2018 Midterms: Did anti-establishment Republicans perform better?

Democrats here!

There was no overall outperformance by anti-establishment Republicans compared to establishment Republicans.

There was no overall outperformance by anti-establishment Republicans relative to their districts’ partisan leans in the 2018 U.S. House general elections.

• As with the Democrats, a lot depends on how one defines “anti-establishment”. Several fields in the dataset were used to categorize a candidate as “anti-establishment” or not:

  • Yes on any of the following fields indicated the candidate was anti-establishment: Trump Endorsed?, Great America Endorsed?, Bannon Endorsed?, House Freedom Support?, Tea Party Endorsed?
  • The following fields were not considered indicative of establishment/anti-establishment status:
    • Rep Party Support? - Political parties often throw their support behind viable candidates in competitive races (in general elections), even if the candidates don’t line up completely with the party establishment.

• Using these criteria, I found n = 15 anti-establishment candidates and n = 174 establishment candidates. At p = 0.651, there was no significant difference in performance between the two groups.

What if?

I tried several combinations of fields to look for a possible significant result, to no avail.

• No on any of the following fields indicated the candidate was anti-establishment: Main Street Endorsed?, Chamber Endorsed?, Club for Growth Endorsed?, Koch Support?, No Labels Support? - At p = 0.471, there was still no significant difference in performance between the two groups.
• Yes on only Trump Endorsed? - p » 0.05
• Yes on Trump Endorsed?, Great America Endorsed?, or Bannon Endorsed? - p » 0.05
• Yes on House Freedom Support? or Tea Party Endorsed? - p » 0.05
• There are other organizations in the dataset, but they endorse both establishment and anti-establishment candidates.

Did candidates’ professional background, characteristics, etc. affect performance?

Surprisingly, candidates with party support (Rep Party Support?) didn’t perform better (or worse) than candidates without party support. (38 candidates were explicitly identified as having party support; 151 were not. p = 0.482)

Some fields were not available in the Republican dataset: Veteran?, Elected Official?, Race, LGBTQ? So these variables couldn’t be analyzed.

Notes

I used FiveThirtyEight’s dataset on 2018 Republican primary candidates. This dataset includes only candidates who had primary challengers, so incumbent U.S. Representatives who did not face a primary challenge were excluded from this analysis.

Data Sources

2018 Midterms

2018 Midterms: Did anti-establishment candidates really perform better?

“The Year of the Woman”: Did candidate gender impact electoral performance?

2018 Midterms: Did candidates’ professional background, characteristics, and/or identities affect performance?

U.S. House: Do moderates come from swing districts? Relationship between caucus/coalition membership and district partisan lean

Last Updated: Feb 15, 2019