FiveThirtyEight doesn’t give very good odds to the GOP losing the House, as one can expect that down ballot GOP candidates will move away from tRump much as some have decided not to go to the RNC convention even though they probably weren’t Golden State Warrior fans.
Republicans’ down-ballot advantages still exceed Democrats’. Let’s take a quick tour:
Why Democrats will gain House seats in 2016:
- Rebound — Quite simply, Democrats hit rock bottom in 2014, when their base, especially young and nonwhite voters, didn’t show up. It cost them some districts the GOP has no business holding.
- Court-ordered redistricting — Democrats rejoiced when courts threw out Republican-drawn congressional maps in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia on grounds of partisan and racial gerrymandering. However, the net effect of new court-ordered maps is likely to be small...
- Open seats — There are a dozen more House Republicans retiring or running for other office this year than Democrats, 30 to 18. Of those, according to the Cook Political Report’s ratings, 10 GOP seats are vulnerable to Democratic takeover and just four Democratic seats are vulnerable to GOP takeover.
Why Republicans will probably keep their majority:
- The great sort — The House is just a lot less “elastic” than it used to be. Today, the Cook Report rates just 36 of 435 districts as competitive — about 8 percent of the House. Even if Democrats were to hold all their own seats and sweep out all 26 Republicans sitting in districts Obama carried in 2012, they’d still be four seats short of a majority (and, by our tally, just five of these 26 Republicans have endorsed Trump by name so far). By contrast, if Democrats were to defeat all seven Republicans running for Senate in Obama states, they would win a 53-seat majority, assuming they hold all their own seats.
- Timing — It’s possible there are a lot of talented Democrats who would be running for Congress right now if only they had known Trump would be the GOP’s presidential nominee.
- Ticket-splitting — Although there isn’t a ton of publicly available polling at the House level yet, some Democratic operatives say that for down-ballot purposes, they’d rather be running against Ted Cruz than Trump.
House Democrats probably need a Donald Trump loss of historic proportions to have any chance at a three-part sweep. But not even a Clinton rout would guarantee that scenario thanks to structural factors and because voters skeptical of both nominees could well anticipate such an outcome and respond to a Republican message of “checks and balances” — a tactic that’s worked before.
Will coattails work in 2016...perhaps taking the Senate back is the best to hope for.