In 2016, President Donald Trump narrowly carried Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined 67,000 or so votes to defeat Hillary Clinton and carry the two states’ combined 30 electoral votes. Those victories, along with Trump’s 10,000-vote win in Michigan, seemingly signaled an end to the “Blue Wall” that supposedly gave Democrats a built-in advantage in the Electoral College.
Fast-forward 18 months, and Democrats find themselves the beneficiaries of a midterm environment where a Republican incumbent president has an approval rating in the low 40s. While Democrats are defending about three-fourths of the Senate seats up in 2018 and could very well lose net seats in November, the Rust Belt seats that they worried about at the start of the cycle seem to be increasingly out of reach for Republicans. CONT.
Geoffrey Skelley, Sabato’s Crystal Ball
