Patrick Allitt

Hillary will beat Trump. But her presidency will be hamstrung just like Obama’s

The more you study history, the more you realise how hopeless it is to try predicting the future. Even sophisticated polling can’t prevent surprises like the two recent whoppers in the UK: the wrong prediction of a razor-thin margin for David Cameron in 2015, followed by the wrong prediction of a Brexit defeat in this summer’s referendum.

I’m a history professor. If anyone knows better than to make predictions, it’s me. Nevertheless, I predict that the Democratic Party will win the presidency and the Senate in November, but will continue as minority party in the House of Representatives. Let me explain why.

Every fourth year, presidential elections bring out plenty of voters, and winning candidates usually create a wave for fellow party members as they run for other offices. This effect was massive in 2008 when Democrats clinging to Barack Obama’s coat-tails won big majorities in both houses. Like nearly everyone else I think Hillary Clinton will win the presidency this year, and in doing so will help other Democrats to win elections nationwide.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are contested every two years. In so-called mid-term elections, when the presidency is not at stake, the sitting president’s party usually does poorly. A mood of ‘throw the rascals out’ tends to dampen their prospects and help the opposition. The Democrats followed this pattern in 2014, ending up with 59 fewer seats than the Republicans in the House.

Now they’re licking their lips at the prospect of getting a few seats back, but hard demographic realities make it unlikely that they’ll regain control of the House. Only about sixty out of the 435 House seats are flagged by pollsters as marginal, including nine in California, eight in New York, and seven in Florida.

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