-all since Barack Obama won an electoral vote there in 2008. 'Fairer = benefits me' when it comes to this legislation.

The 2016 election made many people aware that the way electoral votes are distributed gives residents of sparsely populated states more clout than those in large states. To take the two extremes, California gets 55 electoral votes for 37.3 million people (2010 Census), or one electoral vote for approximately each 680,000 people. Wyoming receives 3 votes for its 568,000 people, or about one per 190,000. For more detail, see the 'Background' section of this article.

We were curious how the electoral vote would have turned out if the 538 available electoral votes were distributed based exclusively^ on population, so that everyone's vote would have the same weight. As it turns out, it would have made very little difference in the 2016 outcome.

It's a long way off, but we've utilized a recent report from Election Data Services to take a look at how the electoral map may shift after the 2020 Census. We've illustrated it using state winners from the 2016 election, but the map is interactive allowing you to make your own projections. The new electoral map, however it ultimately looks, will be in effect beginning with the 2024 election.

Texas is projected to be the big winner, gaining 4 electoral votes on top of the 4 it gained after the 2010 Census. While Texas has voted Republican since 1976, 2016's margin of victory was the smallest there since 1996. If demographic or other trends make the state even remotely competitive, this will be one of the major battlegrounds of the next decade.