So here's some slightly scary news for Trump: The 2018 map looked more like 2012 than 2016, with Democrats performing quite well in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the three states that essentially won Trump the election two years ago.

As a "fun," day-after-the-election experiment, I decided to add up the total popular vote for the U.S. House in each state, based on ABC News's tally of votes as of Wednesday afternoon. This isn't a perfect exercise, by any means. The vote is still being counted in many states; there are a few dozen congressional districts where one of the parties (usually Republicans) didn't nominate a candidate. I did make one adjustment for a slightly different problem, which is that Florida doesn't bother to count votes in uncontested races, something that cost Democrats in the neighborhood of 720,000 votes off their popular-vote tally in that state.2

With those caveats aside, here's the map you come up with if you count up the popular vote. It ought to look familiar. In fact, it's the same exact map by which Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012, except with Ohio going to Republicans. It would have equated to 314 electoral votes for Democrats and 224 for the GOP.

Then a map less favorable to the Democrats for 2020:

Of course the map looks good for you when you've had a good night. How about in an average year instead, when the overall vote is fairly close? Democrats currently lead in the national popular vote for the House by around 6 percentage points, and they're likely to run that total up to 7 or perhaps 8 percentage points as additional votes are counted, mostly from the West Coast mail-balloting states (California, Oregon, Washington). On the other hand, the Democratic margin is a bit inflated because Republicans let quite a few districts go uncontested. So let's go ahead and subtract 6 points from the Democrat's 2018 margin in every state; this is a benchmark for what things might have looked like in a roughly neutral year:

IMO, 2020 will be about as neutral as was 2018, So, perhaps we need not despair. There seems to be a reasonable hope for a 2020 outcome favorable to Democrats. And it seems likely that, by 2020, Democrats might have a new House Speaker and another crop of more progressive members.  

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

2016 Actual - House [POLITICO]

2018 Current -House [538 shown: last update 227(D),198 (R); BLOOMBERG:last update 231 (D), 198(R), 11 outstanding]

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What do these maps signify? (1.) Geographic area of congressional districts (2.) Partisan "control" of geographic area (3.) "Correlation" of partisan districts to electoral outcome in 2016, when Trump won greatest number of electors, which Nate Silver does not want to discuss. Why? Correlation of district representation to electoral outcome is weak. Correlation of voter participation --greatest in POTUS election-- to candidate is strong. And the opposition party candidate with "charisma" to unseat an incumbent is unknown. Anyone Butrump is not a candidate.


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