The 2018 Election is, in a weird way, still happening. Voters are still being tallied in House races. There’s a lawsuit in Georgia. And Florida is in the middle of a recount (because of course it is).
The outcome of the Florida recount is obviously important—there’s a Senate seat and a governorship up for grabs—but I think there’s more than just the offices at stake here. The outcome of the Senate race will likely have a real influence on whether the GOP is able to keep the Senate in 2020 and both races will influence strategy on both sides of the aisle.
The 2020 Map Isn’t Good For Republicans—But It’s Not the Democratic 2018 Map
One of the defining features of the 2018 map was how tilted it was towards Republicans—the GOP was defending nine seats and the Democrats were defending 24, five of which were in deeply red states. The Democrats were overexposed, and the GOP took advantage of that and (if Hyde-Smith and Scott both win) will have ended up building on their advantage even while losing the House.
The 2020 map isn’t so good for the Republicans.
As of now, Republicans look like they’ll be defending 22 seats (assuming they win the Mississippi runoff) and Democrats will be defending 12. A lot of that territory will stay safely red, but there are some key points of vulnerability
| State | Party Holding Seat | Trump Margin |
| Colorado | R | -4.91 |
| Maine | R | -2.96 |
| Arizona | R | 3.5 |
| North Carolina | R | 3.66 |
| Georgia | R | 5.1 |
| Texas | R | 8.98 |
| Iowa | R | 9.41 |
| South Carolina | R | 14.27 |
| Alaska | R | 14.73 |
| Mississippi | R | 17.8 |
| Louisiana | R | 19.64 |
| Montana | R | 20.23 |
| Kansas | R | 20.42 |
| Nebraska | R | 25.05 |
| Tennessee | R | 26.01 |
| Arkansas | R | 26.92 |
| South Dakota | R | 29.79 |
| Kentucky | R | 29.84 |
| Idaho | R | 31.76 |
| Oklahoma | R | 36.39 |
| West Virginia | R | 41.68 |
| Wyoming | R | 46.3 |
Republicans will be defending two states that Hillary Clinton won—Colorado and Maine. They’re also defending North Carolina (a swing state), Georgia (a light red state that’s shown some amount of inelasticity), Texas (a still-red state where Democrats came close to taking a Senate seat in 2018), Iowa (a state with big swing potential: it voted for Trump once, Obama twice and George W. Bush once and elected a Republican governor in 2018 while electing two new Democrats to its four-person congressional delegation) and Arizona, which jerked sharply left in 2016 (went from a nine point margin for Romney to a 3.5 point margin for Trump)
I’m not convinced that all these states will be competitive, but some combination of these states will probably be in play. If Trump slips with blue-collar Obama-to-Trump style voters, that could cause problems for Joni Ernst in Iowa and Susan Collins in Maine (though Collins has a sort of weird personal brand). Trump’s continued problems with suburbanites could easily bleed into Colorado and/or Arizona. North Carolina is a sort of a light red swing state, so it’s not hard to imagine it coming into play. And if things get bad enough for Republicans, it’s possible that Democrats will cause the GOP to sweat again in Texas and Georgia.
This isn’t as bad for the GOP as the 2018 map was for the Democrats—none of the Republican incumbents are defending territory as tough as West Virginia, Montana, Missouri, North Dakota and Indiana were for Democrats. But it’s the sort of map that could easily lead to losses.
And it’s not immediately clear that the GOP would be able to fully make up for those losses without the help of a favorable national environment
| State | Party Holding Seat | Trump Margin |
| Alabama | D | 27.73 |
| Michigan | D | 0.22 |
| New Hampshire | D | -0.37 |
| Minnesota | D | -1.51 |
| Virginia | D | -5.32 |
| New Mexico | D | -8.21 |
| Oregon | D | -10.98 |
| Delaware | D | -11.37 |
| New Jersey | D | -13.98 |
| Rhode Island | D | -15.51 |
| Illinois | D | -16.89 |
| Massachusetts | D | -27.2 |
There’s one obvious bright spot for the GOP here: Alabama. Doug Jones, who won the Alabama special Senate election by less than two points last year, probably won’t be running against someone as weak as Roy Moore next time. Democrats are also defending two swing states—New Hampshire and Michigan—though their New Hampshire incumbent (Jeanne Shaheen) initially seems stronger than their Michigan incumbent (Gary Peters). Under the right conditions, Minnesota and Virginia could flip, but they would probably require a strong Republican pull at the top of the ticket.
And that’s why Florida (and every other competitive seat the GOP won in 2018) is so important. If Republicans had ended 2018 with a 50 seat majority, they’d need a lot of help to push back against the map and keep the majority in 2020. But if they manage to get to 53 seats—their total if they win the Mississippi run-off (which they should) and Florida—they have a cushion to lose some tough seats while still holding the chamber.
Florida as the Present
People are also glued to these recounts because they think the outcome will tell them something about what’s going to happen in 2020.
That’s because the current electoral map is laid out in a way that puts the state near (but not necessarily at) the political center. Florida also leans slightly to the right of the country and has a lot of electoral votes. So winning Florida is often an important (though not necessarily sufficient) step towards taking the White House.
If this recount ends in a Scott win, some make take it as a sign that the state is turning red and that the small GOP advantage there is durable even in solidly Democratic years. Others will dig deep into what both Scott and Nelson did right and wrong to figure out how Republicans can win (or Democrats can avoid losing) in swing states in tough national environments. And if DeSantis wins in this recount, Republicans may take it as a sign that they can win intense cultural clashes by going Full Trump.
