What Went Down In The 2018 Midterms

In New York’s 27th District, which re-elected Republican Chris Collins despite his indictment for allegations of insider trading, there was almost no outside spending in this race. According to ProPublica, none of the major independent expenditure groups or super PACs were involved in this upstate race.

Missouri and Arkansas both raised their minimum wages via ballot measure today; both measures passed with more than 60 percent of the vote. Arkansas and North Carolina enshrined voter ID laws in their state constitutions. Arkansas did so with 79 percent of the vote.

Want evidence of nationalization? In Florida, at the county level, the correlation between the Democrats’ share of 2012 presidential returns and 2014 gubernatorial returns was 0.95 (correlations run from -1 to 1). Between the same races in 2016 and 2018, it’s up to 0.99. So in English, the governor’s race in Florida looks like a rerun of the 2016 presidential race. And interestingly, if you want to predict the 2018 Florida county-level results, they look more like 2016 than 2012. That’s true in the Ohio Senate and Georgia governor races, too. I don’t know if that will hold in other states, but it’s indicative that 2016 wasn’t a total aberration.