Dire report gives struggling Democratic Party more bad news

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As we’ve reported on numerous occasions previously, the Democratic Party saw a bloodbath during the election cycle when it came to their standing in government. The grand total comes out to a net loss of 1,042 state and federal Democratic posts, including congressional and state legislative seats, governorships and the presidency.

Since then, Democrats have lost every single special election under the Trump presidency. Then, just last Thursday, we learned that Democrats would lose another governorship as West Virginia’s Jim Justice announced he’ll be joining the Republican Party.

Even when there isn’t an election to be lost, Democrats keep losing.

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In fact, their Party representation in Congress is so poor now, that in 2018 they could win the majority of primaries — and still be in the minority.

According to the statistics blog Five Thirty Eight (FTE):

[T]he Senate hasn’t had such a strong pro-GOP bias since the ratification of direct Senate elections in 1913.

Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats.

This is partly attributable to the nature of House districts: GOP gerrymandering and Democratic voters’ clustering in urban districts has moved the median House seat well to the right of the nation. Part of it is bad timing. Democrats have been cursed by a terrible Senate map in 2018: They must defend 25 of their 48 seats1 while Republicans must defend just eight of their 52.

In the last few decades, Democrats have expanded their advantages in California and New York — states with huge urban centers that combined to give Clinton a 6 million vote edge, more than twice her national margin. But those two states elect only 4 percent of the Senate. Meanwhile, Republicans have made huge advances in small rural states — think Arkansas, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia — that wield disproportionate power in the upper chamber compared to their populations.

And, that’s not all:

The partisan bias of Congress is quantifiable by measuring the difference between each national presidential result against the median House and Senate seats.

FTE continues:

So in 2008, for example, Barack Obama won the popular vote by 7.3 percentage points, but Democrats won the median House seat by 4.4 points — a pro-GOP bias of 2.9 points.

Today there’s still a net GOP bias (obviously), and it’s at an historic high in both chambers.

Yet, despite all this, they can’t even manage to repeal Obamacare. Go figure!

[Note: This post was written by Matt Palumbo. He is a co-author of the new book A Paradoxical Alliance: Islam and the Left, and can be found on Twitter @MattPalumbo12]

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