But a House-Senate split is exactly what we’re seeing in the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Democratic prospects in the Senate are increasingly dire, having fallen to about 1 in 5. Indeed, it’s been hard to find any good news for Democrats in Senate polling lately. In the House, by contrast, their opportunity is holding up relatively well. In fact, Democrats’ chance of taking the House has ticked back upward to about 4 in 5, having improved slightly from around 3 in 4 immediately after Kavanaugh was confirmed. And while district-by-district House polling has been all over the place lately, Democrats’ position has improved slightly on the generic congressional ballot. [...]
The Democrats’ map in the House is fairly robust, because they aren’t overly reliant on any one type of district. (This stands in contrast to the Senate, where most of the battlegrounds fit into a certain typology: red and rural). While House battlegrounds are somewhat whiter, more suburban and more educated than the country overall, there are quite a few exceptions — enough so that Democrats could underperform in certain types of districts but still have reasonably good chances to win the House. This differs from Hillary Clinton’s position in the Electoral College in 2016, in which underperformance among just one group of voters in one region — white working-class voters in the Midwest — was enough to cost her the election. [...]
It’s true that House battlegrounds are Republican-leaning — but for the most part, they’re Republican-leaning and not much more than that. Only 18 percent of competitive House races have a partisan lean of R+10 or better for the GOP, for instance. By contrast, weighted by their importance to determining the outcome of the Senate, 63 percent of competitive districts are at least R+10. Romney-Clinton and Obama-Trump districts — that is, districts that split their vote between the past two presidential elections — are quite important in the House but not really a factor in the Senate.
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