As Democrats recover from their post-election daze, and as President Trump enacts the policies they ran against, they’ve begun to scour the map to see where and how to take back power. That’s led them to what had been deep-red America, places where Clinton’s long bet on the “emerging majority” of white surbanites and melting-pot nonwhites led to gains.
Clinton’s map included Arizona’s 2nd District, briefly represented by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.); Illinois’s 6th District, whose Rep. Peter J. Roskam (R-Ill.) has served in House leadership; and Florida’s 27th District, a Latino-heavy stretch of Miami that voted for Clinton by 20 points while reelecting Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Texas’s 7th District is one of at least 22 across the country that voted for both Clinton and a Republican member of Congress; winning 24 would give Democrats the majority.
“All of these districts are really tough, but we’re expanding the battlefield,” said Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), who just began his second term atop the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “President Trump is starting his term with the lowest approval ratings of any president we’ve seen, and that’s after he lost these districts.”
Out-of-power parties rarely pitch a perfect game, and in 2018, a group of Midwestern Democrats will be defending themselves in districts that broke for Trump. On average, presidents polling under 50 percent approval at their midterms have seen their parties lose 35 House seats. Genuinely surprised by the energy of anti-Trump protests, Democrats are already wondering where it could translate into votes.
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