What Went Down In The 2018 Midterms

Tonight, it’s worth watching to see whether the much-vaunted “blue wave” reaches state attorney general offices. This year, Democrats are hoping to nab more state attorney general seats as they’ve proved strikingly effective in opposing President Trump’s agenda. Blue-state attorneys general have sued the Trump administration over a wide range of issues —environmental regulations, birth control, and the plan to add a citizenship question to the Census, to name a few — and they’ve already started to rack up victories.

Now, Democrats are running on the explicit platform of suing the Trump administration in several states this year. In Florida, Sean Shaw has promised to investigate Trump’s businesses in the state; in Colorado, Phil Weiser says he’ll combat the president’s policy agenda on immigration and environmental regulations, and in Michigan, Dana Nessel has said she’ll also use the position of attorney general to “fight back” against Trump.

As my colleague Nathaniel Rakich and I wrote last month, Republicans currently control 27 state attorney general offices to Democrats’ 22 (one is an independent), which means the balance of power could shift if Democrats win even a few contests. Check out our piece for the full list of competitive races (as of late October).

Leader in the clubhouse for the coolest — and most haunted — polling place. See more

Now on the opposite side of town, the Columbarium, where many dead San Franciscans are interred and many more will be voting today. (Coolest polling place ever.) pic.twitter.com/Hl62Nrg1U4

— Gwendolyn Wu (@gwendolynawu) November 6, 2018

Today is Election Day, but voters have actually been voting for more than a month. It’s common for pundits and the media to try to read early-voting numbers as tea leaves for how the election as a whole will turn out, but the correlation between early-voting numbers and election results is actually quite flimsy.

First of all, results are not reported until after polls close on Election Day. So when you hear about early-voting numbers, what you’re hearing about is the party registration data of those who voted early — and party registration does not necessarily correspond with vote choice. (For instance, in states like Ohio and Texas, party registration is determined by the last primary you voted in.) Then there’s the fact that independent early voters are a total black box. If 40 percent of early voters are Republican and 30 percent are Democrats, there’s still plenty of room for the 30 percent who are independents to swing the election to either party.

Early voting is a relatively new phenomenon, and its patterns are ever-changing. Just because a lot of Republicans have historically voted early doesn’t mean that it will play out that way next time. And if historic levels of Democrats are voting early, it could be a sign of heightened Democratic enthusiasm … or it could be that reliable Democratic voters who used to vote on Election Day are now voting early.

Oh, yeah, and then there are those Election Day voters, who make up a majority of the electorate in most states. There’s no guarantee that they will follow the same patterns as early voters; in fact, it kind of makes sense that people who vote early are pretty unrepresentative — demographically, culturally, politically — of the people who wait until the last minute. In 2016, we saw that happen in North Carolina, where Hillary Clinton won the early vote by 2.5 points, but Donald Trump won the Election Day vote by 15.6 points.