2018 United States elections


were held in the United States on November 6, 2018. These midterm elections occurred during incumbent Republican president Donald Trump's first term. Although the Republican Party increased its majority in the Senate, Democratic incumbents and challengers vastly outperformed Trump's margin in Republican-leaning states, and unified Republican control of Congress and the White House was brought to an end when the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives. In what was widely characterized as a "blue wave" election, Democrats also gained governorships, other statewide offices, and state legislative chambers.
Democrats made a net gain of 40 seats in the United States House of Representatives, gaining a majority in the chamber and thereby ending the federal trifecta that the Republican Party had established in the 2016 elections. The Republican Party retained control of the United States Senate, making a net gain of two seats and defeating four Democratic incumbents in states that had voted for Trump in 2016. As a result of the 2018 elections, the 116th United States Congress became the first Congress since the 99th United States Congress in which the Democrats controlled the U.S. House of Representatives and the Republicans controlled the U.S. Senate. In state-level elections, Democrats picked up a net of seven governorships and several state legislative seats.
This was the first time since 1970 that one party gained Senate seats while losing House seats, which had also occurred in 1914 and 1962, and would go on to also happen in 2020, 2022, and 2024 as well. In the state elections, Democrats gained seven state governorships, control of approximately 350 state legislative seats, and control of six state legislative chambers.
The elections marked the highest voter turnout seen in midterm elections since 1914, at 49.4%. The elections saw several electoral firsts for women, racial minorities, and LGBT candidates, including the election of the first openly gay governor and the first openly bisexual U.S. senator. In various referendums, numerous states voted to expand Medicaid coverage, require voter identification, establish independent redistricting commissions, legalize marijuana, repeal felony disenfranchisement laws and enact other proposals. During the campaign, Democrats focused on health care, frequently attacking Republicans for supporting repeal of provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including protections for individuals with preexisting conditions. They also focused on tying many Republican incumbents and candidates to President Trump. Republican messaging focused on immigration and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. There were allegations of attempted Russian interference in these elections as well as controversies regarding potential voter suppression.
Research has linked Republican losses in the elections to the party's unsuccessful and unpopular efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as the China–United States trade war.

Issues, advertisements, and campaigning

In May 2018, President Trump began to emphasize his effort to overcome the traditional strength of the non-presidential party in midterm elections, with the "top priority for the White House the Republican majority in the Senate". He was already well into his own 2020 reelection campaign, having launched it on his inauguration day in January 2017. By early August, the president's midterm efforts had included rallies in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Montana and elsewhere "reprising the style and rhetoric of his 2016 campaign". He focused his message on the economy, his proposed border wall, the "trade war" with China, criticism of the media, and his proposal to create the space force, a new branch of the military devoted to operations in space. In late August 2018, the Huffington Post reported that Trump and his administration had been engaging in campaign activity on taxpayer-funded trips. According to the report, a top White House staffer identified 35 events by Cabinet and senior staff members "with or affecting House districts in August already". White House Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters called the report "misleading".
The 2018 elections featured a wider range and larger number of campaign advertisements than past midterm elections. Almost a third of Republican ads focused on taxes, especially on the recently enacted Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. By mid-October 2018, at a cost of some $124 million, more than 280,000 television advertisements related to immigration had been aired in House, Senate and gubernatorial races, representing a five-fold increase compared to the 2014 cycle. In October 2018, The New York Times and The Washington Post characterized Republicans' 2018 campaign messaging as being chiefly focused on fear-mongering about immigration and race. According to The Washington Post, President Trump "settled on a strategy of fear—laced with falsehoods and racially tinged rhetoric—to help lift his party to victory in the coming midterms, part of a broader effort to energize Republican voters". In November 2018, Facebook, NBC, and Fox News withdrew a controversial pro-Trump advertisement that focused on a migrant caravan; Facebook noted that the ad violated Facebook's rules concerning "sensational content".
Nearly half of all advertisements by Democrats focused on health care, in particular on defending the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and keeping in place protections for individuals with preexisting conditions. A number of Republican candidates claimed to support provisions of the Affordable Care Act, such as protections for preexisting conditions, even though they supported efforts that either weakened or eliminated those provisions. In the final weeks of the campaign, Democrats indicated their desire to keep the focus of the campaign on Republican efforts to repeal provisions of Obamacare through the proposed American Health Care Act of 2017. A Gallup poll conducted days before the election found that voters considered healthcare and the economy to be the top issues among registered voters, though many voters also considered immigration to be a top priority.

