2018 Midterm Elections: Can Democrats Keep Seats In the Senate?
The 2018 midterm elections will have 33 senators vying for re-election, and it presents a chance for the Democrats to gain back majority control of the Senate. Their opportunity to win more seats look to be very slim, however.
Thirty-three senators will be up for re-election, and 23 of them are Democrats, with the remaining 10 being Republican senators. The current seats in the U.S. Senate are taken up by 52 Republicans, 46 Democrats and two independent senators, according to the International Business Times.
With the situation as is, taking back even the slimmest single seat majority for the Democrats entails taking over three Republican seats, at the very least.
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That difficult task comes on top of maintaining their hold on their own 23 seats, a monumental task given the results of the 2016 election, where five states with Democrat senators voted for Trump by a significant margin.
These states are Indiana, North Dakota, West Virginia, Missouri and Montana. In all these five regions, current U.S. President Donald Trump prevailed over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton by 20 percent or more.
Democrat Senators have a ray of hope in their dilemma, as Five Thirty-Eight points out. They could bank on the trend that incumbent senators enjoy some resilience when they don't have control of the White House.
Midterm election voting trends from 1982 have shown that only four percent of "opposition senators" lost their re-election bids. What's more is that most of the remainder won back their seat by huge margins, averaging 28 percent over the president's party mates.
The lowest point for opposition senators in that year, 1998, only saw 14 percent of them ousted, giving them a winning rate of 86 percent.
Nevertheless, it's still an uphill battle for Democrats, as the Republicans only have ten seats they need to defend. Out of these ten, only two of those — Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada — saw a close race in the 2016 election.
