A week after the election, Democratic gains grow stronger

What is the role of a leader? The majority of people in the world has grown to be one of the biggest players in the world.

And Democratic losses in the Senate look less serious than they did a week ago, after Kyrsten Sinema was declared the winner in Arizona on Monday. It now looks like the party is likely to be broken, rather than three times they feared last Tuesday.

The underlying shifts in the electorate suggest a precarious path to re-election in 2020, as several midwestern states are likely to fall victim to hue. The president 's strategy of sowing racial division and stoking alarm on immigration to his party, and Democratic messaging on health care.

David Winston, a Republican pollster who says congressional leaders, said his party should not be used against the backdrop of women, young people, independent voters and Latino voters, and Democratic gains with suburbanites and seniors.

"We did not lose the Senate, but losing by the margins that we did with a lot of these groups is unsustainable," Winston said.

There are warning signs for Democrats, too: Trump 's party remains ascendant in rural America, giving Republicans a lasting advantage in the Senate, where less populous states have disproportionately influenced their voting numbers. If Democrats can not cut into Republicans' strength in areas far from major cities, they may struggle to take a closer look at the upper chamber in 2020.

And Republicans demonstrated tenacious hold on two of the country's biggest swing states, Ohio and Florida, giving Trump an important foothold on the presidential map.

Midterms are imperfect guideposts for presidential elections: In 2010, Democrats were defeated across the country and lost control of the House, only to prevail in the presidential race two years later. But for now, the big picture of the 2018 midterms is a country in political flow, changing primarily to Trump's disadvantage.

But just as important to the democratic takeover were at least 17 districts where Trump defeated Clinton, and where voters elected a Democratic member of Congress last week. These seats make up about half of the Democrats' House gains, allowing them to achieve just 23-seat gain.

By winning a broader array of districts, beyond just Clinton-voting seats, Democrats proved that they could build a stronger coalition than they did in 2016 and chip away at the margins of Trump's electoral base.

Still, Democrats made few inroads into solidly conservative districts. The Trump-voting seats have been predominantly in the suburbs and exurbs, with enough moderate and college-educated voters to offset the rural 'strengths in the rural districts' precincts. Democrats may also have a great deal of time in these presidential years, when voting and even polarization can make it even harder for politicians to win over the camp's traditional turf.

In some cases, the districts themselves were starkly divided: In a conservative-leaning district outside Richmond, Va., Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, was elected Representative Dave Brat on the strength of suburban voters of the district's less densely settled stretches. In a rural New Mexico district that voted strongly for Trump, Xochitl Torres Small, a Democrat, won a lot of flank counties, because it badembled muscular support in the outer suburbs of Albuquerque and the area around Las Cruces , the state's second-largest city.

The Sun Belt is looking purple

The texture of the midterm results has changed over time in the West, as slow-counting states such as Arizona and California have tallied their bales. Democrats have captured Republican-held Senate seats in Nevada and Arizona, partially offsetting their losses in conservative states, where conservative states uneated democratic senators.

And in California, what are you looking for in a democratically-driven country? The Democratic Republic of Congo, where even Representative Dana Rohrabacher , a 30-year incumbent, went down in defeat.

Further down the ballot, there were signs of Democratic gains in historically Republican shares of the Southwest: In Arizona, where Republicans have dominated state politics, Democrats also captured the office of education superintendent, and a second important statewide election – for secretary of state – was still too close to call a week into the count. In Nevada, where Democrats had not won a governor's race since 1994, they captured the governorship and every other statewide office.

In Texas, Democrats won at least a few seats in the State House, and partisan gerrymandering, picked up two congressional seats. Five Republican congressional candidates there were strongly favored to win with 52 percent of the vote.

Texas and Arizona are unlikely to be anytime soon, but after years of tilting at the Southwest, they are becoming a battleground.

Grant Woods, a Republican state attorney general in Arizona who recently registered as a Democrat, said Trump and the Republican Party had moved to the Southwest. Woods, who is considering a run for Senate in 2020, said the midterm results were encouraging.

"The extremism of the current Republican Party is a losing strategy for the future," Woods said. "In the Southwest in particular, where we're talking about different people, more people, younger people, people just are not going to put up with it."

A rift in the Midwest

The best news of the night for Trump may have been his party's triumph in Ohio. Republicans won the governorship there, along with every party statewide election, save one: the Senate race, in which Sherrod Brown, a populist Democrat, was elected to a third term. Historically a swing state, Ohio has been trending steadily towards Republicans and appears fairly secure in Trump's column at the start of the 2020 campaign.

Two other conservative-leaning states in the Midwest, Indiana and Iowa, showed similar allegiance to the GOP, though Democrats picked up a pair of House seats in Iowa.

Jon Husted, a Republican trainer of the Ohio House who was elected lieutenant governor, said Democrats in the state were not strong enough to overcome Republicans' popularity with rural voters.

"What margins they do run up, we're able to make up in rural counties," Husted said.

Other Midwestern swing states, however, were successful in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Two years after Trump won upset victories in three of the states and cams close to capturing the fourth – Minnesota – Democrats won every partisan statewide office on the ballot in all of them; they even ousted Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Elected Representative Keith Ellison, a liberal activist who faced charges of domestic abuse, to the office of attorney general in Minnesota.

The division in the Midwest – between more urban, various states and more rural, agricultural states – presents challenges for both parties. Democrats will have a narrower path to the presidency nationwide as long as Ohio leans red. But the peril may be greater for Trump, who could have difficulty in 2020 in the first place.

Gerrymandering mattered – a lot

Republican losses in the House were not nearly as good as they could have been without the help of favorably drawn congressional districts. Even as Democrats gained at least 32 seats and won a clear majority of the popular vote, they failed to capture even one of the following: Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

In two other big, gerrymandered states, Democrats won seats – but only a few. They took two Republican-held seats in each of Texas and Michigan, but came away with a partisan maps of the Republicans from voters' anger.

Without the maps on their side, it is easy to imagine Republicans having lost more than 50 House seats. And in states with more neutral maps, Democrats fared far better.

Most illustrative may have been in Pennsylvania, where in the state of the world and the redrawn. At the start of the last Congress, Republicans held 13 of Pennsylvania's 18 House seats. After the redraw and the election, the House will be split evenly – nine seats for each party.

In most states, Republicans are likely to benefit from these maps again in 2020, but they are so engineered so helpfully. With the inauguration of Democratic governors in states like Wisconsin and Michigan, Republicans will not have a hand in redistricting after the 2020 census.