Federal elections

Senate

ClassDemocraticRepublicanIndependentNext elections
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2122102020
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In the 2018 elections, Republicans sought to defend the Senate majority they had maintained since the 2014 elections. Thirty-five of the 100 seats were up for election, including all 33 Class1 Senate seats. Class2 Senate seats in Minnesota and Mississippi each held special elections to fill vacancies. The Class1 Senate elections were for terms lasting from January 2019 to January 2025 while the Class2 special elections were for terms ending in January 2021. 24 of the seats up for election were held by Democrats, two of the seats up for election were held by independents caucusing with the Democrats and nine of the seats up for election were held by Republicans. Three Republican incumbents did not seek election in 2018 while all Democratic and independent incumbents sought another term. 42 Republican senators and 23 Democratic senators were not up for election.
Assuming the two independents won re-election and continued to caucus with them, Senate Democrats needed to win a net gain of two Senate seats to win a majority. Including the two independents, Democrats held approximately 74 percent of the seats up for election, the highest proportion held by one party in a midterm election since at least 1914. Prior to the 2018 elections, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight wrote that Democrats faced one of the most unfavorable Senate maps any party had ever faced in any Senate election. Silver noted that ten of the seats Democrats defended were in states won by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Meanwhile, the Class I Senate seat in Nevada was the lone Republican-held seat up for election in a state that had been won by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Silver predicted that even a nine-point victory in the nationwide popular vote for Congress would not be enough to give Democrats a majority in the Senate. Some observers speculated that Republicans might be able to pick up a net of nine seats, which would give them the 60-seat super-majority necessary to break filibusters on legislation.
Republicans won a net gain of two seats in the Senate. The 2018 elections were the first midterm elections since 2002 in which the party holding the presidency gained Senate seats. Republicans defeated Democratic incumbents in Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota and Florida. Democrats defeated the Republican incumbent in Nevada and picked up an open seat in Arizona. All four defeated Democratic incumbents represented states won by Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Democratic incumbents tallied victories in the competitive Midwestern states of Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin as well as the key Northeastern swing state of Pennsylvania. Montana and West Virginia, both of which voted for Trump by a margin of at least 20 points, also re-elected Democratic incumbents. After the election, Chris Cillizza of CNN noted that by limiting their Senate losses in 2018, Democrats put themselves in a position to potentially take control of the Senate in the 2020 or 2022 Senate elections.

House of Representatives

In the 2018 elections, Democrats sought to take control of the United States House of Representatives for the first time since the 2010 elections. All 435 voting seats in the House of Representatives were up for election to serve two-year terms. Additionally, elections were held to select five of the six non-voting delegates for the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories.
The 2018 House elections saw the largest number of retirements by incumbents of any election cycle since at least 1992. By June 2018, 20 House Democrats and 44 House Republicans, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, had announced their retirement. The disproportionate number of Republican retirements may have harmed Republican prospects in the 2018 mid-term elections due to the loss of incumbency advantage.
Democrats had 193 seats immediately prior to the November elections, and needed to net at least 25 seats to win a majority in the House of Representatives. In the November elections, Democrats won a net gain of 40 seats. As the elections also saw Democrats fill two vacant seats that had previously been controlled by the party, the Democrats won control of a total of 235 seats, while Republicans won control of at least 199 seats. The net gain of 40 seats represented the Democratic Party's largest gain in the House since the 1974 elections. Democrats won the nationwide popular vote for the House of Representatives by 8.6 percentage points, one of the highest margins won by either party since 1992. Due in part to the surge in turnout, the total number of votes won by Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives nearly equaled the number of votes Trump won in the 2016 presidential election. The 2018 elections were the third midterm elections since 2006 in which the President's party lost control of the House of Representatives.
Democrats defeated 29 Republican incumbents and picked up 14 open seats. Republicans did not defeat a single Democratic incumbent, though the party did pick up two open seats in Minnesota and one in Pennsylvania. Republicans defended the vast majority of their rural seats, but several urban and suburban seats flipped to the Democrats. Many of the districts picked up by Democrats had given a majority or a plurality of their vote to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Of the 447 individuals who served in the House during the 115th Congress, at least 104 did not win re-election in 2018—this represents the third-highest turnover rate of any election cycle since 1974.