538: Why Are Democrats Looking So Strong In The Midwest?
During the Obama years, Republicans won total control of the state government1 in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. Then, on Election Day in 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowly lost in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — states Democrats had won at the presidential level for more than two decades. She was easily defeated in Iowa and Ohio, which had tended to be close.2 Clinton barely won in Minnesota, another state where Democrats are usually strong. Post-election, there was a lot of doom and gloom about the Democratic Party’s prospects in the Midwest, with both nonpartisan analysts and even some party strategists suggesting the party needed a dramatic overhaul or risk losing in this region, which will be packed with white, working-class voters, for the foreseeable future.
Never mind all that now. Democrats are looking strong in the Midwest — it is by some measures the region where they are likely to make their biggest gains this November.
Let’s start with the House. Because all 435 House seats are on the ballot every two years, the House will provide the fullest picture of how the two parties are doing in 2018. According to the Classic version of FiveThirtyEight’s House forecast, Democrats are favored to pick up about 14 seats in the Midwest. That’s a big number on its own, but it’s even more significant when you think about that gain in terms of regions. Sure, the Democrats are likely to gain seats in the Northeast and Pacific, as you might expect, but they are making even bigger strides in the Midwest in terms of the number of seats they are expected to gain relative to the total number of seats available in the region.
To compare how strong Democrats look in one region versus another, we have to put regions with different numbers of seats on equal footing. To do that, we divided the number of seats Democrats are favored to win in each region by the total number of seats there. We then multiplied that by 100, which shows us how many seats the Democrats would be favored to pick up in each region if every region had 100 races. When all regions are normalized in this way, we can see that the Midwest is shaping up to be the party’s best region. (How you divide the states into regions is a matter of great and impassioned debate, of course; here we’re using an old-school FiveThirtyEight categorization. But yes, feel free to object to Pennsylvania being included in the Midwest if you like.)
Add to which, the likely sweep of all Rust Belt Gov. and Sen. races.
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I can live with that. 
should be higher, though.
