We Must Win Back the House. But, We Won’t Be Able to Hold It.
Despite being out of power in Washington, Democrats have plenty to celebrate. Across the country, from Alabama to Virginia to Oklahoma, a blue wave is building. And Republicans are not helping themselves: Their signature achievement, the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” is the most unpopular piece of legislation in 30 years and Trump’s approval rating is 36%.
Now, not without reason, flipping the House has become the holy grail of 2018. Democrats lead the generic ballot by an average of 13 points. Historically, a sitting president’s party on average loses 36 congressional seats if less-than-half the country approves of their job performance. And the congressional map offers multiple paths to victory: through the 23 Republican-held districts that Hillary Clinton won, the 21 that flipped from President Obama to Trump, or the 61 with a partisan voter index of R+8 or less.
Taking back the House is imperative to checking this reckless Administration. But, the inconvenient truth is that even if we do win the House, we won’t be able to hold it.
Why? The Chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee gave a clear answer this week, admitting publicly a truth many in the GOP try to avoid discussing: Gerrymandering. The math simply doesn’t work with rigged Republican-drawn maps. During the last round of redistricting in 2010, Republicans methodically drew districts to benefit their party and disenfranchise Democrats.
In critical swing states like Pennsylvania the 2016 statewide congressional vote was split 52% Republican, 48% Democrat. But, Republicans won 13 of 18 seats — a whopping 72%.
Across the country, an estimated 18 Republican seats in the House are held to extreme partisan gerrymandering. Thus, to win back the House, Democrats can’t win a simple majority; they must win with a minimum 7% margin. Not quite our Founding Fathers’ intention for ‘the people’s house.’
With nearly 1,000 seats and 27 state chambers lost to Republicans over the past ten years, the Democratic Party faces serious deficits as we head into the next round of redistricting when congressional lines will be set for the next decade.
The Supreme Court may rule in Gill v. Whitford to establish an upward bound for extreme partisan gerrymandering. This would be a welcome, significant step forward, but it is not a silver bullet. In 37 states, district lines are drawn in a partisan process controlled by state legislatures. Even in a best case outcome, we likely face years of judicial challenges to maps through the redistricting process, across multiple congressional election cycles. By way of illustration, litigation in the Gill v. Whitford case began in 2011.
If we fail to win back state legislatures, Democrats will never be able to hold on to the gains we may achieve in 2018.
We will continue to see years like 2012, a good year for Democrats in which Obama won the White House, Democrats picked up 23 of 33 Senate races, and won 1.4 million more votes nationwide for the House. But, Republicans retained a 33-seat advantage in the House, and Republican Speaker John Boehner claimed a congressional mandate.
With the midterms 10 months away, we have a critical window of time to reverse the tide in these down-ballot races and new groups like Forward Majority are taking the aggressive approach we need to win back key state legislatures. Forward Majority made a decisive impact in Virginia, running a $1 million effort in the House of Delegate races that had been dismissed by others as unwinnable.
This was the first time that our party had focused on the foundational level of campaigning that drives wins up and down the ballot — a level that the Republicans have long invested in.
What the Koch brothers and Republicans figured out years ago is that, in the words of Karl Rove, “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.” The simple reality for our Democratic Party is that we don’t need to gerrymander districts to control Congress; we simply need a level playing field to compete.
If Democrats continue to only focus on statewide and federal races, and ignore critical state legislatures, we will continue to be disenfranchised and out of power. We must shine a light on the importance of state legislatures and the outsized impact they have on American democracy.
