In an ordinary presidential election cycle, most political analysts would have called it Mission: Impossible — the idea congressional Democrats, swept from power in back-to-back midterm elections, could defy political gravity, and a Republican supermajority, to recapture the House of Representatives.
But 2016 has been anything but an ordinary presidential election cycle.
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Energized by Republican dysfunction on Capitol Hill and in the presidential primary, including the likelihood Donald Trump will lead the GOP ticket, Democratic Party officials say the House is now in play, and they’re well-positioned to win it back.
The Republicans’ self-inflicted wounds — from the real estate mogul’s boorish behavior, to the party elites’ half-hearted attempts to sabotage his march to the nomination, to the Senate’s blockade of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee — have triggered a fundraising deluge for down-ballot Democrats. And, party leaders add, there’s a fresh crop of liberal congressional candidates running this year who are waiting for them to make it rain.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, is blaming an ongoing fundraising drought in part on the protracted political combat between Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, his nearest competitor for the GOP presidential nomination. Uncertainty — or disbelief — that the GOP nominee will be a divisive, outsider candidate has top donors sitting on their wallets, they say, forcing tough financing decisions on some down-ballot races.
That, combined with trends showing independent voters won’t choose the GOP if Trump or Cruz are at the top of the ticket, has the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which oversees House races, ready to surf back to power in a wave election that could feasibly give them control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House.
“The DCCC is absolutely prepared to seize upon whatever political opportunities are before us in November,” Meredith Kelly, a Democratic spokesperson, says in a recent email interview. “With strong Democratic candidates and well-oiled campaigns in over 60 districts, and recruiting still ongoing until the last filing deadline, there is no question that we will be ready to benefit from Republican dysfunction and win big in November.”
Yet while there are reasons for Kelly and the party to be bullish on retaking Congress this fall — including generic polls that show the public has soured on the Republican brand — some analysts say Democrats should curb their enthusiasm.
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Critics within and outside the party say the sudden instability on the right caught Democrats, resigned to long-term House minority status by redistricting, flat-footed, and without viable candidates in newly-competitive seats. Add in a few strategic missteps with unfavorable historic trends, the argument goes, and it’s less probable that House Democrats can reverse a 30-seat Republican advantage, a difficult feat under most circumstances.
“Republicans are sitting on their largest majority since 1928 — 247 seats to 188 — meaning Democrats would need to pick up 30 seats, a daunting challenge given the GOP’s immense redistricting advantage and the vaporization of swing districts,” analyst David Wasserman wrote in last month’s Cook Political Report.
The scale of that challenge is nothing new to Democrats: Last year, the party released an internal task force ” autopsy,” in part to explain what went wrong during the 2014 midterms, where they “suffered devastating losses at all levels of government since 2008,” including 69 House seats.
While the party energized young and minority voters in 2008 and 2012, according to the report, they still struggle with Southern white voters, can’t get their base to turn out consistently in unsexy, off-year elections and their candidate pool badly needs an upgrade. Meanwhile, after trampling Democrats in 2010, newly-elected, state-level Republicans locked in power through redistricting based on that year’s U.S. Census, leaving Democrats out in the cold for the foreseeable future.
But the DCCC’s Kelly says party leaders took the internal critique to heart, and had already recruited a high-quality field of congressional candidates even before the Trump phenomenon upended the GOP’s presidential campaign.
“Since January 2015, the DCCC’s strategy has been to go on offense, recruit aggressively and expand the battlefield,” she says. “The committee’s goal was always to have great candidates and high-functioning campaigns ready to seize upon any opportunities or electoral winds that might exist in November.”
So far, “that approach has already yielded strong candidates in more than 60 congressional districts, and recruitment will not end until the very last filing deadline,” Kelly says. “With Donald Trump or Ted Cruz at the top of the Republican ticket, the DCCC’s offensive strategy will bear even more fruit in House elections.”
