By: Berny Belvedere – nationalreview.com – August 2, 2018

Are we a hundred days from a Congress-realigning blue wave? Is a violent Democratic tide, thrust forward by the dreams of Resisters everywhere, coming to wash away Republican control in the House of Representatives?

Some analysts define a wave election to be an overwhelming, mandate-issuing electoral romp — the kind that leaves the ascendant party with a sizable advantage in seats. I view things differently.

As I see it, if the Democrats win a net total of 23 seats, which is the magic number they need to flip the House, the 2018 midterms should be construed as a wave election, regardless of the fact that this would leave the Democrats with a razor-thin majority, and regardless of what happens in Senate, state-legislature, and gubernatorial races.

There are obvious counterarguments to the suggestion that acquiring a one-member majority in the House of Representatives should represent a “wave,” but none of them are convincing. Here’s why.

If the Democrats pick up 23 seats in the House of Representatives, that is an astonishing achievement in its own right. In other words, don’t look at the resulting distribution; look instead at how many seats were won and what hurdles were overcome to win them.

Let’s take a look at the political landscape in the run up to the midterms, and compare Republicans’ set of advantages to the reasons for Democratic optimism.

How Republicans Hope to Weather the Storm

The hurdles for Democrats are significant. Here are some of them.

Could it be that wave elections are the new norm? In 2010, a midterm year, the GOP engineered a 63-seat tsunami to wrest control of the House. Just a few years prior, the toxicity of George W. Bush’s final years in office handed Barack Obama the keys to the White House, but before it did that, in 2006, it also gave the Democrats the keys to D.C.’s other important House. A littler further back, in 1994, the Newt Gingrich–led Republican Revolution turned Bill Clinton’s blue House red.

Historically, however, House wave elections have not been a common occurrence. As the Washington Post’s Amber Phillips notes, the House has been flipped only three times in over 60 years. Obviously, recent political trends are more predictive than what took place in, say, Eisenhower’s day, and Democrats ran the House all the way from 1955 to 1994. But even if we restrict ourselves to elections from 1994 to 2016, the House changing hands only three times in twelve elections  —  three times in nearly 25 years  —  isn’t enough to call something a new norm.

The structural advantages

Then there are the structural advantages that favor Republicans this year, by which I mean factors that have to do with the arbitrary benefits of being in power rather than the substance of the individual congressional races themselves.

One such advantage is the incumbency advantage. In 2010, the year the GOP swept up 63 seats, the incumbent reelection rate was at the subterranean level of . . . 85 percent! In the years since, the rate has climbed back up to typical levels –  90 percent in 2012, 95 percent in 2014, and 97 percent in 2016.

Do the math with me. The Republicans have 236 members in the House to the Democrats’ 193. If the recent incumbent-reelection rate more or less holds, the GOP should easily retain control of the House.

Admittedly, we have not yet factored in all the incumbents who won’t be seeking reelection. Some members are pursuing another line of work, some are angling for higher political office, and others are simply retiring. All in all, there are 36 Republicans who will not be seeking another two years in the House. Since the Democrats need to pick up 23 seats, they should be able to pull in that amount from the 36 individual openings the Republicans are laying out for them, right?

I ran the numbers, and, unfortunately for the Democrats, only nine of those 36 seats are seriously in play, according to data from the Cook Political Report. Out of those nine, six are leaning Democratic and three are considered tossups.

Even assuming all nine seats go blue, the Democrats will still have to siphon off 14 more seats from Republican incumbents to win back the House.

Another structural advantage for Republicans this year  — one far less philosophically defensible than the advantages that accrue from the status of incumbency — is the practice of gerrymandering.

The makeup of the electoral maps for the House of Representatives were in the main put together by Republicans at the state level. Our decennial national census is followed by redistricting, given that updated data on population levels requires a corresponding update in the way our districts look.

Prior to 2010, a census year, Republicans launched an ambitious effort to capture state legislatures, the organs typically responsible for reapportioning and redrawing state congressional districts. They succeeded. And it’s no surprise that, given the state of technology available in 2010 and beyond, Republicans have found a way to draw the districts to remarkable partisan effect.

What does all of the above mean? Consider the fact that, historically, the Democrats would have needed to win the nationwide popular vote for the House by four points to secure a 23-seat pick-up. This year, however, a four-point win in the national vote is good enough for only a seven-seat bump. To reach their magic number this year, Democrats would need to win the popular vote by an absurdly high margin: over ten percentage points.

 

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Source: Midterm Elections 2018: Democrats Have Great Chances