November 3, 2020, is now just under 150 days away and while much of the focus is on the Presidential Election and the battle for the US Senate, all 435 seats for the US House will be up for grabs as well. One reason for the lack of attention given to that chamber is because of the reality that while Republican grip on both the White House and the Senate is very much in danger, Democrats remain decisively favored to retain the majority in the House. Part of that is history: indeed, the last time that the US House majority changed during a Presidential election was 1952. But there are other factors specific to 2020 that is powering this reality, which will be the focus of this article. Today we’ll be breaking down why Democrats are clearly favored, and what the battle for play looks like with under five months to go in the 2020 election.
Factor #1: the generic ballot
The generic ballot, which is a poll question read by a variety of pollsters that simply asks “are you going to vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in the upcoming congressional election?”, is used as a national gauge for the US House because it is well, generic. Untethered from specific candidates, it has been a useful tool for prognosticators assessing the battle for control in the lower chamber. In 2018, the FiveThirtyEight average of the generic ballot finished at D+8.7, and the final margin in the 2018 US House Elections nationally was D+8.6, although the actual margin was likely closer to D+7, as Democrats ran up votes in seats where Republicans declined to run a candidate. That said, even if we take that D+7 margin, the generic ballot proved to be an incredibly good indicator of the national environment then, and it’s worthwhile to see what it’s telling us now. As of the publishing of this article, the 2020 FiveThirtyEight average of the generic ballot is D+8.4, and it has hardly budged since April 1, 2019. Given that it is Republicans who need to gain seats in order to claw back into the majority, trailing by high single digits nationally is no real formula to accomplish a takeover of power. One could argue that the decently high degree of gerrymandering in the national congressional maps means that Republicans may not have to win the popular vote nationally, but even in that scenario Republicans would need to be significantly closer to the Democrats than they are in the present for that to happen.
Factor #2: Trump may not be as big of a lift as Republicans think
Democrats currently hold 233 seats in the chamber, and 30 of those seats are ones that President Trump carried in 2016. In theory, that could make Democrats vulnerable in a presidential election year, given how tied presidential partisanship has become to congressional elections. However, one issue is that many of the Dem-Trump seats are those that the President does not seem likely to carry again, if the election were held today. For example, of the 30 seats stated above, over half (16) of them were carried by Trump by 4 points or less in 2016. Why did I use 4% as the threshold? Because Trump has consistently trailed Biden by at least 6 points in polling of the election this fall. Thus, if we assume there is a uniform 4 point swing across the board in favor of Democrats, those seats that the President carried by 4 points or less in 2016 would be seats that could very well be carried by Biden this time around, not Trump. And many of these seats were carried by statewide Democrats in 2018. For example, while Representative Lucy McBath of Georgia’s 6th Congressional District is in a seat that President Trump won by 1 point in 2016, Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams carried GA-06 by 3.5% in 2016, even as Abrams narrowly lost statewide. Given that polling of Georgia for the presidential election this fall currently shows a dead heat between Biden and Trump, that is a district we would expect Biden to carry this fall, showing how even in “Trump Districts”, if the President doesn’t turn around his national polling, he may not be a significant lift for House Republican candidates. That’s not even mentioning the fact that even within those 14 districts that Trump won by more than 4 points in 2016, there are two in Michigan (MI-08 and MI-11) that were carried decently comfortably by current Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a seat in Utah (UT-04) where Trump is quite unpopular. All things considered, the number of districts where Trump is likely to give a significant boost to Republican offensive efforts may be closer to 10, as opposed to the 30 number that is bandied about.
Factor #3: Lack of quality candidates and $$$
One of the greatest assets that Democrats had in their successful 2018 election in the US House was undeniably that they drafted strong candidates to run in key districts and then supplied them with a money cannon so large it could shoot them to Washington on a wave of green bills. Republican incumbents were flooded in 2018 by progressive fundraising dollars, as well as by major donations from Mike Bloomberg. Democrats got several candidates with impressive national security backgrounds, like Elaine Luria and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, as well as Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, to run for office, and then gave them the money to win. Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be doing neither of these things in 2020, jeopardizing an opportunity to capitalize on any electoral breakthroughs they could hypothetically get nationally.