“A Trump, or Cruz, candidacy further expands our battlefield, makes more House races competitive and leans many of them in our favor,” she says. “These beneficial dynamics will especially play out in suburban House districts, districts with a high number of minority voters, independent voters, highly educated voters, and/or millennials.”
Even Republicans are worried that the Trump effect at the polls could help liberals and progressives grab power in the chamber that’s responsible for national spending and taxes.
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A GOP super PAC dedicated to retaining the House majority recently hired a former senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign to oversee fundraising for downballot races. House Speaker Paul Ryan personally recruited the operative, Mason Fink, to work for the Congressional Leadership Fund, beefing up its operations for what is expected to be a difficult cycle for Republicans.
Out West, California Republican consultant Kevin Spillane recently told the San Francisco Chronicle that Trump would be “particularly devastating” in the Golden State “because he would spur an unprecedented Latino turnout, where you’d actually have Latino Republicans probably running 80 percent-plus Democratic,” and drag down the rest of the ticket.
Nationally, he said, the celebrity billionaire and novice politician is “unpopular with everyone, but he’s extraordinarily unpopular with Latinos, women, younger voters, swing voters — all the people you want in an election.”
Yet that doesn’t necessarily translate into guaranteed wins for Team Blue. “It’s impossible to know just how bad it could get for Republicans sharing a ballot with Trump or Cruz,” even if they lose in a landslide writes Wasserman, the Cook Political Report analyst.
“On one hand, past presidential blowouts in years like 1964, 1972 and 1984 haven’t led to dramatic sea changes in House seats,” he writes. “On the other, there hasn’t been a true presidential blowout in 20 years.”
And history isn’t necessarily on the Democrats’ side: “Presidential elections tend to result in smaller changes to House partisan balance than midterms,” according to Ballotpedia.com, the nonpartisan online political encyclopedia.
“The last two presidential elections saw gains of only eight and 24 seats for Democrats,” according to its House elections report. “While it is extremely unlikely that the Democratic Party will be able to gain control of the chamber in this election cycle, Democrats can still hope to reduce the majority that the Republican Party holds.”
Indeed, in Ballotpedia’s list of 24 of the country’s most competitive House races, 18 are held by Republican incumbents. Of those 18 seats, however, 14 are rated by Cook’s Political Report as either toss-ups or leaning Democratic so far this election cycle, including districts in Republican strongholds like Arizona and Texas and battleground states of Pennsylvania and Florida.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, agrees with Kelly: Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and Cruz’s hardcore conservative positions and the prospect of a once-in-a-generation Supreme Court shift to the left likely will boost Democratic turnout if either of them becomes the nominee.
“It’s the type of thing that could actually mobilize liberals and mobilize minorities out of a sense of fear,” triggering massive party-line voting, she says. “I think the other thing to keep in mind is we don’t have evidence yet that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz have coattails” that might help down-ballot incumbents.
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Still, “you kind of have to wait to see what President Obama’s [job-approval] standing looks like in a couple of months,” Gillespie adds, noting that if the numbers are rising, voters are more likely to stick with Democrats. At the same time, she adds, the numbers don’t lie — 30 seats is a tough hill to climb, even if the leader of the other party’s ticket is a drag for down-ballot candidates.
“They can’t change that Republicans control the House, and they can’t change the number of seats the GOP has” ahead of the election, she says.
But Kelly insists House Democrats have Republicans right where they want them.
“The NRCC’s own polling indicates that both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz will have a negative down-ballot impact on House Republicans,” she says. According to POLITICO, an NRCC-commissioned poll indicates that “a plurality of respondents — 48 percent to 40 percent — would be less likely to vote for a Republican congressional candidate or incumbent if Trump were the nominee.”
Ultimately, “The dysfunction, uncertainty and hateful direction that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have taken the Republican presidential primary is absolutely helpful to Democrats down-ballot in the House and Senate,” Kelly says. “The entire Republican brand has been badly damaged in the eyes of voters and House Republicans will be inseparably tied to their Party and the top of the ticket.”
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Democrats Have a Chance to Take Back the House and Senate originally appeared on usnews.com
