This was only a week ago:
House Republican leader John Boehner recently said the GOP could pick up 100 seats this November. Now, the Republican National Committee's political director says the party has its eye on 130.
"Our scoring as of today has us looking at about 130 House seats as potentially competitive," Gentry Collins said Tuesday. He hastened to add: "Just to be clear, I'm making no claim that we are going to pick up 130 House seats."
Republicans see the potential for significant gains this November as support for President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats slide. The GOP needs to win 40 seats to reclaim control of the House. Currently, Democrats hold 254 seats and Republicans 177 with four vacancies.
It sure is easy to claim everything is in play, yet among the four special elections since Obama was elected, Democrats have won a seat Republicans had held since the 1850s (NY-23, an R+1 district), held Kirsten Gillibrand's tough seat (NY-20, a Republican R+2 district), and won yesterday's contest in the only district in the country that McCain won after Kerry had carried it in 2004 (PA-12, an R+1 district).
In other words, all three of those were Republican districts, yet Republicans weren't able to reclaim them in this particularly toxic environment. Heck, PA-12 wasn't even close!
Those are the low hanging fruit, and the GOP still cannot make a dent into the Democratic advantage. Part of it is the GOP message of "Nancy Pelosi is bad, and Obama too! Reid, also." Part of it is this:
My biggest takeaway from the surprising outcome in PA-12 last night, besides the fact that Mark Critz and the DCCC did an amazing job? There's a limit to just how unpopular Republicans can be and still hope to make gains everywhere this fall.
Barack Obama's mid-30s approval rating in the district got more ink, but the number that may have ended up being even more relevant to last night's outcome was the putrid 22% approval rating for Congressional Republicans with 60% disapproving of them. Given that our final survey overestimated GOP performance in the district it's entirely possible that actual support for the Republican leadership in Washington is under 20% [...].
One other key finding on our PA-12 poll- only 28% of voters in the district thought Republicans did a good job running the country while George W. Bush was President. 63% think they did not. That 35 spread is 15 points worse than the 20 spread we found for Obama's approval in the district.
We've been shouting this for the last year, but we're not hotshot DC insider know-it-alls, so what do we know? But the polling has been clear -- the GOP's favorability SUCKS. From our own weekly poll:
That's a -10 net favorability for Democrats this past week (42/52), but a -31 for Republicans (32/63). It doesn't matter how much people may hate Obama, even in districts like PA-12 where Obama's faves were in the 30s.
If Republicans can't present themselves into a viable alternative, they're going to leave plenty of Democratic seats in our column.