Take Maine’s 2nd Congressional District for example, a pretty Trumpy seat held by Rep. Jared Golden (D), who flipped the seat by the skin of his teeth in 2018. This was a district that Trump carried by 10 points in 2016 and should be one of the easiest seats for Republicans to pick off if they were making a serious play for the majority. Their current leading candidate is Eric Brakey, a former State Senator who got crushed in a losing campaign for US Senate in 2018, and who lacks an inspiring story. Brakey also lacks cash, as he was decimated in the fundraising department in Q1 of this year, raising $140,000 to Golden’s $585,000, and in terms of money in the bank, trails 10:1 to the incumbent. Now, money doesn’t buy victories in politics; if it did, Mike Bloomberg would be the Democratic nominee for President and gearing up to run this fall. But, it is also something you need some of to run a successful campaign, and in spite of President Trump’s prodigious fundraising, the money hasn’t trickled down to Republican House candidates (nor Senate candidates, for that matter). In Democratically-held district after district, the incumbent Democrats are beating the Republicans in fundraising like a rented mule. As it stands now, the GOP is hopelessly outgunned in the money department and it is holding back a broader play for majority control.
Factor #4: Democrats seem poised to gain at least a few districts
With Democrats holding 233 seats, the magic number at the moment for Republicans in the House is 16 to take control back. But in reality, that number is probably at least 19, given that Democrats are clear favorites to gain three Republican seats. In North Carolina, a court-ordered redistricting plan drew two formerly solidly red districts to be now solidly blue seats, and Democrats are near certain to take control of those two seats. In Texas’s 23rd Congressional District, Rep. Will Hurd (R) is retiring and the district seems poised to flip blue. It’s a seat Clinton carried by 3 points in 2016, and Hurd barely won re-election in 2018 despite being a strong and well-funded incumbent, winning by less than a percentage point over Gina Ortiz-Jones. Ortiz-Jones is back for a second try and building off the previous paragraph, Republicans (*repeat after me*) have failed to come up with a strong candidate and Ortiz-Jones is running laps around them in fundraising. As of right now, TX-23 seems more likely than not to go blue.
Those 3 seats make it a longer haul for Republicans, but they are far from the only seats that could flip. Two more seats in Texas are potential danger for Republicans, as is a seat in Georgia, Nebraska, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and New Jersey. This is not to mention the fact that Republicans recently flipped a seat in California via special election, but may have benefited from the reality that Democratic turnout is generally sluggish in special elections due to its heavy Hispanic population. That seat, CA-25, was carried by Clinton by 7 points in 2016 and Biden is very likely to carry it by a healthy margin in 2020, making the seat a clear tossup in a regularly scheduled November election. All things considered, Republicans should probably shoot to flip 20 seats to be safe, a bit higher than the bare minimum 16 that it appears.
The State of Play 5 Months Out
As it stands currently, all of the above factors make it very likely that the Democrats keep their majority in the US House. Even if the Republicans were to win every seat currently deemed as a tossup by most prognosticators, that would still not be enough to take back the majority. In order to put the majority seriously in play, the GOP would need both a significant shift in the national environment, but also a rapid infusion of money into key districts, as a way to put more seats in play. On the flip side, while the most likely outcome is that the Republicans gain a few seats, a strong night for Democrats, such as a comfortable Biden victory and a Democratic takeover of the US Senate, could very well yield a small gain in seats in the US House. The amount of seats Democrats can realistically target from the Republicans isn’t large, but they have continued to draft strong candidates and have lots of money in the tank, even in some “reach” seats. Thus, if 2020 turns out to be a second straight blue wave election, it’s not inconceivable that Democrats could get up to 240 seats or more in the chamber. Though Republicans are on the offensive, Democrats have their fair share of targets, and we should be mindful of that reality.
In totality, the situation is rather grim for the Republicans in the US House. They do not have the candidates or the money to seriously contest a number of seats that should be winnable, and overall the national mood is also not what would be necessary for a change in power in the House. As it stands currently, President Trump is some degree of an underdog for re-election, and control of the Senate looks more and more like a clear tossup. Those conditions simply are not ripe for a strong Republican night in the House. All things considered, the 2020 election looks more like 2008 than 2004 as we stand currently, but a lot can change and President Trump could very well win re-election. The issue for the GOP in the battle for the House is that even if Trump pulls off a second upset and wins a second term, they are not well positioned to reap the benefits of that, having whiffed on recruiting and fundraising thus far. For the moment, the more pressing question for me in the House is who gain seats, Democrats or Republicans, as opposed to who will hold the majority, Democrats or Republicans. So, while there is still plenty of time for conditions to change, the underlying indicators make it seem very likely that the 117th Congress will see Nancy Pelosi in charge of the US House yet again.