Fall campaign begins
Balance of power in Congress at stake in midterm elections
Primary season is over: Democrats and Republicans have chosen their standard-bearers and defined their major arguments, and the general election has begun.
The midterm campaigns will not only determine the balance of power in Congress, but also shape the strategies and identities of the two parties heading into the 2020 presidential race.
Here are some of the main lessons from the primaries and the start of the fall campaign.
Democrats eye 2020
Democrats hope to use the midterm elections to position themselves for a comeback in the 2020 presidential election, by retaking or capturing two swaths of the country President Donald Trump carried in 2016: the industrial Midwest and the tje Sun Belt.
They have nominated starkly different sets of candidates in the two regions. In the Midwest, the party has largely fielded well-known white politicians who are modestly to the left of center. The Democratic tickets in the Sun Belt are more liberal and represent the progressive element of the party.
A new generation rises, led by women
A record number of women emerged from primary elections this year, powered by strong turnout among female voters and an apparent hunger across the electorate for candidates promising change. There are 257 women running for House and Senate seats around the country — 197 of them Democrats — and more than a dozen female nominees for governor. This class of candidates has the potential to create a dramatic change in the image and culture of U.S. government.
Polls suggest the country is headed for a gaping gender gap in November; it could send a clear signal about the kind of leader Democrats want in 2020.
New rules are at play for both parties
Even as the two parties seem to be pulling further apart from one another, it was what they had in common this primary season that illustrates how much politics is being transformed: Republicans and Democrats in 2018 paid little heed to the decorous rules and precedents that have long governed how they choose candidates.
Trump ran through the Republican primaries, shredding the tradition of presidential neutrality by taking sides in nominating contests and even opposing a handful of incumbents.
For their part, a group of Democratic insurgents targeted incumbent lawmakers who had no whiff of scandal and reliably liberal voting records.
The question now is whether 2018 represented a Trump-era anomaly or the start of a new, less genteel primary culture.
Republicans, Democrats vie for open House seats
The Republican House majority is beleaguered. But at the outset of the general election, there is no more urgent problem for the party than the dozens of open seats Republicans must defend, Democrats must gain 23 seats to take control of the House, and they could win a quarter or more just from these vacancies.
The Senate #Resistance(ish)
No Senate Democrats were denied renomination or, more to the point, faced much in the way of a challenge at all from the left.
So with the Senate election this year mostly being fought in conservative-leaning states that Trump carried in 2016, this turn of events has created an odd juxtaposition: The full success of the anti-Trump forces in the midterms could hinge on Senate Democratic candidates who spend more time discussing how they can work with the president than they do vowing to block his agenda.
Democratic candidates for the Senate are benefiting from their party’s disdain for Trump, raising money from all over the country and welcoming a new wave of motivated activists to their campaigns. But they are downplaying their objections to his presidency in a way that makes clear that they do not think red America is fully embracing the #resistance.