But when you focus on how predictably Republican or Democratic a district is, you may miss the fact that a district’s partisanship can — and does — change over time. To better understand how partisanship is shifting at the district level, we looked at each House election since 2012 and calculated the difference between each party’s share of the two-party vote — that is, each party’s votes as a share of all the votes cast for one of the two major parties, disregarding any votes for third parties, independent candidates or write-ins.2 (We excluded any districts that had been redrawn at any point since 2012 election, which meant ignoring all of Pennsylvania, for example, as its districts were redrawn by a court earlier this year.3) Overall, we were able to calculate the margin of victory for 371 districts in at least one of the four election cycles. [...]
Only two districts in our data set flipped from Democrats to Republicans this year.4 One of those districts, the Minnesota 8th, had been represented by Democrats for 68 of the last 70 years. [...]
We grouped districts into percentiles by what percentage of the population of adults over 25 had a bachelor’s degree, and then selected the top 10th percentile and the bottom 10th percentile.5 Districts in the top 10th percentile took a limited swing to the right in 2014, then moved to the left in each subsequent election. In 2018, this group swung to the left by an average of 18 points, which far outpaced the national average of a bit under 5 points. Overall, out of the 38 districts in the top 10th percentile for residents with a bachelor’s degree, the number of Republican-controlled districts has winnowed from 17 to just seven.
But the story is less clear-cut in districts in the bottom 10th percentile for population with a bachelor’s degree — 14 went Democratic this year and 16 went Republican. And that’s due in part to the role race can play in determining how a district votes. While there is evidence that white voters without a bachelor’s degree have swung right in recent years, we haven’t seen the same movement among nonwhite voters without a bachelor’s degree. Of the districts in the bottom 10th percentile by education, 31 were majority white, six were majority nonwhite and one was about evenly split.6 They span a pretty broad spectrum, from New York’s 15th Congressional District, which is 82 percent nonwhite, to Kentucky’s 5th, which is 97 percent white. [...]
The idea that partisanship is increasingly driving Americans’ political behavior is, of course, true. But leaving it at that skims over some interesting aspects of the landscape today. Distinct groups of people, living in distinct parts of the country, are shifting their preferences and shifting the electoral map along the way. In 2016, Democrats lost in places that, four years before, they would never have imagined they could lose. In 2018, the same thing happened to Republicans. In all likelihood, 2020 will bring its own surprises. Will recent racial, class and regional trends continue? If they do, we could be looking at a new American political map before too long.
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