Hillary Deemed the Big Winner, Pelosi likely Speaker and Trump on Thin Ice for 2020

The tally this Wednesday morning is Democrats +26, with votes in tossup California districts still being counted. So it's likely to look like Democrats +30 when all is said and done. Enough to control the U.S. House of Representatives, but nowhere near the blue tsunami predictions of Dems +50 of several months ago.

Trump's midterm shellacking is looking a lot like the shellacking that W. took his second midterm in 2006. Then, hailed as a great blue dog triumph, it was Dems +30, with Nancy Pelosi becoming the first female speaker of the house.

Interestingly, the principal "morning after" write-up in The New York Times ("Democrats Capture Control of House; G.O.P. Holds Senate" by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns) attributes Democratic gains to Clintonian centrism:

The Democrats’ broad gains in the House, and their capture of several powerful governorships, in many cases represented a vindication of the party’s more moderate wing. The candidates who delivered the House majority largely hailed from the political center, running on clean-government themes and promises of incremental improvement to the health care system rather than transformational social change.

To this end, the Democratic gains Tuesday came in many of the country’s most affluent suburbs, communities Mrs. Clinton carried, but they also surprised Republicans in some more conservative metropolitan areas. Kendra Horn, for example, pulled off perhaps the upset of the night by defeating Representative Steve Russell in central Oklahoma.

FiveThirtyEight agrees, saying the Democratic capture of the house is attributable to the party's strong showing in Romney-Clinton districts:

Indeed, a theme of the evening was that suburban areas came up big for Democrats.

We’ve often used so-called “Romney-Clinton districts” as a stand-in for these areas — districts that voted for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 but switched their allegiance to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. Republicans had hoped that these places had voted for Clinton because of an aversion to President Trump, but that they would remain loyal to their more traditionally Republican representatives. That didn’t end up being the case. Not only did Democratic House candidates win most Romney-Clinton districts, but in at least six of the 13 races, they did so by margins that exceeded Clinton’s margin over Trump.

Given this conventional wisdom, don't bet against Pelosi resuming her role as speaker.

But what does this election say about Trump? He's popular with rural America, not popular in the suburbs and despised in the metropolis.

What's interesting is that if we look at the Trump GOP through the lens of Kevin Phillips' breakthrough The Emerging Republican Majority we see a Republican Party moving in the opposite direction from the one Phillips' plotted. Phillips saw the future of the GOP in the new working-class suburbs created out of white flight and "negrophobia." Those suburbs are now Democratic (Washington's Eighth CD is a wonderful illustration). Overtly racist messaging is not enough anymore. The only place lynch-mob appeals resonate is with the rural electorate.

And you can't capture the electoral college with rural votes alone.