Congress will include more women than ever
More than 100 women were projected to win seats in the House of Representatives, easily shattering the record. Overwhelmingly, they were Democrats who helped the party take control of the chamber.
Women have never held more than 84 of the 435 seats in the House. By 1 a.m. Wednesday as the votes were still being counted, 85 had already been declared winners.
“Women made history in a number of ways and were a significant force in flipping many districts from red to blue,” said Kelly Dittmar, a political scientist at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Many of the winning candidates campaigned on the need for better health care for all Americans. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds — from military veterans to teachers — and many had never run for office before.
Women made inroads in gubernatorial races, too, which are particularly important because of the upcoming redistricting battles. In Kansas and Michigan, women flipped states that had been under GOP control.
Democratic state Sen. Laura Kelly defeated Republican Kris Kobach, whom Trump had campaigned with recently in Kansas.
Gretchen Whitmer, a former state senator in Michigan, won her race after campaigning on a promise to fix the state’s roads and aging drinking water infrastructure, and to expand Medicaid to lower-income adults.
Notably, Michigan Democrats selected a woman for every statewide office on Tuesday’s ballot: governor, U.S. senator, attorney general and secretary of state.
Georgia had the most high-profile governor’s race. Stacey Abrams, a Democrat who won the backing of former president Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, was aiming to be the first black female governor in the nation.
But she was trailing Wednesday behind Trumpbacked candidate Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, who cast himself as a “politically incorrect” hard-line immigration candidate like the president.
The women who ran this year were remarkably diverse: black, Latina, Native American. But noticeably absent on ballots were more Republican women.
“We need to go out and get our women engaged,” said Sarah Chamberlain, president and CEO of Republican Main Street Partnership. “We are being dwarfed by the Democrats. This is something we are going to focus on.”
Chamberlain said she hears voters in key districts talking mostly about an affordable health-care system that serves everyone, even those with preexisting medical conditions. That has been the loud and clear message of many Democratic candidates.
Among the new faces coming to Congress:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, 29, a Latina who defeated incumbent Joseph Crowley in a decisive primary, will head to the House.
In Virginia, Democrat Jennifer Wexton unseated Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock.
Deb Haaland, a Democrat in New Mexico, became the first Native American woman to serve in Congress.
In Florida, Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, an immigrant from Ecuador and educator, focused her campaign largely on health care and toppled Rep. Carlos Curbelo, the Republican incumbent. Curbelo had voted to repeal Obamacare in a district that contains thousands of people who benefited from it.
Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, born in Detroit to Palestinian parents, and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, who arrived in the United States from Somalia at 14, won their House races, becoming the first Muslim women elected to Congress. Jeremy W. Peters, Matt Flegenheimer, Elizabeth Dias, Susan Chira, Kate Zernike and Alexander Burns
©2018 The New York Times Here is a quick look at what happened Tuesday night.
Suburbs defect as Trump’s base holds
The divergent outcomes in the House and Senate — a Democratic takeover in one chamber and Republican gains in the other — exposed an ever-deepening gulf separating rural communities from America’s cities and suburbs.
Democratic gains in the House came in densely populated, educated and diverse enclaves around the country, around major liberal cities such as New York and Philadelphia and also red-state population centers like Houston and Oklahoma City. The Republican Party’s traditional base in these districts collapsed, with college-educated white voters joining with growing minority communities to repudiate President Donald Trump and his party.
Republican victories in the Senate came mainly in the conservative strongholds where Trump’s popularity has remained steady or grown since 2016. With rural voters moving rightward and the national Democratic Party moving left, Senate Democrats such as Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Joe Donnelly of Indiana found it impossible to reassemble the political coalitions that elected them in the past.
As a long-term proposition, Democrats may be getting the better end of the bargain: They are winning over voters in growing communities that look more like the country as a whole, while Republicans are increasingly reliant on an aging population of conservative whites to hold up their electoral map. And for now, the Democrats’ eclectic coalition of white moderates, young liberals and African-American, Latino and Asian-American voters was more than enough to seize the House.
But the midterm elections also made clear that Trump and his party continue to hold important structural advantages on the electoral map — including near-total dominance of the conservative states that hold outsized power in the Senate and a tenacious hold on the governorships of the two biggest swing states on the presidential map, Florida and Ohio.
Viral stars fall short
It was the year of the viral campaign video — powerful ads that helped boost the profiles and fundraising numbers for Democratic challengers across the country. But it was not their night. Several House candidates whose compelling biographies (and slickly produced renderings of them) helped put them on the national radar lost Tuesday, including Randy Bryce in Wisconsin, Amy McGrath in Kentucky and M.J. Hegar in Texas. McGrath and Hegar made it close in traditionally conservative areas, although Democrats had higher hopes for full breakthroughs in recent weeks.
The conclusion is certainly not that viral videos are counterproductive; they remain a useful and efficient way to raise money and introduce a candidate to a wider audience. But at times, it seems, the audience was not always the intended constituency. Bryce, for instance, was an MSNBC darling — one of the most talked-about progressive candidates this cycle after his introductory video gained wide distribution, highlighting his ironworker background and signature mustache and hard hat. He appeared poised to lose by double digits, running in the district that House Speaker Paul D. Ryan is vacating.
And then there was the Texas Senate race, where Sen. Ted Cruz felled the most viral candidate of them all: Beto O’Rourke, who livestreamed virtually every waking moment on the campaign trail, from burger stops to three-hour drives.
Opponents of abortion win big
Republicans gained some of their most important ground Tuesday by electing several new senators who are opposed to abortion rights, a development that will help the party advance one of its bedrock issues.
By picking up Democratic-held Senate seats in Indiana, North Dakota and Missouri — and possibly elsewhere — the Republican majority will be decidedly further to the right on the issue. And no longer will the votes of two senators who support abortion rights — Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — be as pivotal when it comes to confirming judges and passing legislation.
The elections of Josh Hawley in Missouri, Mike Braun in Indiana and Kevin Cramer in North Dakota — all opponents of abortion — have emboldened anti-abortion activists and would appear to make it far easier for the Senate to confirm judges who are seen as likely to strike down legal protections contained in Roe v. Wade.
In another series of victories for the anti-abortion movement, key governors’ races also swung its way. Iowa, Florida, Georgia and Ohio all elected governors Tuesday night who oppose abortion rights.