I'm as shocked as you are, but the normally roller-skates-on-the-moon useless think tank Third Way actually compiled a list of the 99 House Democratic districts where we need to run up the score the most in order to win the White House and the Senate back in order to start cleaning up the Trump disaster, districts like Rob Kind's in Wisconsin, Rashida Tlaib's in Michigan and G.K. Butterfield's in NC.
Third Way, created in the “New Democrat” mold of Bill Clinton’s presidency, often clashes with more liberal activists over party ideology, but in this report the group has tried to illustrate the range of political geography Democrats need to focus their energy on to ensure a broad victory.
So, in this regard, Third Way places double the value on Tlaib, whose staunchly liberal positions would be out of place with the group’s moderate policy prescriptions. But her seat could prove critical to building turnout for the presidential race and to reelect Sen. Gary Peters (Mich.), one of the few incumbent Democrats that Republicans want to target in a year the GOP will mostly be on defense.
Here’s why: In 2016, Tlaib’s district gave Hillary Clinton a margin of victory of almost 61 percentage points, which might seem staggering. But four years earlier, that district gave Obama a nearly 71-point margin.
Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes, making that small drop in Detroit critical to Clinton’s defeat statewide.
Down in North Carolina, Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D) has easily won for 15 years, but the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus has a district that might be key to tipping the state’s 15 electoral votes to Democrats.
Perhaps more importantly, Butterfield could help the Democratic nominee for the Senate race against Sen. Thom Tillis (R), a contest that could serve as a tipping point for control of the Senate.
Without a comprehensive effort, Democrats fear a new president would be stymied if Republicans still control the Senate, where the GOP could block or water down the Democratic agenda, similar to Obama’s second term.
“It determines whether Democrats can accomplish anything in 2021,” said Lanae Erickson, the group’s senior vice president and a policy expert.
Some obviously important Democratic seats are even more critical when looking up and down the ballot in their respective states. These are what [report author David] de la Fuente calls “five point races”: freshman Democrats who narrowly won a GOP-held seat in 2018, running for reelection in districts that Trump won two years before, whose states will also be battlegrounds in the presidential and Senate contests.
There are eight “five-point” Democrats: Reps. Abby Finkenauer (Iowa), Cindy Axne (Iowa), Angie Craig (Minn.), Jared Golden (Maine), Elaine Luria (Va.), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), Abigail Spanberger (Va.), and Haley Stevens (Mich.).
Golden carries even more value because Maine allocates some of its electoral votes based on performance within congressional districts, allowing Trump to claim an extra vote for winning the northern Maine district despite losing narrowly statewide.
If Golden, a Marine veteran from Iraq and Afghanistan, can win next year by a sizable margin, he could secure the state for the Democratic nominee and also help knock off Sen. Susan Collins (R) in another critical race.
The full report is here, ranking the districts by how many of those five points it checks off, but the eight listed above are the holy grail. The four-pointers are Tom O'Halleran and Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona, Colin Peterson in Minnesota, and Chris Pappas in NH, and 20 districts are worth 3 of the 5 points, with another 40 worth 2 points.
If Dems win big in those districts, they keep the House, they win the Senate back, and they send Trump home. Take a look at the list, and if you're in at least a one-point district, keep that in mind. Turnout in these districts will help the Democrats the most.
If you're like me in a red district, well, you can help too. This report doesn't take into account the red districts that Dems are gunning for, like Will Hurd's TX-23 border district and winnable Texas suburban districts (TX-10,21,22,24 and 31) and national race districts like MI-6, PA-1 and PA-10, and FL-15.
There's a lot of work to be done. Trump won 31 House districts in 2016 that Democrats currently represent, 23 of those 31 currently have House Democratic freshmen who won in 2018. Democrats are going to be playing a lot of defense and they're just not going to keep all those districts.
But this report is a good start to know where to go.
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