Finally, hard evidence of just how badly Donald Trump has screwed the Republicans in the midterms

| 1:04 am EDT June 21, 2017
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The general line of thinking with regard to Donald Trump’s historically unpopular presidency is that it’ll cost the Republican Party quite a number of seats in the House and Senate in the 2018 midterms. And as of last night, now we finally have some hard evidence that turns this from a mere logically sound theory to a mathematically demonstrable premise. Don’t worry, it doesn’t take much math.

Here’s all you need to know: when Republican Tom Price won Georgia’s 6th District in November, he won by a twenty-one point margin. The only reason the GOP was okay with Donald Trump plucking Price for his cabinet is that the resulting special election should have been an automatic blowout win for his Republican successor. But when Karen Handel won the Georgia 6th last night, she won by only a four point margin. That means the Republican Party plummeted by seventeen points in the same district in just eight months.

If you go back through the modern history of Presidents plucking Congressman for their cabinet, you won’t find a resulting special election in which the candidate from that same party ended up finishing seventeen points worse. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Yet it just did in Georgia – and it’s not an outlier. Earlier in Trump’s tenure, when he wasn’t yet as toxically unpopular, the Republicans plummeted in other special elections in places like Kansas. Now they’ve plummeted even more.

So if Donald Trump remains roughly as unpopular by the fall of 2018 as he is right now, we now have a mathematical guidepost for the midterm races: the Republicans will be in danger of losing every Congressional seat that they won in 2016 by less than seventeen points. That’s at least a hundred seats, far more than needed to flip the House back to the Democrats.