Nate Cohen over at the Upshot is out with a piece that reasons that some of the Trump won districts around the country that have well educated voters….AND …Also some blue collar working voters are slipping away from Republicans…
If he has this right?
Democrats could, grab back some of the Obama blue collar voters that slipped away …..
Remember ?
Voters do NOT have Hillary Clinton repping Democrats ……
In, addtion?
Democrats have a much larger stable of well funded candidates running in places that Trump did well and now has Democrats pumped up to do something like actually come out and vote…..
To this point, we have mainly seen polls of the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters whether they intend to vote for a Democrat or Republican for Congress. Democrats have generally led on this ballot by six to eight percentage points over the last few months, which is around what analysts believe Democrats need to have an even shot of retaking the chamber.
The Republicans still have structural advantages — gerrymandering; the tendency for Democrats to waste votes in urban areas; incumbency — but in some cases these have weakened.
A flurry of Republican retirements has led to 42 open seats, many of them the sort of well-entrenched incumbents in competitive districts whose retirements are the most valuable for Democrats. The Democrats have succeeded in recruiting well-funded and strong candidates in many of the battlegrounds, which has tended to lessen the advantage of incumbency even in the districts where Republicans are running for re-election. A court decision in Pennsylvania has eliminated the party’s gerrymander there.
On paper, the Republicans still have a big geographic advantage: There are only nine Republican-held districts that voted more favorably for Democrats in the last two presidential elections than the rest of the country did. But that advantage doesn’t seem to be helping the Republicans as much as it has in past cycles, when congressional election results were increasingly correlated with presidential results.
Instead, Democrats appear highly competitive in many conservative districts. Already, there are polls showing Democrats ahead in Kentucky’s Sixth District, West Virginia’s Third, North Carolina’s Ninth, New York’s 22nd and Montana’s at-large district. Mr. Trump won each by at least 10 points.
One possibility is that Democrats are unexpectedly putting conservative districts into play because the overall national political environment is more favorable to Democrats than the generic ballot polls imply. Another possibility is that a district’s presidential vote choice will play a smaller than expected role in determining how a district will vote for the House.
Indeed, there aren’t many polls showing Democrats excelling in the well-educated districts where Mrs. Clinton won. Polls sponsored by Democratic groups have shown Republicans leading in Illinois’s Sixth, Pennsylvania’s First, Washington’s Eighth and California’s 39th. Even in the well-educated districts where Democrats lead in recent polls, like Virginia’s 10th or California’s 48th and 49th, the polls show Democrats merely running even with Mrs. Clinton….
More….