Economy not on the ballot
Republicans bet it would buoy them at the polls; the data show it didn’t
Unemployment is abnormally low. Growth has sped up. A $1.5 trillion tax cut signed by President Donald Trump last year is fueling consumer spending. Faced with strong Democratic enthusiasm and fundraising, and hindered by an unpopular president, Republicans were counting on that economic strength to lift them at the polls, or at least limit the damage.
It didn’t. Republicans lost in House districts with low unemployment rates. They lost in districts that have gained manufacturing jobs. They lost in districts that got big tax cuts. They lost overwhelmingly in the kind of affluent, educated suburbs that have experienced the strongest overall recovery — and that were once among the most reliable Republican districts.
Republicans had lost 30 net seats in the House as of Friday afternoon and will probably lose a few more once all the votes are counted. It is possible that Republican losses might have been even larger were it not for the strong economy. But there was little sign of that in district-level results: Many of the Democrats’ pickups came in places where the economy, at least by standard measures, is strong.
All told, there was no apparent relationship between Republicans candidates’ performance in Tuesday’s House races and the strength of the economy in those districts, an analysis of economic and electoral data shows.
Republicans fared better in the Senate, but there is no sign the economy was a major factor in those races, either. Kevin Cramer, a Republican, unseated incumbent Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, which has the nation’s lowest unemployment rate, 2.7 percent. But in neighboring Minnesota, where the rate is just a tenth of a percentage point higher, the Democratic incumbent, Amy Klobuchar, cruised to a 24-point victory.
If the economy was going to save Republicans anywhere, it should have been in Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District, where the unemployment rate was 2.5 percent in the third quarter of the year and where the typical household earned more than $80,000 a year in 2017.
Yet the Republican incumbent, Jason Lewis, lost by more than 5 points to a local businesswoman, Angie Craig, whom he had beaten in a tight election two years earlier.
Craig wasn’t the only Democrat who found success in a part of the country where the economy is exceptionally strong. Republican incumbents were defending eight seats that are among the 25 districts where unemployment is lowest. They lost five, including two districts each in Minnesota and Iowa, where the local unemployment rate is below 3 percent.
In fact, Republican incumbents fared better on average in districts with higher unemployment rates. And while that partly reflects partisan dynamics — Republicans tend to do well in rural areas, where unemployment tends to be higher — the party’s candidates also did better relative to past elections in districts where the jobless rate was higher than the national average.
Democrats did well in parts of the country that are thriving under broader measures of economic health. Of the 33 districts Democrats have picked up so far, 20 are considered “prosperous,” according to ratings by the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank.