One reason why House Democrats can afford to oppose Trump: He lost badly in most of their districts

Now that Donald Trump occupies the White House, Democrats face the choice of whether to try to compromise with his reactionary agenda, or whether to emulate Republicans under Barack Obama and oppose the new administration in lockstep. To the dismay of many progressives, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sometimes sounds more inclined toward working with Trump on certain policies. However, there’s one crucial reason why House Democrats in particular have very little to lose by opposing Trump: He lost the overwhelming majority of their districts by a decisive margin.

This statistic is critical in our highly polarized era, when ticket-splitting rates are at historic lows. Democrats who hold seats where most voters vigorously opposed Trump have little to fear in future general elections if they are seen opposing him, especially when his national approval rating often polls in the low 40s. In fact, Democrats from these dark-blue districts who do cross the aisle to work with Trump could even be at risk of losing a primary challenge because of it.

Daily Kos Elections has calculated the 2016 presidential election outcome in all 435 congressional districts, which we’ve illustrated in the map at the top of this post that renders each district the same size. It reveals which party won each seat at both the presidential and congressional level (see here for a larger image or a traditional map). Thanks in large part to gerrymandering, House Democrats won just 194 seats in 2016, but 182 of those members hold seats that Hillary Clinton carried.

The graph below, called a histogram, groups every Democratic-won House seat by its 2016 presidential election margin. Clinton prevailed in half of the Democratic seats by a landslide 31-point margin or greater—all of those dark blue districts to the left of the “Median District” line. She carried 167 of those seats by at least 10 points, equivalent to a full 86 percent of all Democratic seats. With polls finding Trump deeply unpopular nationally, there is a strong likelihood that voters disapprove of him by even more in the vast majority of Democratic districts.