Weigel

The Midwest: The Killing Fields

LAS VEGAS – One smart piece of pre-election conventional wisdom was that the Midwest would be a toxic swamp of Democratic losses. This was right at the Senate level, but it was devastatingly true at the House level.

The rundown: The Democrats lost both Dakota seats, one seat in Minnesota, two seats in Wisconsin, two seats in Indiana, two or three seats in Michigan, five seats in Ohio, five seats in Pennsylvania, and either four or five seats in Illinois. That’s either 23 or 25 seats, some of them held by Democrats for decades, some examples of how the party had learned to win in the suburbs. Those nine states produced more than a third of the seats that gave the GOP the House.