Monday, Nov. 5, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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Molly Reynolds lives 2,400 miles from Las Vegas, but she’s been watching the race between Sen. Dean Heller and challenger Jacky Rosen closely.
Reynolds, who studies Congress at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., says that while Democrats appear unlikely to retake the majority in the Senate, the Heller-Rosen race is among several that could signal how long the party may be frozen out.
During a visit to UNLV this past week, the Brookings fellow in governance studies sat down with the Sun to discuss the race and other national political issues. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow.
How’s the polling looking in the battleground states?
My overall assessment is that Democrats stand pretty likely to retake control of the House, and I say that based partly on the polling. But also, it’s worth remembering what we know about the fundamentals of midterm elections, which also suggests the Democrats are well positioned for big gains. The president remains relatively unpopular, and we know that historically, having an unpopular president hurts a party’s prospects.
We also know that generally the president’s party loses seats in midterm elections. Throughout the post-World War II era, there have only been two or maybe three times when the president’s party has gained seats. The most recent was 2002, when people still felt like Republicans and President Bush still deserved some credit for handling 9/11. So they rewarded Republicans at the polls.
Then, the third factor that works in Democrats’ favor in the House is that Republicans are a little bit overexposed.
There are a relatively large number of districts that Republicans hold where the districts are plus-five in polling. So they’re within striking distance for Democrats.
And although Democratic voters turn out in midterms at lower numbers than Republicans, this year we see very high levels of enthusiasm among Democratic voters. We’ve also seen a movement of white women with college degrees increasingly and solidly into the Democratic coalition.
With Democrats in the Senate, though, it’s a very different story. I’m not the first person to say this, but I think in some ways we’re watching two elections happen in parallel — one for the House and one for the Senate.
Some of that has to do with the Senate seats that are up for election. We have many more seats held by Democrats up for election this year. Some of the seats that are up now were last up in 2012, so there are some Democrats who were helped in their path to the Senate in 2012 by the Obama re-election.
And then also within those seats that Democrats are defending this year, there are 10 of them that are in states where President Trump won in 2016. Those seats fall into two different categories, some where the Democrat is in real trouble. That would be places like North Dakota, Indiana, to some degree in Missouri.
But there are also places, particularly in some of the Rust Belt states that shifted to Trump in 2016, where the Democrats are running with almost no prospect of them losing. That would be Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin.
In parallel to that, we see few seats held by Republicans that Democrats have a legitimate chance of gaining. One of them is obviously here in Nevada.
What are the dynamics of the Heller-Rosen race that you’re watching?
One thing I’ve been paying attention to since the start of the Trump administration is watching how Dean Heller is trying to negotiate representing a purple state with President Trump in the White House when he’s up for re-election.
I paid pretty close attention to the debate over repealing Obamacare, which was pretty fascinating to watch. He does that press conference with Gov. (Brian) Sandoval and then within several weeks he’s saying, “No, I can support this (repeal) bill.” And then by September he’s totally on board with this last-ditch effort with Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy.
Then, if you pay attention to what he’s been doing more recently, it’s a full-scale embrace of Trump.
The other thing that will be interesting to learn post-election, if Rosen wins, is the degree to which the Democratic organization in Nevada was helpful in turning out voters to get that to happen.
As we think about what the future of what the Democratic Party looks like, there’s been some increasing conversation in recent months about how if Democrats lose Senate seats during this cycle in places like North Dakota and Indiana and Missouri, are they confined to a long-term period as a minority in the Senate?
And one response that I often raise to that is yes, we’re seeing demographic change in those kind of states that are making it more difficult for Democratic Senate candidates to win, but we’re also seeing changes in states that are running in the opposite direction. And Nevada has been sort of at the forefront of that, to the extent that it’s become a purple state. And we’re seeing Arizona, which has some similarities, do the same. Then there’s what’s happening in Texas.
If we look at Georgia, too, Stacey Abrams is running strong campaign.
So I think there are ways in which Nevada can tell us some important lessons about where this demographic change might be taking us.
Have you seen any indicators on the Hispanic vote?
I haven’t been paying particular attention to that, but it’s certainly true that Republican candidates across the country have been running on immigration. We’re having this conversation this morning about how he maybe intends to use an executive order to try to make changes to the 14th Amendment, which as far as I can tell is a fringe legal theory.
But it certainly embraces immigration as a message. By my mind, that’s largely because the Republicans are trying to outrun what they tried to do on health care — which is to say they tried to undo some very popular parts of that law. And Democrats have been talking about that a lot, and people don’t like the idea that Republicans tried to take away protections for pre-existing conditions and those sorts of things.
And another thing that I think has led them to emphasize immigration more is that fact that the tax bill is actually quite unpopular.
Basically, the tax bill is structure to deliver benefits more to corporations and high earners than it is to middle-income earners, and it turns out that people get that. And they don’t feel like they’re benefiting from the tax bill.
So it’s just not popular with average Americans.
To go back to something I said before, I think there’s been an interesting interaction with the movement of some well-educated white voters away from the Republican Party. And those are the kind of voters who Republicans would have thought would be very enthusiastic about the tax bills — people who live in suburbs of large metro areas.
But because there are other things happening that are making those people less enthusiastic about the Republican Party, the tax bill force is running into this immovable object of people being unhappy about Trump and the direction he’s taking the country.
What are some of the other reasons people are leaving the Republican Party?
Some of it is that people are uncomfortable with a lot of Trump’s rhetoric, and some of it is that people are uncomfortable with a lot of the higher-profile things that Republicans are trying to do.
So when Republicans tried to repeal Obamacare, that was really unpopular. As a general rule, people are more sensitive to losses than they are to gains. So when you say you’re going to take something away that people have gotten used to having, and like, they’re sensitive to that — like the idea that they won’t get charged more for having pre-existing conditions or that they can keep their kid on their health insurance until they’re 26 or lifetime limits on their insurance plans.
So it’s a combination of unhappiness with some of the Republican rhetoric around some things like immigration and gender issues.
Has the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation been a significant issue?
I think it’s entirely possible that had all of that happened two weeks before the election, it would have had a larger effect.
We saw some mixed polling results after that happened. Some polls suggested there was an enthusiasm bump among Republicans, and it’s not clear to me that that has persisted.
But I think that for some Democratic voters and activists who were already quite highly engaged, that was more fuel for the fire.
What about the enthusiasm of Donald Trump voters? When he was here for a rally recently, he packed the house at the Convention Center and had a spillover crowd of several thousand.
One question about that is, while those people continue to be very enthusiastic toward President Trump, how closely do they connect Republican candidates for House and Senate with races to Trump himself?
That’s part of why we’ve seen things like Sen. Heller’s embrace of Trump, and he’s not the only one who’s taken that route. The judgment there is that people who continue to be enthusiastic supporters of the president are behind the president, but to what degree are they enthusiastic supporters of congressional candidates, we don’t know.
