It is never preferable to be in the minority party in a legislative body. But as far as minorities go, House Republicans are in a pretty good spot.
Between the trend of midterm elections usually favoring the party that is not in the White House, a closely divided House, and a party apparatus ready to continue their expectations-exceeding 2020 strategy while Democrats rework theirs, Republicans are on track to winning back the House in 2022.
“It has the makings of what could be a good year for the Republicans when it comes to the House,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
President Biden’s approval rating is around 53%, and while he is not underwater, history indicates he would need to bump that rating up by at least 10 points in order to have a shot at gaining seats. Gallup analysis found that even presidents with approval ratings of 50% during the midterm elections averaged a loss of about 14 House seats from their own party.
That would be enough to bump Republicans back into the majority. Democrats have the slimmest House majority since 1930, currently 221 seats to 210 GOP seats (four vacancies include two Republicans who died, one Democrat who joined the Biden administration, and one razor-close election with a Republican representative-elect who has yet to be seated).
Republicans in the 2020 cycle shattered the expectations of analysts who forecasted Democrats to gain House seats in 2020. Not a single Republican incumbent lost the election, and they picked off 13 incumbent Democrats.
Some of the Democratic incumbents who survived blasted the far-left wing of the Democratic Party for giving Republicans fuel to campaign on fears of socialism and “Green New Deal” politics. “If we run this race again, we will get f—ing torn apart again in 2022,” Virginia Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger reportedly said on a Democratic conference call just after the election.
This cycle, Democrats debuted a strategy that tries to harness some of the same kind of opposition energy that drove voters to the polls in 2020, but for their own purposes: negatively define Republicans early, tying them to conspiracy theories and elevating the more fringe members of the party, such as Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who the House removed from committee posts last week over her past embrace of conspiracy theories such as QAnon.
Sponsored Links
Comments are closed.